PSY 300 Quiz/Practice Questions

A county in Indiana needs to choose a jury for a trial. By law, all adults in the county are potential jurors. The presiding judge writes the name of each man and each woman on an individual slip of paper and places the slips in two large boxes, one box containing only men's names and one box containing only women's names. She then draws 6 names from each of the two boxes to obtain 12 jurors in total. What sampling method has the judge apparently used?

Stratified sampling

Which of the following is NOT a research claim? Texting interferes with a driver's ability to pay attention. (look for opinion or value)

Teens spend too much time texting and driving.

Before using a measure in her study, Dr. Valencia gives the measure to a group of students on Tuesday. She then gives the measure to them again on Friday. She then calculates the correlation between the scores from the two days. This calculation is an assessment of what?

Test-retest reliability

According to the lecture on Chpt 6, which of the following is true?

The confidence people have in their memories is not strongly related to the accuracy of their memories.

Nadia submits her article to a scientific journal for publication. Who makes the final decision on whether an article is published in that scientific journal?

The editor of the journal

Dr. Hadden wants to conduct a study that will allow her to make claims that apply to all college students. Which of the following validities is she prioritizing?

The external validity of the study

The need to balance the potential costs and benefits to participants taking part in a research study is done to address which principle of the Belmont Report?

The principle of beneficence

The belief that the participants in a research study should be representative of the type of people who would also benefit from the findings of the research stems from which principle of the Belmont Report?

The principle of justice

In Chpt 1, we learned that there is a cycle of testing and refining scientific ideas. Which of the following correctly lists the order of things in this cycle?

Theory, Hypothesis (more general than prediction), Prediction, Data

Below are a causal claim, an association claim, a frequency claim, and an anecdotal claim. Which is the association claim?

"Owning a dog is related to higher life satisfaction."

Which of the following makes it more likely that behavioral observations will have good interrater reliability?

A codebook with clear instructions and definitions

Which of the following NOT is possible? (validity is more important)

A measure is valid but not reliable

Which of the following has the sections of an empirical journal article in the correct order?

Abstract, Method, Results, Discussion, References

Imagine the leader of a large nation gets sick with a serious infectious disease. She is treated with a newly developed drug that has not yet been tested with clinical trials. The leader quickly recovers and proclaims that, based on their own recovery, this new drug should now be given to everyone who has the disease; clinical trials are no longer needed to test it. It appears that this leader does not realize that personal experience _______

All of the Above. (has no comparison group. is confounded. is usually limited to one case.)

The key idea of the "Common Rule" is that _____ All research studies done in the U.S. must share all of their Methods and Results in a government database that is open to everyone.

All scholars who conduct research on humans, not just medical doctors or psychologists, must conform to the same ethical standards, including obtaining IRB approval before they begin collecting data.

Which of the following is an example of applied research?

An educational psychologist who looks for a way to increase math skills in 8-year-olds.

Research that is done specifically to add to our general understanding of psychology, like distinguishing the components of extraversion or predicting the time it takes a person to determine whether an object is a face or another object, is known as:

Basic research

Following a study using deception, how does the researcher attempt to restore an honest relationship with the participant?

By revealing the deception and explaining why it was used.

To evaluate how well a study supports a frequency claim, you need to focus on evaluating which of the following validities?

Construct validity and external validity

Your friend Dominic is complaining about having to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), a test similar to the ACT and SAT that is required to go to graduate school. Your friend Shakendra tells him he shouldn't complain because statistics show that GRE scores are actually strongly correlated with graduate school GPA. Shakendra is speaking about the ________ of the test.

Criterion validity

___________is the approach of collecting data and using it to develop, support, and/or challenge a theory.

Empricism

If a scientist criticizes the Counting Bones study because they are skeptical that the results will generalize to people who are not graduate students at the University of Illinois, they are challenging the study's______

External Validity

If a scientist criticizes the Counting Bones study because they are skeptical that the results will generalize to situations where people must pay for their food (rather receiving it for free), they are challenging the study's______

External Validity

External validity is most important for which of the following claims?

Frequency claims

For his research methods class project, Hiro is studying the effect of pet ownership on stress levels. Although a lot of research has been done on dog and cat owners, not much is known about other pets so Hiro decides to study hamster owners. Which of the following would demonstrate a snowball sampling technique?

He asks hamster owners to give him the names of other hamster owners.

Stefan wants to make a causal claim in his dissertation. Which of the following is necessary?

He must conduct an experiment.

According to Chpt 2, when evaluating the claims made by non-academic sources, such as news articles, blogs, and trade books, which of the following should we pay most attention to?

How consistently they back up their clams with references.

IRBs and IACUCs are both committees that evaluate if research is ethical. Which of the following is a difference between them?

IACUCs evaluate animal research; IRBs evaluate human research

In which of the following ways is an IACUC different from an IRB?

IACUCs monitor the care and treatment of animals throughout the study; IRBs do not monitor the care of human participants throughout the study.

