Читать книгу The Handy Psychology Answer Book - Lisa J. Cohen - Страница 238

Although it is better to avoid potentially confounding variables, it is not always possible to do so. In these cases, it is possible to remove the effect of the confounding variable statistically. The relationship between variable A and variable B will be assessed, covarying for the effect of variable C. Let’s say we want to study the impact of child abuse on personality functioning in adulthood. We could correlate a measure of child abuse with a measure of adult personality functioning. However, some of the subjects had alcoholic parents. In order to make sure that we’re studying the impact of child abuse and not parental alcoholism, we would correlate childhood abuse and adult personality, covarying for the effect of parental alcoholism.