Psychology 255

Establishing construct validity would probably be most important for which of the following?

A measure of religiosity

Establishing construct validity is most important for which of the following?

An abstract concept

RESEARCH STUDY 5.2Dr. 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 to 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. Refer to Research Study 5.2 to answer the following nine questions.Dr. 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

A teacher separates the students in his class into high, medium, and low reading skill groups. What scale of measurement is being used to create the groups?

Ordinal

Georgina graduated as valedictorian of her high school class because of her class ranking. What type of scale is used for the quantitative variable of class ranking?

Ordinal Scale

Determining a person's reaction time (in milliseconds) would involve measurement on a(n) ____ scale of measurement.

Ratio

RESEARCH STUDY 5.1Dr. Valencia is considering conducting a study examining whether narcissistic people have poorer social interactions than those who are not narcissistic. One of her first tasks is to determine which of her participants are narcissistic and which are not. She decides to use the scale created by a colleague, the Mayo scale. Question 1 reads, "I tend not to think about other people as much as I think about myself." Question 2 reads, "I do not have a high opinion of myself." Question 3 reads, "I think other people think I am really special."Refer to Research Study 5.1 to answer the following seven questions.Before using the measure in her study, Dr. Valencia gives the measure to a group of students on Tuesday. She gives the measure to them again on Thursday. She then compares the scores between the two days. This is a test of which of the following?

Test-retest reliability

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

Whether the participant drank a soda in the 24 hours prior to the study

Mendoza et al. (2009) introduced a coin rotation task as a convenient test of motor dexterity. It involves timed completion of twenty 180° rotations of a nickel using the thumb, index, and middle fingers. Research participants' results on the coin rotation task are compared with their results on two widely used tests of motor dexterity: the finger-tapping task and the Grooved Pegboard task. What empirical way of assessing construct validity is being used?

convergent validity

Dr. Johnson wants to do a study to investigate whether the physiological measure, heart rate variability, varies over time or whether it is a trait that stays stable within the same person over time. He records participants' heart rate variability once at the beginning of the semester and once at the end of the semester. He finds a high positive correlation (r = .65) between the first and second time points. What type of reliability is he examining?

test-retest

​Using number of facial smiles in a 60-second period as a definition and a measurement of happiness, is an example of ____ happiness.

​operationalizing

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. He complains that it doesn't really measure how well he will likely do in graduate school. Dominic is questioning the ________ of the test.

Criterion validity

Julie has developed an intervention to improve the relationship between parents and pre-school-aged children. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of her intervention, Julie video records the parents interacting with their children at the end of the study. She has two research assistants watch the videos and rate the level of warmth in the interaction. Julie then correlates the ratings of the raters. She finds a high positive correlation (r = .87) between the two raters. What type of reliability is she examining?

interrater

Mendoza et al. (2009) introduced a coin rotation task as a convenient test of motor dexterity. It involves timed completion of twenty 180° rotations of a nickel using the thumb, index, and middle fingers. The results were compared to the results of another widely used test of motor dexterity, the finger-tapping task, in which participants tap their index fingers as many times as possible in 10 seconds. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant relationship between the finger-tapping task and the coin rotation task (r = -.40). What would a scatterplot of these results (coin rotation scores on the x-axis, finger-tapping scores on the y-axis) look like?

The cloud of points would slope downward from left to right.