Author Archives: roalt.ahmet

• What area of interest/research question do you wish to explore through a research study design?

If marijuana has an effect on memory while studying. Whether it increases the amount of information you recollect the day of the exam or decreases it.

• What variables or concepts are you looking to observe and/or manipulate?

The variable looking to be manipulated is memory recollection.

• What type of design would best suit your research question? (Experimental, Correlational, etc)

A Correlational study would best suit the research question

• What research method would you use to conduct your experiment? (Survey, case study, naturalistic observation, lab experiment, etc.)

In order to gather as much as information as possible this would be a two part research experiment. Firstly there would be a Survey on people that smoke marijuana before studying and their thoughts on whether it helps or not. The second part of the experiment would be a lab experiment where experienced marijuana users would first read a brief story and write as much as possible on the topic the day after. A week later the same people would read a similar story while on the influence of marijuana and write on it again the day after.

• If applicable, what would you put as your independent and dependent variables?

The independent variable would be the marijuana used and the dependent variable would be the amount of information recollected.

• Give a hypothesis about what you think you might find.

I believe that a low to moderate dosage of marijuana will help when studying or reading. All though know to kill short-term memory cells, marijuana has also been known to raise focus.

• What might be the benefits and implications of this study? In other words, who would gain from it?

The legalization of Marijuana is a hot-topic because of its failure to have killed anyone since its discovery and its long history in many cultures. This study would be another notch in the belt of those who would want to see this drug legalized.

• Please reflect on the process of designing this experiment. What were the challenges you faced? Was this more/less difficult than you expected? How?

Firstly, the greatest challenge of all is finding people of the same age that have similar study habits. To be most effective, this experiment needs to be done with people that study the best while reading since that is what the experiment is based on. Secondly, the Survey part of the experiment could lead to different results than the hypothesis which would lead to inconclusive experimental results. For example if the survey concludes it does not help and the experiment says it does, who is to say that just because it helped the amount of people in the experiment it will help everyone.  In reality, this would be a very hard experiment to follow through with because there are a lot of variable outside the scientist’s control. Regardless it would be a fun little experiment to try out.