Impairs Driving Experiment

In designing an experiment to find out if talking on a cell phone impairs driving skills, having a control group is very important. We would have no foundation for knowing if the result is due to the variable being tested, or to a random factor, if there is no control. This hypothesis could possibly not get a valid test if the subjects in the experiment are not under precise settings. These include certain control conditions, making sure that there is both a dependent and an indepent variable present and that there are also certain assignments for the test subjects.

Control conditions are crucial in this experiment because there needs to be two different groups to test the hypothesis; a control group and an experimental group. The two groups

will be put under all of the same conditions on a computerized driving simulator. These include the same driving time, speed and course. The only variant is that the experimental group will be driving while talking on a cell phone and the control group will not. The control of this experiment is essential because if either group is put on a different course, different types of traffic could affect their driving and accident rate.
This leads into the independent and dependent variables being present. Every part of the experiment is held constant except for the independent variable, which is cell phone use. The dependent variable is what will be affected by the independent variable, which in this case is the number of collisions. Only changing one variable will give us a valid answer to the hypothesis and tell us whether talking on the phone impairs driving or not.
The final factor in testing the hypothesis is using random assignment and making sure that the participants of this study do not have any direct affects on the outcome of the experiment. Random assignment chooses individuals randomly for each group and ensures that the characteristics of the drivers will be distributed evenly enough that they will not affect the results. It is important that the drivers in both groups have roughly the same driving skill, so these characteristics include age, driving experience and education. Another benefit of this is making sure that the only difference between groups is the use of a cell phone.
If nothing is controlled in this experiment, the results of this experiment could definitely be misinterpreted. If this happened, one could say that cell phone use itself is not the cause of whatever the outcome of this experiment may be. Having control conditions such as two groups, independent and dependent variables and certain assignments for test subjects are extremely necessary in testing driving impairment due to cell phone use.