What does it mean that behavioral research is probabilistic?

Inferences drawn from behavioral research are not expected to explain all cases.

Which of the following is true regarding interrogating (evaluating) frequency claims?

It is critical to look at the sampling technique.

Unobtrusive observation is done to counteract which of the following?

Reactivity

Angela reads about a study in which cell phone use is associated with migraine headaches. She says, "Well, that study is not valid because I use a cell phone more than anyone I know and I never get migraines." Based on her comment, Angela may be forgetting which of the following?

Science is probabilistic.

Online surveys commonly suffer from which of the following?

Self-selection

200 people completed a 12-item survey that is supposed to assess their life satisfaction. Each item asks participants how much they agree, on a scale of 1 to 7, with a particular statement. For example, one item was: "I can't imagine my life could be any better than it already is." A researcher decides to examine the internal consistency of the responses to the 12 items. She sums up the response scores for items 1 to 6 and then sums the responses for items 7 to 12. Then she calculates the correlation between these two sums. What is this measure of internal consistency called?

Split-half reliability

Dr. Fletcher 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

In which of the following situations do people most accurately answer survey questions? When they are describing the reasons for their own behavior.

When they are describing how they personally feel about something.

Erica is studying the relationship between caffeine consumption and problem-solving ability. Which of the following is a categorical way to operationalize caffeine consumption?

Whether or not the participant drank a soda in the 24 hours prior to the study

A survey question that asks participants to rate a response on a 5-point scale from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" is an example of_______

a Likert scale question.

The defining feature of primary journal articles is that they_____

always report detailed information about their methods and results.

If researchers measure every member of a population, they have _______

conducted a census.

Every two minutes for an entire day, two biologists independently code the activity (e.g., feeding, socializing, resting) of one orangutan. The next day, they examine their data and calculate kappa to assess their agreement. What type of reliability is this?

inter-rater

An independent variable is one that ______

is manipulated

A dependent variable is one that:

is measured

A researcher has developed a new test of "interpersonal skills." It consists of measuring a person's shoe size. The test shows a test-retest reliability of 0.93. It appears that this test has __________ and ___________.

low face validity; high reliability

According to the lecture on Chpt 6, questionnaires, polls, and surveys are similar because they all ______

measure self-reports of behavior.

Deception in psychology studies_____

must be followed with a debriefing.

An educational psychologist is testing the discriminant validity of a new measure of numerical learning difficulties. He gives his measure to a group of students along with another measure of verbal learning difficulties, which he predicts should not be strongly related to numerical learning difficulties. Which of the following correlations would the psychologist hope to find in order to establish discriminant validity? (weak correlation)

r = -0.18

A sample is always ________ a population.

smaller than

According to the textbook, the conclusion that family meals prevent eating disorders cannot be considered to be strongly supported because______

the study does not establish temporal precedence and internal validity.

A statement, or set of statements, that describes general principles about how variables relate to one another is a(an) _________________.

theory

After two students from his school commit suicide, Marcelino concludes that the most likely cause of death in teenagers is suicide. In fact, suicide is not the most likely cause of death in teens. What went wrong with Marcelino's thinking?

Marcelino was influenced by the availability heuristic.

Dr. Oishi is an educational psychologist interested in students' attitudes toward math and the effect of those attitudes on performance on standardized tests. She chooses her local school district to study. There are 15 middle schools, and she randomly chooses five. Then, of the 1,500 students in each of those five schools, she randomly recruits 250 students. This is an example of which of the following sampling techniques?

Multistage sample

For his research methods class, Felipe plans to watch how teachers treat children in their classrooms who have ADHD. He will evaluate how positively or negatively the children are treated. This is an example of what type of measurement?

Observational measurement

Masked, or blind, study designs are designed to deal with?

Observer bias (or effects)

A study by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968) involved telling teachers that some of their students were "bloomers" and would achieve rapid academic success within the next year. In fact, these students were no different than any of the other students in the class. At the end of the year, the "bloomers" achieved greater academic gains than the other students did. It appeared that the teacher had unintentionally treated the "bloomers" in special ways. According to the lecture on Chpt 6, this study illustrates _______

Observer effects

Nina is studying the effect of popularity on academic success for her research methods project. To assess popularity, she has elementary school students rank how popular each member of their class is (e.g., John is the most popular, Vanessa is the second-most popular). Which of the following best describes this variable?

Ordinal (ORDER) scale of measurement

What kind of research misconduct involves representing the ideas or words of others as your own?

Plagiarism

Dr. Ellison finds a relation between the amount of sleep and problem solving. Specifically, having a higher amount of sleep the night before an exam is associated with higher scores on two measures of problem solving. This is an example of which type of association?

Positive association

According to our lecture, Milgram's obedience studies probably would not be approved today because of two major ethical problems. These problems are _____ and ______

Potential for harm; Deception was not fully disclosed during debriefing

Which of the following does NOT result in a representative sample?

Quota sample