research methods final
Benjamin is a social psychologist who studies marriage. He believes that marital satisfaction has two components: the ability to trust one's partner and a belief that one can be a good spouse. He conducts a study to test his ideas. Assuming that his data match his theory, which of the following statements should he make?
"The data provide support for my theory."
Marcella is conducting a PsycINFO search for treatments for autism spectrum disorder by searching "autism treatment." However, her search is returning too many results. If she is interested in getting more specific results, Marcella could search:
"autism treatment" and "behavioral" and enter an age range of interest
Which of the following phrases would NOT indicate that a researcher is making a causal claim?
"is at a higher risk of"
RESEARCH STUDY 12.3: Dr. Yared is interested in memorization techniques and motivation. He splits his participants into four equal groups of 20 people each and gave each participant a list of 30 words to try to memorize in three minutes. Two groups were offered 10 cents per word they recalled and two were offered $1 per word. The table shows how many words each group was able to recall. What are the marginal means for memory technique?
10.5 and 18
Which of the following is a poll likely to measure?
A person's opinions about a healthcare law
In which of the following ways is an institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) different from an institutional review board (IRB)?
IACUCs monitor the care and treatment of animals throughout the study; IRBs do not monitor the care of human participants throughout the study
Dr. Gavin is conducting a 2x4 independent-groups factorial design. Assuming he wants 25 people in each cell, how many participants does Dr. Gavin need to recruit?
200
RESEARCH STUDY 12.2: Dr. Singh was interested in the way people recognize objects as members of categories. For example, what makes us recognize a dog as being a dog and not a cat? More specifically, she was curious as to whether people think about categories in a more complex way if they contemplate an "opposite" category first. For example, does a person think differently about the category of "southern" if they are also thinking about the category of "northern"? She was also curious as to whether people categorize differently if they are shown examples of those categories (e.g., looking at pictures of different animals) compared with generating those examples themselves (e.g., drawing pictures of different animals). Dr. Singh has four groups of participants (with 30 people in each group). In Group A, participants were told to cut out pictures of dogs and cats from magazines. In Group B, participants were told to cut out pictures of just dogs from magazines. In Group C, participants were told to draw pictures of cats and dogs. In Group D, participants were told to draw pictures of just dogs. After doing this for 30 minutes, participants in all groups were asked to list the attributes that define the "dog" category. Having a higher number of attributes listed was considered to be an indication of thinking about the category in a more complex way. Dr. Signh also was curious as to whether categorization happens similarly for children as it does for adults. As such, she recruits a group of 10-year-olds and a group of 20-year-olds to participate in the study. The results are below. Dr. Singh will need to examine how many two-way interactions?
3
RESEARCH STUDY 10.1: Dr. Lonsbary is a cognitive psychologist who is curious about how mood affects memory. She recruited 60 high school students and divided them into three groups. Group A listened to a 5-minute piece of music intended to make them feel happy ("Happy" by Pharrell). Group B listened to a 5-minute piece of music intended to make them feel sad (a song titled "Home Is Such a Lonely Place" by Blink-182). Group C listened to no music and instead was asked to sit quietly for 5 minutes (thought to make them feel neutral).When a participant would come to her laboratory, Dr. Lonsbary would greet the participant and then ask him or her to roll a six-sided die. Participants who rolled a 1 or 2 were assigned to Group A. Participants who rolled a 3 or 4 were assigned to Group B. Participants who rolled a 5 or 6 were assigned to Group C. The participants were then given an unlabeled CD to listen to based on their group assignment. The CD contained either the song selection or 5 minutes of silence. They were then escorted into a different room, where they were greeted by a research assistant who conducted the experiment. The research assistant sat the participants in front of a computer screen and told them that a list of 25 words would be displayed on the screen. They were instructed to listen to the CD with headphones while trying to memorize the list of words. All participants were given the same list of 25 common words to remember (e.g., desk, gray, plane, car, mask).When 5 minutes had passed, the screen displayed a question asking them whether they felt happy, sad, or neutral. After the participant responded, a new screen was displayed asking them to type in all the words they could remember from the list of 25 words. All participants were given 3 minutes to type the words they remembered. Afterward, the participant was thanked and dismissed. In response to the mood question, a majority of Group A participants said they were happy, a majority of Group B participants said they were sad, and a majority of Group C participants said they were neutral in their mood. Dr. Lonsbary found the following results in response to the number of words remembered. Dr. Lonsbary's study contains which of the following techniques designed to address a threat to construct validity?
