Going on an interview? Avoid the “vocal fry…”

On By Beth Morling, University of DelawareIn Chapter 03; Three Claims, Four Validities, Chapter 12; Experiments with More Than One Independent Variable, Complex Experiments (Factorial Designs), Experiments, Questions Only

BLOG72You might not know the name "vocal fry," but if you've been on a college campus  lately, you've definitely heard it: Vocal fry is a creaky, low sound that up to 2/3 of college women put at the end of sentences. A friend once called it the "sticky voice." 

The Atlantic just covered a research study on how people perceive others who use vocal fry in a job interview.  The story includes little audio clips of men and women speaking in regular voices and with vocal-fried voices (I recommend listening to them!)

Here's how the study was described: 

Researchers at the University of Miami and Duke University asked seven male and seven female young people to say the phrase “Thank you for considering me for this opportunity” in both a normal tone and in vocal fry. Then, 800 men and women of a variety of ages were invited through an online survey to listen to the samples and [to rate each] speaker (normal or fry) [on how] educated, competent, trustworthy, attractive, and appealing [they were] as a job candidate.

a) This is a factorial design. What are the independent variables?  For each independent variable, indicate if it is independent groups or within groups. Then state the design as precisely as you can.

b) Note that this study has more than one dependent variable. Name at least three dependent variables,

Here's a summary of the results:

For each trait, the listeners preferred the normal voice to the fry voice for both the male and female speakers. They were less likely to say they'd want to hire the person with the fry voice, [and] they found them to be less trustworthy. When making hiring judgments, people preferred a normal voice 86 percent of the time for female speakers and 83 percent of the time for male speakers. Women using fry were viewed more negatively than men doing so, and the negative perceptions were stronger when the listener was also a woman. 

c) Graph the results for the dependent variable, "rated negativity," described in the last sentence above.

d) In the graph that you drew, is there an interaction? (There'd better be!)

e) What about main effects? Based on your inspection of the graph you made, decide whether there will be main effects for the two independent variables in this study. 

 f) given the results and method of the study, did the study design and results allow the journalist to say that "Vocal fry may hurt women's job prospects?"  How might you improve this headline to make it more faithful to the actual study?