Quiz 4

Dr. Lonsbary's study (above) asked participants to report on their mood before completing the memory test. Her decision to include this step was done to address the study's _________ validity.

construct

Dr. Gong conducts a study where she randomly assigns participants to different experimental conditions. The testing for each condition occurs in a different room of the psychology building. After collecting her data, she learns that the air conditioning in one of the rooms had been turned off during data collection. Which of the following threats to internal validity should Dr. Gong be concerned with?

design confound

In previous studies, Dr. Schulenberg 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. Which of the following aspects of Dr. Schulenberg's study allows him to prevent observer bias?

ensuring the person grading the exams is unaware of each student's writing group

Dr. Gore is conducting a survey examining people's opinions toward funding for collegiate athletics on his campus. He notices that several participants agree with all 12 questions. This could be an example of all of the following EXCEPT

fence sitting

In the study depicted in the figure above, how could a researcher transform the study into a within-groups design?

having participants play both the competitive game and the noncompetitive game

The key attributes of the empirically-grounded, well-anchored response scale, as discussed in lecture, are as follows

uses both endpoint and middle anchors uses anchors that create equal appearing intervals uses number of points that allows people to express a range of opinions

Dr. LaGuardia 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, he 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 him to decrease the threat of instrumentation?

using clear coding manuals

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 results in the table below. Dr. Lonsbary's colleague, Dr. Chavis, recommended randomly assigning the participants to the three groups. His recommendation was designed to avoid which of the following?

a selection effect

Why do studies that use probability samples have excellent external validity?

all members of the population are equally likely to be represented in the sample

Research articles that use terms such as "unbiased sample," "random samples," or "representative sample" allow for readers to

be confident in a study's external validity

Dr. Sanderson is curious as to whether exposing people to violent video games causes them to be more aggressive. She assigns half her participants to play a violent video game for 5 minutes and the other half to play the same game for 25 minutes. Afterward, she has them play a board game and has a well-trained coder determine whether they are very aggressive in their playing style, barely aggressive, or not at all aggressive. She finds that a vast majority of her participants, regardless of group assignment, are rated as very aggressive. This outcome would be known as a(n)

ceiling effect

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. 43 of 50 Introduction to Neuroscience students and 46 of 48 Psychology and Law students complete the survey. Based on this information, which of the following can Dr. Kramer say?

his sample came from his population of interest

All of the following are advantages of within-groups designs EXCEPT

it is less time-consuming for the participants

A sports psychologist develops a new technique that might improve accuracy in shooting free throws in school children. To test this, she arranges to give the new technique to a girls' physical education class and the standard technique to the boys' physical education class. She finds that the girls' accuracy in shooting was higher than the boys' accuracy. A colleague rightly points out that

it is unclear whether the difference in accuracy was caused by gender or by technique

Dr. Cyril conducts a simple random sample of 500 men who became fathers for the first time in the past year. He finds that 23% of them report being unsure of their ability to be good fathers, plus or minus 4%. If Dr. Cyril increased his sample size to 1,000, which of the following would happen?

the margin of error would become smaller

Why are double-barreled questions problematic?

they may have poor construct validity