A manipulation check
What is the best description of a peer-reviewed journal article?
An article written by experts and reviewed by other professionals in the same field of study
Naomi is studying the effect of popularity on academic success for her research methods project. To do this, she has elementary school students rate how popular each member of their class is. She then uses this information to rank the students on popularity (e.g., John is the most popular, Vanessa is the second-most popular). Which of the following best describes this variable?
An ordinal scale of measurement
RESEARCH STUDY 3.3: Anton and his friends are discussing a study he read about in his developmental psychology class. In the study, the researcher made the claim that most middle school students who are bullied have low self-esteem. Clarissa questions the study, saying "I am not sure that I am convinced. I am not sure you can really measure being bullied." Quinn also questions the study, saying, "Which middle school students did they study? I am curious if they included both private and public school studies." Manish is also curious about the study, asking "I wonder how strong the relationship is between bullying and self-esteem. Could you predict one from the other?" Why should Anton NOT interrogate the internal validity of the study?"
Because the study's claim is an association claim
Sasha believes that she is a nice person. To confirm this, she asks all her friends whether she is a nice person; they all agree that she is. Sasha concludes that she is a nice person and says she has evidence of it. However, she does not ask any of her enemies whether they think she is a nice person. This is an example of which of the following?
Confirmation bias
If a person is asking whether the variables in an association claim are measured appropriately, ____ is being interrogated.
Construct validity
RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr. Sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling. Pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble. Bothered by not having a good measure that he can give clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling. The measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. D. Sheffield has now decided that he wants to test his measure on some university students (who some estimates say have a 6% prevalence rate of compulsive gambling). He has a group of 100 university students complete his measure. He also has them complete two other measures (one that measures addictive behavior in general and one that measures general attitudes toward gambling). He finds that his new measure is positively associated with each of these other measures. This procedure has provided evidence for the ____ of Dr. Sheffield's measure.
Convergent validity
____ is used to control order effects in an experiment
Counterbalancing
According to its conceptual definition, a variable should be related to a particular behavior if a researcher is able to demonstrate that his measure of the variable is related to the behavior, then he has established which of the following?
Criterion validity
RESEARCH STUDY 10.2: Dr. Dormuer studies sleep and sleep disorders. She is curious as to whether technology exposure before bedtime causes people to fall asleep more slowly. She recruits a sample of 60 middle-aged women from a local church who reported no history of sleep problems. She creates three conditions. All participants come to the sleep lab for three nights in a row and experience all three conditions. In the first condition (A), participants were asked to play an online game (Candy Crush) on an iPad for 10 minutes prior to going to bed. In the second condition (B), participants were asked to read an article using an iPad that discussed tricks and tips for improving one's score on Candy Crush (which took about 10 minutes). In the third condition (C), participants were asked to read a newspaper article about the inventor of Candy Crush (about 10 minutes). With the use of an electroencephalograph (EEG), the researcher measures how long it takes participants to fall asleep. Dr. Dormeur was concerned that asking participants how long it took them to fall asleep would lead them to suspect that the purpose of the study. Her decision to measure how long it took participants to go to sleep using the EEG instead of self-report was meant to decrease which of the following?
Demand characteristics
Dr. Gahan decides to create a questionnaire asking about people's attitudes toward immigration (a socially sensitive topic). He should be most concerned about which of the following?
Fence sitting
Forced-choice question formats are especially good at dealing with which of the following issues?
Fence sitting
Julian creates a survey asking participants first to report how happy they are in their marriage and then second to report how happy they are in their life. His advisor, Dr. Fuentes, recommends that he create a second version of the survey that reverses the order of these questions. Why is Julian's advisor recommending this?
He is concerned that Julian's results could be affected by question order
Which of the following questions is NOT necessary to ask when interrogating statistical validity?
Is random assignment affecting the findings?
