Essay

Your police department has received a grant to set up a program of in-house counseling services in an effort to reduce officer stress. You have been hired to evaluate the program. To do so, you must set up a classic experiment to see if officers who participate in the counseling services report less stress than those who do not. You have access to 100 officers and decide to put 50 in the experimental group and 50 in the control group. Describe the following: (a) your hypothesis and the null hypothesis; (b) the independent and dependent variables and how they will be operationalized, including how you will measure officer stress; (c) how equivalence of the groups will be ensured including minimizing selection bias and why this is important; (d) how pretest and posttest will be administered; (e) at least two potential rival causes and how you will control for them; (f) how you will know if the program is a success.