¶ … independent variable is the one over which the researcher has control in the experiment. In this case, the humor level of the sentence is the independent variable. The researcher (Schmidt) changes this variable in order to test for responses from the subjects.

There was no scale of measurement for the independent variable. There were individual units -- a single sentence each -- but the key measure was the humor level. For that, there was no measure given. It is doubtful that such a measure exists, as humor is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. One of the faults in the study is that there is no way to measure humor -- responses could have been different from interpreted because subjects either fond humor in "non-humorous" sentences or did not find humor in "humorous" sentences.

The dependent variable is the variable that is not under the control of the research. The ability to remember the sentences was the dependent variable in this study. This reflects that the change in the independent variable (humor level of sentence) would register a change in the response (remembering or not).

It is not stated if there was a measure for the dependent variable. It is known that the researcher recorded whether or not the subject remembered a given sentence. However, there is no explanation given with respect to partial memory of a sentence. Without that, we can only guess that the researcher used a binary scale (yes/no) to measure whether or not the subject remembered a given sentence.

Schmidt and Williams (2001) conducted a study entitled "Memory for humorous cartoons." The purpose of this study was to further test the effects of humor on memory, this time using cartoons. The research question is basically the same -- what is the effect of humor on memory. The independent variable was again the humor level of the cartoon. This time the study also used serious cartoons and "weird" ones, adding a further subjective variable into the equation. The response of the subject was again the dependent variable, again as measured by memory. Given that cartoon recall -- in descriptive form -- is significantly more complex than sentence recall, this also adds a level of uncertainty to the responses.

Works Cited:

Schmidt, S. & Williams, A. (2001). Memory for humorous cartoons. Memory & Cognition. Vol. 29 (2) 305-311.