Which of the following is true of p-hacking?
It can involve running a different analysis than originally proposed
Which of the following is true of experimental realism?
It supports external validity
Why is it unethical to provide an incentive that is too large to refuse (for example, offering undergraduate students free tuition for a semester for participating in a study)?
It unduly influences people into participating
A participant's score on a dependent variable is a combination of which of the following?
Measurement error and their true score
According to the Belmont Report, which of the following groups of people is entitled to special protection?
People with developmental disabilities
RESEARCH STUDY 7.1: Professor Kramer has decided to measure how happy his students are with his teaching this semester. He is teaching two classes this semester - Psychology and Law and Introduction to Neuroscience. He gives his students a survey. If all the students in Dr. Kramer's two classes complete the survey, then Dr. Kramer has done which of the following?
Relied on a census
Nimah is working on her senior honors thesis and finds only one of her three hypotheses was supported. If she follows transparent research practices, what should she do with these results?
Report on all findings and hypotheses as they were originally formulated
How does research overcome the problem of confounds?
Research systematically compares multiple conditions
RESEARCH STUDY 8.1: Dr. Guidry conducts a study examining the relationship between the number of friends one has and the experience of daily stress and life satisfaction. She randomly samples 1500 elderly men and women in Nashville, TN (the state capital), located in the southern US. Below are her findings. - Life satisfaction and experience of daily stress: r = -.57 (p = .01) - Number of friends one has and experience of daily stress: r = .09, not sig. - Number of friends one has and life satisfaction: r = .36 (p = .04) In determining whether the relationship between two of Dr. Guidry's variables was statistically significant, which of the following must be considered?
Sample size and effect size
Online surveys commonly suffer from which of the following?
Self-selection
To evaluate how well a study supports a frequency claim, you need to focus most on evaluating which of the following validities?
Statistical validity and external validity
Javier wants his lab partner to tell him if he thinks the article he found for their project is appropriate. Rather than have him read the article, which two parts of the paper could Javier have his lab partner read to get a summary of the article?
The abstract and the first paragraph of the discussion
RESEARCH STUDY 3.4: Dr. Kang, a cognitive psychologist, conducts an experiment examining the effect of emotion on memory. He provides lists of 15 words to two groups of participants at his university. He puts the names of all the participants in a hat. The first 20 names he assigns to Group A and the last 20 he assigns to Group B. Group A is given a list of words that are very emotional in content (e.g., passion, murder). Group B is given a list of words that are neutral in content (e.g., houseplant, desk). He then measures how many words each group is able to remember after being distracted for 5 minutes by watching a video about the history of the university. He finds that Group A remembers 15% more words than Group B. Dr. Kang sends his study to a journal to be published. One of the peer reviewers questions the way Dr. Kang manipulated emotion, arguing that being exposed to emotional words does not make one emotional. The reviewer is questioning which of the following?
The construct validity of the study
A scientist is most likely to accept a theory when
The findings of replicated studies are consisted with the theory
Imagine that you are reading a journal article and you see the following sentence: "The study used a 2x2x4 design." Based on this sentence alone, you would know which of the following pieces of information?
The number of main effects that need to be examined
RESEARCH STUDY 4.1: Dr. Kushner is planning on conducting a study next semester. He is curious as to whether sleep deprivation is associated with poorer cognitive performance. For example, if you sleep poorly the night before a big exam, will you do worse? Dr. Kushner is especially curious about selective sleep deprivation, where people are kept from entering REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Using an electroencephalograph (EEG) to monitor brain waves, he plans to let participants sleep until they enter REM sleep and then wake them. After the participants are awake for one minute, Dr. Kushner plans to let them return to sleep. As they enter REM sleep again, he will wake them again and follow the same procedure. He plans to do this through the entire eight-hour sleep session. The following morning, participants will be asked to take a sample SAT test. Dr. Kushner asks his participants to provide informed consent. Doing this is adhering to which principle of the Belmont Report.
The principle of respect for persons
A correlation coefficient and a scatterplot both provide which of the following pieces of information?
