RM1 STUDY SET
In which of the following ways are content and face validity similar?
Both involve subjective judgments.
You read a news article about a recent scientific study titled, "New Drug Reduces OCD Symptoms in Mice." To evaluate whether the title's claim is supported, you should do which of the following?
Check whether the authors established the three criteria for a causal claim.
You and your friends go to see a speaker on campus. The speaker, Dr. Darian, is an "expert" on getting into graduate school. Which of the following should make you less skeptical about his advice?
His recommendations are based on research he conducted for his dissertation.
Dr. Sanchez 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%. What does this mean?
If the study was done many times, the estimate of father uncertainty would be between 19% and 27%.
Which of the following is an example of a history threat?
In a study of school performance, a hurricane closes the school for two weeks.
How does research overcome the problem of confounds?
Research systematically compares multiple conditions.
Your professor says that researchers do not make ethical decisions alone. What does this mean?
Researchers must consider the opinions of others, including institutional review board (IRB) members and peers.
Which of the following is true of selection effects?
Selection effects can occur when experimenters allow participants to choose their own treatment group.
RESEARCH STUDY 2.1: Sariyah is studying subliminal messages and weight loss. She is curious whether people will lose more weight if they hear subliminal messages that encourage weight loss ("don't eat that food," "you want to be thin," etc.) in the music compared to people who do not have subliminal messages in their music. She studies 40 people and finds the following results: To understand whether the subliminal messages have an effect, Sariyah needs to consider which of the following cells in the chart?
She must consider all of the cells.
What makes certain constructs harder to operationalize?
Some constructs are difficult to observe.
Which of the following is true of variables?
Some variables can be either manipulated or measured.
In developing a measure of "need for cognition" (the degree to which people like thinking and problem-solving), Dr. Jonason asks his participants to rate their agreement with the following statement: "I frequently solve and enjoy solving crossword puzzles." What should Dr. Jonason do to improve the construct validity of this question?
Split up the question into two separate questions.
When reading an empirical journal article "with a purpose,"which section should you read first?
abstract
RESEARCH STUDY 7.1: 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. What is Dr. Kramer's likely population of interest?
all students he is currently teaching
Which of the following statements is an operational definition of "fear of snakes" that could be assessed as a structured question?
asking, "On a scale of 1 to 10, how afraid of snakes are you?"
Dr. Granger notices that 20 students in their longitudinal study of 100 college students dropped out of the experiment over time. When they look at the missing data, they discover that those 20 students had significantly lower pretest scores than the 80 with complete data. Which type of threat is this an example of?
attrition
Which of the following allow us to make strong predictions using association claims?
both strong positive associations and strong negative associations
Which of the following best describes an abstract?
brief summary of an article
The difference between a cluster sample and a stratified random sample is
cluster samples use randomly selected clusters; stratified random samples use predetermined strata.
What is the term for a researcher's definition of the variable in question at a theoretical level?
conceptual definition
Kalilah just read a story in the most recent issue of Psychology Today that has grabbed her interest. As a thoughtful consumer of information, what should Kalilah do?
consider comparing the media coverage of the story to the original research report
If a person is asking whether the variables in an association claim are measured appropriately, what is being interrogated?
construct validity
A study suggesting a link between the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism led to reduced vaccination rates and increased rates of measles. This example demonstrates the serious implications of
data falsification/fabrication.
What must a researcher do when using deception in an experiment?
debrief the participants afterward
The absence of random assignment in any study
decreases internal validity.
Dr. Hamid likely designed his study so that neither he nor his students knew which group they were in to address which of the following?
demand characteristics
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
Which of the following is a method researchers use to identify or correct for attrition?
determine whether those who dropped out of the study had a different pattern of scores than those who stayed in the study
Dr. Flores wants to determine whether a new therapeutic technique for treating depression in adolescents is effective. Which of the following is a method Dr. Flores could use to increase power in the experiment?
double the sample size
When obtaining informed consent from a participant, what must the researcher do?
explicitly inform participants of any potential risks involved in participating in the study
In the case of a factorial design, another term for independent variable is
factor
How can you ensure that a popular media article accurately reflects the original research of a scientific study?
find and read the original scientific article
Which of the following allows Dr. Lonsbary to conclude that she met the temporal precedence rule for causality?
having people listen to music or silence before they wrote down the list of words they remembered
When is it acceptable for a researcher to study participants only from a specific group, such as a researcher studying depression in a sample of Native American women?
if the specific group being studied is especially prone to the problem being studied (e.g., if depression rates are higher in Native American women)
When a participant arrives for her experiment, Dr. Dajani flips a coin to determine which of two experimental conditions the participant will receive. Using this strategy increases the ________ of her study.
internal validity
A variable that the researcher controls is a ________ variable.
manipulated
The addition of a comparison group can address which of the following threats to internal validity?
maturation
Which of the following ethical considerations is relevant to research with animals?
minimizing harm
Which of the following is another term for response sets?
nondifferentiation
Which of the following could be an independent variable in a causal claim?
one that is manipulated
Which of the following is a dependent variable?
one that is measured
A sample is to ________ as a population is to ________.
part; entire
Journal articles that are available through subscription only are
paywalled.
