Professor Jones wants to study vocabulary growth in preschool children. He contacts all of his faculty colleagues who have child

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Professor Jones wants to study vocabulary growth in preschool children. He contacts all of his faculty colleagues who have child

ren, and from this group, he assembles a sample of 20 faculty children ranging from two to five years of age. To test each child’s word knowledge, Professor Jones reads each child a list of simple words that he has gathered from children’s storybooks and records whether or not the child understands each word. He then uses the results to publish norms (standard or expected levels of achievement) for vocabulary mastery for each year from two to five years of age.
What's wrong with this study?A. no control groupB. biased or nonrepresentative sampleC. interpreting a correlation as indicating cause and effectD. experimenter bias (experimenters' expectations influence the results)E. participant bias (participants' expectations influence the results)

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harkovskaia [1.6K] · Answer 1 · 2026-03-28T09:41:00+03:00

Answer:

Biased or non-representative sample.

Explanation:

A biased sample refers to a collected sample wherein the chosen population has a lower probability of being selected compared to others. Individuals are not chosen equally in such biased samples.

Professor Jones exclusively evaluated the children of faculty members. This narrow demographic yields a biased or non-representative sample. The participants' environmental exposures and genetic backgrounds may differ significantly from those of the general population and may affect vocabulary development rates.

Therefore, the conclusion drawn is that the study suffers from a biased or non-representative sample.