research exam 2 quiz questions

The final step in conducting a counseling program evaluation involves:

creating an evaluation trail and conducting a metaevaluation

A true experimental design differs from a quasi-experimental design in terms of the _____.

random assignment of participants to conditions

in the context of program evaluation and research, evaluators are responsible for:

setting the boundaries of an evaluation

Which of the following questions is true of longitudinal counseling process designs?

They examine whether a process variable changes over time and whether those changes are associated with counseling outcomes

In the context of the historical development of single-subject designs, which of the following took place at the beginning of the 20th century?

The invention of descriptive and inferential statistics facilitated group comparisons.

Which of the following is a weakness of the factorial design?

The study results become increasingly complex with the addition of more variables to the design

One of the goals of manipulation checks is to show that:

conditions vary on the intended dimensions

identify a variable that pertains to the counseling process in analogue research.

counselor interventions

_____ are cues within an experiment that may influence participants to respond in a particular way apart from the independent variable.

demand characteristics

A type of mixed methods design in which the need to use a second method is not known from study inception but rather becomes evident over the course of the research is referred to as a(n) _____.

emergent design

The difference between the conditions on the desired dimension of the independent variable should be _____.

salient

Moving back and forth from a counseling program's objectives to its evidence and the weaving together of the individual pieces of data into a holistic picture is:

the core process of program evlauation

Based on reanalyses of existing data sets and analyses of outcomes in practice settings, it appears that between 3% and 8% of the variance in treatment outcome is due to _____.

therapists

In the context of presenting qualitative findings, an untouched and thorough presentation of the data obtained is known as a _____.

thick description

If the independent variable of a research study is poorly designed, either the expected effect will not be found or the results will be ambiguous or meaningless.

true

A key disadvantage of self-reports is that they are _____.

vulnerable to distortions by participants

For a variable X, a reliability coefficient of rxx that equals .75 indicates that _____ of the variance in the scores is due to true differences in the level of the characteristic of interest, and that _____ is due to other factors

75%, 25%

Which of the following is true of the mediators in multiple regression analysis?

A mediator establishes "how" or "why" one variable predicts or causes a criterion variable

Which of the following is a feature of a within-subjects experimental design?

Each participant is exposed to all of the treatment conditions

Which of the following is the difference between intensive single-subject designs and single-subject experimental designs?

In intensive single-subject designs, the independent variable is observed, whereas in single-subject experimental designs, the independent variable is manipulated

Which of the following is a weakness of a posttest-only control group design?

Researchers have limited information available about group equivalence prior to treatment

Which of the following is a difference between independent variables and status variables?

Status variables cannot be manipulated, whereas independent variables can be manipulated

In the context of counseling programs, which of the following is a difference between structured observations and participant observations?

Structured observations capture the quantity of activities that have occurred, whereas participant observations describe the mood during activities

Which of the following is true of participants placed in a matched control group?

The participants are paired with participants in the treatment group to reduce variance

Identify the simplest, and logically defensible method, for measuring the outcome of any of the research designs.

Use only the posttest measure and perform some type of analysis of variance on these measures to test the hypothesis that the groups vary on the posttest

Which of the following research designs is an example of an independent variable with two conditions?

a treatment group and a control group

The _____ is used to determine whether adding some component to treatment already demonstrably shown to be effective adds to the benefits of the treatment.

additive strategy

In the context of calculating estimates of reliability, _____ is a metric based on the average interitem correlations and the number of items on the measure

coefficient alpha

In experimental designs, the determination of the conditions of the independent variable is referred to as _____.

experimental manipulation

_____, one of the major types of bias, are primarily biological and interpersonal characteristics of an experimenter that may cause differential responses in research participants.

experimenter attributes

A 30% return rate of a sample is enough to generalize the results of a survey from a mailed or online questionnaire.

false

As opposed to qualitative methods, quantitative research methodology emphasizes the importance of context in understanding a phenomenon of interest and stresses the process in which individuals create and give meanings to their social experience and lived realities

false

Findings obtained with groups are always more generalizable than those obtained with an individual case.

false

For a study to be informative, scores on the dependent measure need to be similar among the study's participants.

false

In a treatment package strategy, ideally, the only difference between the two conditions being compared is the counselor.

false

In terms of the MAXMINCON principle, researchers using a quasi-experimental design can both minimize differences in the independent variable(s) and maximize error variance due to measurement issues.

false

In the real world, an investigator is able to engage in a scientific study and remains an impartial, passive observer throughout.

false

Mood transitioning is a general tendency to evaluate oneself negatively on all dimensions.

false

The phases for conducting mixed methods research are intended to be linear and non-iterative.

false

in counseling research, all independent variables consist of only two conditions—treatment and no treatment.