The strength and direction of the relationship between two measurements
RESEARCH STUDY 8.1: Dr. Guidry conducts a study examining the relationship between the number of friends one has and the experience of daily stress and life satisfaction. She randomly samples 1500 elderly men and women in Nashville, TN (the state capital), located in the southern US. Below are her findings. - Life satisfaction and experience of daily stress: r = -.57 (p = .01) - Number of friends one has and experience of daily stress: r = .09, not sig. - Number of friends one has and life satisfaction: r = .36 (p = .04) Dr. Guidry submits her study for publication in a scientific journal. If one of the peer reviewers is concerned about the external validity of her study, which of the following is the most important aspect of Dr. Guidry's study to consider?
The use of three measured variables
When evaluating the external validity of an association claim, which of the following is the most important issue to consider?
The way the sample was selected from the population
RESEARCH STUDY 7.1: Professor Kramer has decided to measure how happy his students are with his teaching this semester. He is teaching two classes this semester - Psychology and Law and Introduction to Neuroscience. He gives his students a survey. Dr. Kramer plans to give his survey only to his Psychology and Law students because he see them on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and he can spare the class time (unlike in his Introduction to Neuroscience class, which only meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays). Which of the following is true?
This will lead to a biased sample because the type of students who take Psychology and Law may be different from the type of students who take Introduction to Neuroscience
RESEARCH STUDY 3.1: Anderson is reading his morning paper and sees the following headline: "Men Should Avoid Rock Music When Playing Board Games." (This headline is based on a study conducted by Fancourt, Burton, & Williamon, 2016). In the study, men and women played the game "Operation" when listening to different types of music. Male participants performed worse when listening to AC/DC than when listening to Mozart, but female participants' performance did not differ based on music. How many variables are included in this study?
Two
Dr. Paul is concerned about a fence-sitting response set when he conducts his survey. Which of the following might you recommend to decrease fence-sitting?
Using scales with an even number of response options
Which of the following is true of a non-representative sample in a research claim?
You should ask whether it is relevant to what the researchers are measuring
RESEARCH STUDY 12.2: Dr. Singh was interested in the way people recognize objects as members of categories. For example, what makes us recognize a dog as being a dog and not a cat? More specifically, she was curious as to whether people think about categories in a more complex way if they contemplate an "opposite" category first. For example, does a person think differently about the category of "southern" if they are also thinking about the category of "northern"? She was also curious as to whether people categorize differently if they are shown examples of those categories (e.g., looking at pictures of different animals) compared with generating those examples themselves (e.g., drawing pictures of different animals). Dr. Singh has four groups of participants (with 30 people in each group). In Group A, participants were told to cut out pictures of dogs and cats from magazines. In Group B, participants were told to cut out pictures of just dogs from magazines. In Group C, participants were told to draw pictures of cats and dogs. In Group D, participants were told to draw pictures of just dogs. After doing this for 30 minutes, participants in all groups were asked to list the attributes that define the "dog" category. Having a higher number of attributes listed was considered to be an indication of thinking about the category in a more complex way. The results of her study are below. Which of the following best describes Dr. Singh's study?
a 2x2 crossed factorial design
Diego is interested in examining the relationship between a person's attachment style and his or her relationship satisfaction. He finds 65 studies that have examined this topic. He combines the results of all these studies and calculates an effect size. His research is most accurately described as:
a meta-analysis
A local committee that reviews research that is conducted on animals is known as
an IACUC
RESEARCH STUDY 10.1: Dr. Lonsbary is a cognitive psychologist who is curious about how mood affects memory. She recruited 60 high school students and divided them into three groups. Group A listened to a 5-minute piece of music intended to make them feel happy ("Happy" by Pharrell). Group B listened to a 5-minute piece of music intended to make them feel sad (a song titled "Home Is Such a Lonely Place" by Blink-182). Group C listened to no music and instead was asked to sit quietly for 5 minutes (thought to make them feel neutral).When a participant would come to her laboratory, Dr. Lonsbary would greet the participant and then ask him or her to roll a six-sided die. Participants who rolled a 1 or 2 were assigned to Group A. Participants who rolled a 3 or 4 were assigned to Group B. Participants who rolled a 5 or 6 were assigned to Group C. The participants were then given an unlabeled CD to listen to based on their group assignment. The CD contained either the song selection or 5 minutes of silence. They were then escorted into a different room, where they were greeted by a research assistant who conducted the experiment. The research assistant sat the participants in front of a computer screen and told them that a list of 25 words would be displayed on the screen. They were instructed to listen to the CD with headphones while trying to memorize the list of words. All participants were given the same list of 25 common words to remember (e.g., desk, gray, plane, car, mask).When 5 minutes had passed, the screen displayed a question asking them whether they felt happy, sad, or neutral. After the participant responded, a new screen was displayed asking them to type in all the words they could remember from the list of 25 words. All participants were given 3 minutes to type the words they remembered. Afterward, the participant was thanked and dismissed. In response to the mood question, a majority of Group A participants said they were happy, a majority of Group B participants said they were sad, and a majority of Group C participants said they were neutral in their mood. Dr. Lonsbary found the following results in response to the number of words remembered. Prior to conducting the current study, Dr. Lonsbary asked her research assistant to use the same mood manipulation with a sample of 30 college students to determine if people's moods really did change after listening to the music. Running this preliminary study helps establish _________ validity.
