Conducting Psychology Research in the Real World

Ambulatory assessment

An overarching term to describe methodologies that assess the behavior, physiology, experience, and environments of humans in naturalistic settings.

ecological momentary assessment

An overarching term to describe methodologies that repeatedly sample participants' real-world experiences, behavior, and physiology in real time.

Lived day analysis

A methodology where a research team follows an individual around with a video camera to objectively document a person's daily life as it is lived.

Daily Diary method

A methodology where participants complete a questionnaire about their thoughts, feelings, and behavior of the day at the end of the day.

Day reconstruction method (DRM)

A methodology where participants describe their experiences and behavior of a given day retrospectively upon a systematic reconstruction on the following day.

experience sampling method

A methodology where participants report on their momentary thoughts, feelings, and behaviors at different points in time over the course of a day.

Electronically activated recorder (EAR)

A methodology where participants wear a small, portable audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds around them.

white coat hypertension

A phenomenon in which patients exhibit elevated blood pressure in the hospital or doctor's office but not in their everyday lives.

Linguistic inquiry and word count

A quantitative text analysis methodology that automatically extracts grammatical and psychological information from a text by counting word frequencies.

Full-cycle psychology

A scientific approach whereby researchers start with an observational field study to identify an effect in the real world, follow up with laboratory experimentation to verify the effect and isolate the causal mechanisms, and return to field research to corroborate their experimental findings.

A relatively recent invention in technology is likely to become an important part of data collection in psychology research. What is it?

smartphones

As a researcher, you decide that you are very interested in peoples' everyday behavior. Therefore, you decide to use an Electronically Activated Recorder, or EAR device, to capture the acoustic diary of participants' days as they naturally unfold. In this scenario, you are:

studying daily behavior

Imagine that you are part of a study that measures heart rate and breathing throughout the day. Your heart rate and breathing only change when you exercise or are very excited. However, every time you visit the researcher to get your equipment updated, your heart rate and breathing spike. This phenomenon is referred to as:

white coat hypertension

internal validity

The degree to which a cause-effect relationship between two variables has been unambiguously established.

external validity

The degree to which a finding generalizes from the specific sample and context of a study to some larger population and broader settings.

ecological validity

The degree to which a study finding has been obtained under conditions that are typical for what happens in everyday life.

The on-going measurement of one's biological functions that occurs as they go about their daily lives is called ______assessment.

ambulatory

There have long been criticisms of the science of psychology regarding the difficulty of measuring internal phenomena such as feelings. This is one reason why ______measures are so important: they are more widely accepted by skeptics.

ambulatory physiological

If you wanted to study a person's online behavior using their posts and contributions to a social networking website like Facebook, what would be the best way to analyze that activity?

analyze the content of the language used in their posts

To study cheating habits, Dr. Martin creates a study that asks participants to take an exam in a room where there is an open textbook on a desk, while being watched and videotaped. Because this study doesn't mirror everyday life, it would be particularly low in which quality?

ecological validity

Scientists have developed the ability to monitor many different types of physiological activity as people go about their daily lives and activities. Which of the following is not one of those types of ambulatory measures?

electrooculogram

Armando is participating in a one-week study examining the relationship between emotional states and eating behavior. Every time he eats something, he has to pull out a digital notebook and record how he is feeling at that exact moment. What kind of research method is being used in this study?

experience sampling method

What is the primary advantage of the day reconstruction method (DRM) in psychology research?

it eliminates the burden of collecting data repeatedly over the course of a given day

Which of the following is an accurate statement regarding the use of an electronically activated recorder, or EAR, in a research study?

it provides a series of soundbites that, when put together, can give an acoustic diary of the participant's day

Dr. Gonzalez conducts research that allows her to draw conclusions about a small group of people: the participants in her study. She now wonders whether these conclusions will apply to the larger population from which her sample was drawn. Which of the following questions is most relevant to Dr. Gonzalez's current situation?

Do my conclusions generalize into the real world?

______ is the degree to which a study ensures that potential findings apply to settings and samples other than the ones being studied.

External validity

generalize

Generalizing, in science, refers to the ability to arrive at broad conclusions based on a smaller sample of observations. For these conclusions to be true the sample should accurately represent the larger population from which it is drawn.

In a research study, ______ validity addresses the degree to which that study can lead to unambiguous causal inferences.

Internal

Researchers have used several creative methods for studying behaviors and personality characteristics in both direct and unobtrusive methods over the years. Which of the following is not one of those methods?

hiring professional drivers to follow participants as they travel across the city throughout the day

After the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001, Cohn, Mehl, and Pennebaker (2004) examined blogs of users of a specific website. Through their use of ______, they determined that their participants expressed more negative emotions and were more cognitively and socially engaged for two weeks. After that period of time, these levels returned to baseline.

linguistic analyses

In a study of 16 million Facebook users researchers found that posting "I voted" was associated with increased voting in their networks. Where research methods are concerned this is an example of ______.

observable behavior

Each night before she goes to bed, Youngha's smartphone prompts her to log into a specific website and to answer several questions about her thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. She does this every day for one month as part of a research study she has volunteered for. Which method is the researcher employing?

the daily diary method

What is traditionally considered to be the "gold standard" in psychology research?

the laboratory experiment

Many students do quite well on practice quizzes or textbook exercises; however, on exam day they become anxious when their professor walks into the classroom. This phenomenon is very similar to ______ in research.

white coat hypertension