false

in the context of qualitative research strategies, memo writing, constant comparative method, and theoretical sampling are primary features of _____.

grounded theory

Which of the following is the most likely cause of a statistically nonsignificant result?

insensitive instruments

One of the strengths of analogue studies is that they possess a high degree of _____.

internal validity

Which of the following is a strategy that is used to reduce the impacts of investigator and experimenter expectancies?

keeping experimenters blind to the purpose of a study

When a researcher wants to examine the relative effectiveness of treatments for various types of clients, settings, or contexts in order to analyze which treatments work with which types of clients, they can utilize:

moderation design

Which of the following is the most common way to determine whether a counseling program took place and the form it took during implementation?

observational methodology

In which of the following outcome research strategies does a researcher compare two or more treatments that differ in the quantity of a particular treatment component

parametric strategy

Which of the following is true of a counterbalanced crossover design?

participants are randomly assigned to different groups that vary in the treatment order

George is conducting a research on the effectiveness of a new counseling technique in improving the career orientation of participants. Due to the availability of participants and the absence of cases where urgent treatment intervention was needed, there were no issues with the random assignment of participants to treatment groups. George wants to distinguish the effects of the treatment from effects due to client expectations, attention, and other nonspecific aspects. Which of the following control groups is best suited to his cause?

placebo control group

Yalda is a research scholar in the Department of Psychology at University of Umbria. She wants to compare the effectiveness of moral education with that of threats of social and financial coercion as a deterrent to tendencies of cheating and corruption. She has resorted to random assignment of the participants to the groups to remove any systematic bias. But, neither Yalda nor the participants have the required amount of time or scope to delve into the treatment specific change of the dependent variable in each participant. She wants her study to have minimal unknown variances to the dependent variable. She does not want threats to internal validity such as history, maturation, order effects, and sequence effects to dilute the effectiveness of her findings. Which of the following research designs is suitable for her study?

posttest-only control group design

Which of the following is true about the uncontrolled case study?

provides ambiguous information, which is difficult to interpret clearly.

Mixed methods research has been referred to as the third methodological movement following:

quantitative and then qualitative methods

in the context of measuring a construct, the degree to which obtained scores reflect the true scores for individuals is called the _____ of the scores.

reliability

Which of the following statements is true of qualitative researchers?

researchers acknowledge their assumptions about a study by taking field notes and writing reflexive journals

Which of the following methodological issues must a researcher undertaking an outcome study address?

Determining the inclusion and exclusion criteria for participants

Which of the following is a possible source of bias due to investigator and experimenter expectancies?

Differences in the levels of enthusiasm of experimenters while administering studies to the various groups in a study

Which of the following is a challenge associated with conducting mixed methods research?

Difficulty in publishing these studies due to the page restrictions of most journals

Which of the following is an advantage of single subject designs?

Specific mechanisms of change are isolated and the understanding of how change occurs can be advanced

A researcher must have an entire sample identified and available at the beginning of an investigation.

false

According to Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, and Sechrest, the convergence of data from multiple sources and multiple observations over time from an intensive single-subject quantitative design is called standardization.

false

According to some researchers, findings from analogue research tend to lack _____.

generalizability

The purpose of the dependent variable is to:

measure the construct that is hypothesized to be the effect

In the context of qualitative research methods, which of the following is the first step in obtaining data through observations?

selecting phenomenon and its setting

The usefulness of quasi-experimental designs for advancing knowledge is directly related to how thoroughly an investigator examines and controls for the:

selection criteria used in forming the initial groupings

Which of the following is a type of counseling process research?

studies that examine a specific process alone

Discriminant validity is said to exist when:

the correlations of measures of different constructs are smaller than correlations of measures of the same construct

A researcher should use two or more experimenters for each level of the independent variable in a study to reduce the possible effects of experimenter attributes.

true

An advantage of analogue methodology is often the reduction of practical and ethical obstacles in experimentally examining some aspect of the counseling process.

true

Which of the following is recommended for a researcher while developing survey inventories?

A researcher should carefully consider the psychometric properties of existing inventories before developing new survey inventories

Which of the following is a difference between ABAB designs and multiple-baseline designs?

