Brief note on variables in research with examples.
Answers
Research
As a researcher, you're going to perform an experiment. I'm kind of hungry right now, so let's say your experiment will examine four people's ability to throw a ball when they haven't eaten for a specific period of time - 6, 12, 18 and 24 hours.
We can say that in your experiment, you are going to do something and then see what happens to other things. But, that sentence isn't very scientific. So, we're going to learn some new words to replace the unscientific ones, so we can provide a scientific explanation for what you're going to do in your experiment.
The starting point here is to identify what a variable is. A variable is defined as anything that has a quantity or quality that varies. Your experiment's variables are not eating and throwing a ball.
Now, let's science up that earlier statement. 'You are going to manipulate a variable to see what happens to another variable.' It still isn't quite right because we're using the blandest term for variable, and we didn't differentiate between the variables. Let's take a look at some other terms that will help us make this statement more scientific and specific.