Research Methods Midterm 3 practice

External validity

12. Dr. Lonsbary is considering doing a follow-up study in which instead of asking participants to listen to music to induce mood, she has them write either a story about a character who just won the lottery or a story about a character who just experienced the death of their spouse. This change in the mood variable is designed to enhance the study's:

Reverse confound

A confound that keeps a researcher from finding a relationship between two variables is known as a/an:

Systematically

A threat to internal validity occurs only if a potential design confound varies ________ with the independent variable.

It is less time-consuming for the participants

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

Concurrent-measures design

Dr. Alfonse, a developmental psychologist, conducts a study to determine whether children prefer books with drawn illustrations or with photographs. A group of 45 first-graders are shown two copies of a book (Little Red Riding Hood) at the same time. Although the story is the same, one book is illustrated with drawings and the other is illustrated with photos. Students are then asked to indicate which book they prefer. This is an example of which of the following designs?

Too many participants

Dr. Deveraux has conducted a study that has resulted in a null effect. Nonetheless, she suspects that there truly is a causal relationship between her independent and dependent variables. Which of the following is UNLIKELY to be to blame?

Using only one research assistant to code all the videos

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 NOT recommend to him to decrease the threat of instrumentation?

A selection effect

Dr. Lonsbary's decision to randomly assign participants to the three groups was done to avoid which of the following?

Construct validity

Dr. Lonsbary's study 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:

A manipulation check

Dr. Lonsbary's study contains which of the following techniques designed to address a threat to construct validity?

A weak manipulation

Dr. Morimoto is curious as to whether exposing people to violent video games causes them to be more aggressive. He assigns half his participants to play a video game for five minutes and the other half to play for seven minutes. He finds that there is no relationship between playing the game longer and being more aggressive. What might be to blame for this null effect?

Ceiling effect

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/an:

Collecting pretest data twice

Dr. Whetstone is curious about how self-esteem changes as a result of a new counseling program. She is concerned about testing threats in her study. Which of the following would you NOT recommend to her as a way to address this type of threat?

Three

How many conditions/levels of the independent variable were in Dr. Lonsbary's study?

A null effect

Imagine that Dr. Bloedorn finds no difference between the calories consumed with the drink additive and without. This is known as

A placebo group

In Dr. Lonsbary's study, which of the following does NOT exist?

It causes more overlap between experimental/comparison groups.

In what way does high within-groups variance obscure between-groups variance?

Pilot study

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. This preliminary study is known as a:

When one group has an extremely high score at pretest

Regression is especially problematic in which of the following situations?

Participants; measurements

Testing threats involve ________ whereas instrumentation threats involve ________.

Systematically, affecting most members of the group

To be a history threat, the external event must occur:

Independent-groups design

What type of design did Dr. Lonsbary use in her study?

External validity

When interrogating experiments, on which of the big validities should a person focus?

Noting that there is a difference between the number of words recalled by the happy and neutral people

Which of the following allows Dr. Lonsbary to conclude that she met the covariance rule for causality?

Having people listen to music or silence before they wrote down the list of words they remembered

Which of the following allows Dr. Lonsbary to conclude that she met the temporal precedence rule for causality?

A comparison group

Which of the following cannot be found in a one-group, pretest/posttest design?

These designs rely on fewer participants.

Which of the following is NOT a disadvantage of within-groups designs

Not allow participants to leave a study once it has started

Which of the following is NOT a method researchers used to identify or correct for attrition?

Use of a within-subjects design

Which of the following is NOT a reason that a study might yield a null result?

The mood of the participants

Which of the following is a NOT control variable in Dr. Lonsbary's study?

Number of words remembered

Which of the following is a dependent variable in Dr. Lonsbary's study?

Practice effects

Which of the following is a threat to internal validity found in within-groups designs but not in independent-groups designs?

Participant's mood

Which of the following is an independent variable in Dr. Lonsbary's study?

Being in an angry mood likely has the same effect on memory as being in a sad mood.

Which of the following should Dr. Lonsbary NOT conclude from her study?

Using a pretest/posttest design

Which of the following things CANNOT be done to reduce measurement error?