ABAB designs identify causal relationships by withdrawing the intervention and reversing the change, whereas multiple-baseline designs determine causality by identifying changes in some but not all of the multiple dependent measures

In analogue researches, real-world constraints such as financial limits and unavailability of participants can be substantially reduced by using _____.

client surrogates

Which of the following statistical methods reduces data by identifying and then classifying similar entities into subgroups?

cluster analysis

The hallmark of analogue research is control of the _____.

experimental situation

Analogue methodology lacks precision—not only in terms of the variables under examination, but also in terms of experimental procedures.

false

Counseling process research typically concerns itself with the immediate and/or long-term changes in clients' functioning.

false

Multiple regression is a statistical method to study the manner in which multiple predictor variables influence each other.

false

Qualitative researchers aim to discover and describe universal principles by quantifying the observed phenomena or by using experimental methods and statistical tests to verify or falsify a priori hypothesis.

false

Status variables are those that a researcher can manipulate as well as assign to a participant.

false

The conditions of the research variables are designed in a manner that eliminates all confounds in an experiment.

false

The independent variable is related to the effect of a research study, whereas the dependent variable is related to the cause of that research study.

false

Quantitative designs provide findings that are more generalizable and higher in internal validity, whereas qualitative designs allow researchers to explore a question in depth and with nuance.

true

The treatment manuals contain precise specification of the experimental treatment, but they still do not guarantee that a treatment in any particular study is delivered as the researcher intended.

true

in a concurrent mixed methods design, qualitative and quantitative data are simultaneously collected.

true

_____ is used when a researcher wants to determine the amount of variability of each predictor variable that uniquely contributes to the prediction of the criterion variable.

simultaneous regression

The pretest-posttest nonequivalent groups design is a stronger and more interpretable design than the posttest-only nonequivalent groups design because it allows for an examination of:

some of the pretreatment differences

In the context of the levels of analysis used in examining the counseling process, _____ refers to the microanalysis of statement-by-statement transactions.

speech acts

Ecological validity is the idea that:

stimuli should be representative of the universe of such stimuli as they exist in the natural world

When both research participants and an experimenter are kept blind, the study is called double blind.

true

Which of the following is a difference between the types of AB designs?

An AB design does not involve withdrawal of treatment, whereas an ABAB design involves withdrawal of treatment.

In the context of grounded theory, theoretical saturation occurs when the new data obtained fit into the categories already devised.

true

Which of the following describes the most essential rules of research as expressed by Kerlinger's MAXMINCON principle?

Researchers try to maximize the systematic variance of the variables under study, minimize error variance, and control extraneous variables

Which of the following is true of a sequential design in the context of mixed methods designs?

One focus follows a second focus, and the two are relatively independent from one another

Which of the following is true of survey research designs?

Survey research designs typically use self-reports to identify facts, opinions, attitudes, and behavior

Which of the following is a disadvantage of the one-group pretest-posttest uninterpretable design?

The lack of a comparison group makes it impossible to rule out threats to internal validity

In the context of procedural considerations of designing the dependent variable, the order of the administration of instruments can have an effect on the responses obtained.

true

Outcome research is predominantly conducted using true experimental or quasi-experimental designs.

true

Time-series designs are characterized by:

observations of the same participant or similar participants

Cathy conducted a survey on the relationship between substance abuse and average annual income of an individual. She divided the annual incomes into three ranges, labelled them as low income, middle income, and high income, and found the groups to be present in the target population in the ratio of 4:5:1. Cathy needed a sample of 100 participants. She selected 40, 50, and 10 people from each income group in a manner such that each individual in a subgroup had equal chance of getting selected into the respective subsample. Which of the following sampling techniques has Cathy used in this scenario?

stratified random sampling

Even though the analysis of status variables is often identical to that of independent variables, it is more difficult to establish causal inferences because _____

they are not manipulated

The steps to develop and deploy an adequately valid treatment in a study includes specifying the treatment, training the therapists to adequately deliver the treatment, and checking whether the treatment was delivered as intended. The degree to which these steps are completed successfully is often termed as _____.

treatment integrity

In which of the following outcome research strategies does a researcher compare a treatment, in its entirety, to some control condition, usually a condition where the participants do not receive any treatment?

treatment package

A hallmark of a true experimental design is the random assignment of participants to various treatment conditions, allowing a researcher to control many of the threats to internal validity.

true

A major identifying feature of between-groups design is the random assignment of participants to different treatment conditions.

true

A program evaluator's responsibility is to determine if there is a match among the counseling treatment, the anticipated outcomes, and the outcome measures.

true

Causality is the strongest claim that can be made about relations between constructs.

true

Correlational designs are one of the most commonly utilized designs in counseling process research.

true

Descriptive studies can suggest possible causal connections among variables that can be examined in experimental designs.

true

Factorial designs are used when two or more independent variables are employed simultaneously to study their independent and interactive effects on a dependent variable.

true

In a single-subject experimental design, a researcher must obtain stable and accurate assessment of the dependent variable before the introduction of an intervention in order to compare the two phases.

true

In analogue designs, it is possible to eliminate or control variables extraneous to the particular research problem.

true

In analogue research, the power of the experimental controls may result in the loss of external validity of the research findings.

true

In general, a researcher can use half the number of participants in a counterbalanced crossover design and still retain the same statistical power as in the between-subjects design.

true