construct
RESEARCH STUDY 14.1: Melanie conducts a study for her research methods class to determine if consuming caffeine causes people to perform better on cognitive tasks. In her study, she gives half of her participants a glass of water and half of her participants a glass of cola and then has them attempt to solve 15 math problems. She finds that people who drink caffeine beforehand solve more math problems than those who drink water beforehand. Melanie decides to conduct the exact same study again to ensure that. she can find the same difference between the groups a second time. This study is known as a
direct replication
Dr. Smitherman insists that all his research assistants know how to be producers of research. All of the following relate to this requirement EXCEPT
he wants to make sure they have previously been participants in research studies
All of the following are advantages of within-groups designs EXCEPT:
it is less time consuming for the participants
RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr. Sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling. Pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble. Bothered by not having a good measure that he can give clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling. The measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. To test his measure, Dr. Sheffield gives his measure to a group of people in Gamblers Anonymous (GA) and another group of people in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). He finds that people in the GA group have higher scores on his new measure than people in the AA group. This procedure is known as a:
known-groups paradigm
To avoid insensitive measures, it is important to use measures that include
multiple increments of the variable
Which of the following is another term for ecological validity?
mundane realism
Another word for data is a(n)
observation
RESEARCH STUDY 11.2: Dr. Bloedorn is a health psychologist who researches nutrition. She is curious as to whether a new drink additive will help people consume fewer calories during a meal. The drink additive is a white, odorless, tasteless powder that a person can add to any drink. She collects a random sample of 63 overweight students on campus and measures the calories they eat during lunch using a calorimeter. She then gives this additive to the same 63 participants to use at dinner and measures how many calories they eat (again using the calorimeter). Which of the following threats to internal validity should Dr. Bloedorn be worried about?
placebo effects
RESEARCH STUDY 11.1: In previous studies, Dr. Hamid has established that finding meaning in one's everyday work activities can lead to greater success in the workplace (e.g., productivity, creativity). He is curious as to whether this can happen in the college classroom. Specifically, he is curious whether finding meaning in one's classroom experience can lead to greater academic performance. In the spring semester, he has his teaching assistant randomly assign half the class to write a paragraph each class period about how the material has meaning for their lives (meaning group). The other half writes a paragraph about what they did to prepare for class (preparation group). He does not know which of his students are writing which paragraph, and the students are not aware they are responding to different writing assignments. To measure academic performance, he gives the students a midterm essay exam and a final exam. Imagine that in Dr. Hamid's study, he notes that all of the students do extremely well on the midterm exam. When he looks at the results of the final exam, he notices that all of the students' exam scores went down. Given this information, which of the following threats might be present in his study.
regression
Which of the following does NOT result in a biased sample?
systematic sample
Dr. Persaud is curious as to whether children in a daycare center will share more after watching an educational video on sharing. Immediately before and after the video, she has several undergraduate research assistants code the sharing behavior of a group of 33 four-year-olds. Which of the following would you recommend to her to decrease the threat of instrumentation?
using clear coding methods