A researcher most likely prepared two versions of a survey with different question sequencing to address the issue of
question order.
In the theory-data cycle, theories first lead to
questions.
Regression is especially problematic in which of the following situations?
when one group has an extremely high score at pretest
Using a matched-group design is especially important in which of the following cases?
when you have only a few people in your study
If a study uses an unrepresentative sample, which of the following questions should you ask when assessing its external validity?
"Are the characteristics that make the sample biased actually relevant to what is being measured?"
Which of the following is an association claim?
"Owning a dog is related to higher life satisfaction."
Which of the following phrases describes a manipulated variable?
"Participants were placed in the high tempo music condition, the low tempo music condition, or the no music condition based on which color card they randomly drew from a deck."
A group of students recorded the amount of time they studied for an exam in their research methods course and the grade they received on the exam. The scatter plot shows a positive, linear relationship. What statement best describes this relationship between time spent studying and exam grade?
As study time increased, exam grades increased.
A researcher wants to know what people really do, not what they think they do. Which method would you advise him to use?
Behavioral observations
Dr. Reyes is examining whether exercise is linked to mood. She recruits a sample of college students and asks them to answer whether they exercised at least three times last week (yes or no) and to rate their mood in the last week (1: Not happy at all to 5: Very happy). Which of the following questions should Dr. Reyes ask if she is interrogating the construct validity of her study?
Does the measurement of mood correlate with other measures of mood?
RESEARCH STUDY 3.2: Dr. Ramon makes the following claim: "Watching television leads people to spend less time communicating with their spouses, study says." Dr. LaSalle makes the claim: "Research shows that making more money correlates with spending less time talking with your spouse." Which of the following statements is true of Dr. Ramon's and Dr. LaSalle's claims?
Dr. Ramon's claim makes a stronger statement than Dr. LaSalle's claim.
Dr. Jewell is interested in measuring people's attitudes toward proposed tax cuts. One of his items reads, "People who support cutting taxes are not well informed about how the government works." Which of the following items should Dr. Jewell use instead to improve construct validity?
Please rate your opinions about tax cuts on a 1 (I strongly disagree with tax cuts) to 7 (I strongly agree with tax cuts) scale."
Which of the following is true of students' views of deception and harm in research studies?
Students typically find the negative effects of deception to be diminished during debriefing.
Which of the following is a reasonable causal claim?
Texting while driving reduces impulse control.
A study finds a correlation coefficient of r =.52 and reports 95% CI [.37, .67]. The 95% CI indicates which of the following?
The correlation is unlikely to have come from a zero association population.
What was the primary ethical concern in the Milgram study?
The potential risks to participants outweighed the value of knowledge we can gain.
For a third variable to be plausible as the explanation in an established association, which of the following must also be true?
The third variable must be related to both of the measured variables in the original association.
Dr. Smitherman conducted a study 5 years ago, and his graduate student now recommends that they conduct the study again to see if the effect still occurs. Dr. Smitherman says, "No, I cannot do that study now; I think it is unethical." Which of the following is NOT a reasonable explanation for Dr. Smitherman's response?
There were no ethical guidelines 5 years ago, but there are now.
Why are empirical and journal review articles considered prestigious publications?
They are both peer-reviewed.
Vanessa claims that she sleeps better when she falls asleep to music. She has a comparison group because she has noticed that she does not listen to music every night, only when she remembers to charge her phone. She typically remembers to charge her phone on nights when she is able to finish studying earlier. What problem do you see in Vanessa's reasoning about sleeping better to music?
Vanessa may be sleeping better because she is less distracted by studying and goes to bed sooner.
Which of the following is a problem presented by the availability heuristic?
We do not examine all of the evidence, only what we can quickly think of.
Which of the following is true of a nonrepresentative sample in a research claim?
You should ask whether it is relevant to what the researchers are measuring.
When examining an association in which one variable is categorical and one is quantitative, which of the following is most likely to be used?
a bar graph
A psychiatrist is testing a drug that treats depression. He has given the drug to all his patients, and all of them have experienced a decrease in depressive symptoms. Although this is interesting, his experience is limited because he does not have
a comparison group that did not receive the drug.
Which of the following studies would probably require written informed consent?
a confidential study examining income level and voting behavior
Sasha believes that she is a nice person. To confirm this, she asks all her friends whether she is a nice person; they all agree that she is. Sasha concludes that she is a nice person and says she has evidence of it. However, she does not ask any of her enemies whether they think she is a nice person. This is an example of which of the following?
a confirmation bias
Davonte conducts a study on numerical reasoning in two-year-olds. He wants to know whether showing them an educational YouTube video will help them improve their counting abilities. For his dependent variable, he asks each child to count to 100. He finds no change from pretest to posttest and discovers most children couldn't count past 10. This is an example of
a floor effect.
Establishing construct validity would probably be most important for which of the following?
a measure of spirituality
RESEARCH STUDY 3.1: Anderson is reading his morning paper and sees the following headline: "Men Should Avoid Rock Music When Playing Board Games." (This headline is based on a study conducted by Fancourt, Burton, & Williamon, 2016.) In the study, men and women played the game "Operation" when listening to different types of music. Male participants performed worse when listening to AC/DC than when listening to Mozart, but female participants' performance did not differ based on music. In this study, the researchers recorded how many errors participants committed. This is an example of which of the following?
a measured variable
Ellie is looking for a summary of research on the effect size of childhood abuse on adult depression. Which of the following scientific sources would be an ideal source?
a meta-analysis
Dr. Bloedorn is a health psychologist who researches nutrition. She is curious as to whether a new drink additive will help people consume fewer calories during a meal. The drink additive is a white, odorless, tasteless powder that a person can add to any drink. She collects a random sample of 63 overweight students on campus and measures the calories they eat during lunch using a bomb calorimeter. She then gives this additive to the same 63 participants to use at dinner and measures how many calories they eat (again using the bomb calorimeter). Imagine that Dr. Bloedorn finds no difference between the calories consumed with the drink additive and without. This is known as
a null effect.
Which of the following is NOT an example of coercion?
a researcher offering three points of extra credit to college students to participate in a study
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
Todd is studying the effect of popularity on academic success for his research methods project. He decides to measure popularity by asking each elementary school student to tell him how many friends he or she has. He assumes that more friends means the student is more popular. Which of the following best describes this variable?
ratio scale of measurement
How would you adopt the mindset of a scientific reasoner?
remaining objective as you interpret scientific data
Advice that is based on ________ is most likely to be correct.
research
Observer bias relates mainly to ________, whereas observer effects stem from ________.
researchers; participants
RESEARCH STUDY 4.1: Dr. Kushner is planning on conducting a study next semester. He is curious as to whether sleep deprivation is associated with poorer cognitive performance. For example, if you sleep poorly the night before a big exam, will you do worse? Dr. Kushner is especially curious about selective sleep deprivation, where people are kept from entering REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Using an electroencephalograph (EEG) to monitor brain waves, he plans to let participants sleep until they enter REM sleep and then wake them. After the participants are awake for one minute, Dr. Kushner plans to let them return to sleep. As they enter REM sleep again, he will wake them again and follow the same procedure. He plans to do this through the entire eight-hour sleep session. The following morning, participants will be asked to take a sample SAT test. Dr. Kushner suspects that the people who will most benefit from his study are high school and college students, who are asked to perform cognitive functions in various states of sleep deprivation. Given this information, what type of participants should Dr. Kushner recruit for his study?
students from a community college
The aim of the Tuskegee Study was to examine which disease?
syphilis
Which of the following results in an unbiased sample?
systematic sample
A threat to internal validity occurs only if a potential design confound varies with the independent variable
systematically.
Which aspect of the peer-review cycle allows for the greatest amount of honesty in reviews?
the anonymity of the peer reviewers
A common finding in the study of aggression is that exposure to television is associated with increased aggressive behavior in children. You know this relationship may not be causal because you are not sure which occurred first: watching television or being aggressive. You are questioning which of the following rules of causation?
the criterion of temporal precedence
A scientist is most likely to accept a theory when..
the findings of replicated studies are consistent with the theory.
The principle of justice calls for a balance between ________ and ________ .
the kind of people who participate in research; the kind of people who benefit from it
The following situations can influence ethical decision making EXCEPT
the possibility of additional grant funding.
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
The issue of obtaining informed consent deals with which of the following principles of the Belmont Report?
the principle of respect for persons
RESEARCH STUDY 8.1: Dr. Guidry conducts a study examining the relationship between the number of friends one has and the experience of daily stress and life satisfaction. She randomly samples 1,500 elderly men and women in Nashville, Tennessee (the state capital), located in the southern United States. Below are her findings: • Life satisfaction and experience of daily stress: r = -.57, 95% CI [-.77, -.37] • Number of friends one has and experience of daily stress: r = .09, 95% CI [-.27, .45] • Number of friends one has and life satisfaction: r = .36,95% CI [.12, .60] Dr. Guidry submits her study for publication in a scientific journal. If one of the peer reviewers is concerned about the external validity of her study, which of the following is the most important aspect of Dr. Guidry's study to consider?
the random sampling technique used to recruit the participants
Who is responsible for deciding which validity is prioritized in a study?
the researcher
A correlation coefficient and a scatterplot both provide which of the following pieces of information?
the strength and direction of the relationship between two measurements
A common finding in the study of aggression is that exposure to television is associated with increased aggressive behavior in children. You are curious as to whether peer pressure is really to blame (peer pressure encourages you to watch television and peer pressure encourages you to be aggressive). You are questioning which of the following criteria of causation?
the third-variable criterion
Hosea is studying the relationship between caffeine consumption and problem-solving ability. Which of the following is a quantitative way to operationalize problem-solving ability?
the time spent solving a math problem
According to the text, the bridge between basic and applied research is known as
translational research.
Dr. Paul 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
A scatterplot is a graph
with points plotted to show a possible relationship between two sets of data.
Dr. Hoda measures job satisfaction and number of years of education. In examining her scatterplot, she sees the cloud of points has no slope. This indicates which type of relationship?
zero association
