Gen Psychology Midterm

Which word is the most appropriate synonym for the term validity?

accuracy

Studies that cannot ethically be conducted as experiments with typical human participants ________.

can sometimes be tested with animal studies

The scientific process is ________, involving both inductive and deductive reasoning.

circular

What kind of research is Saanvi conducting if she tracks six groups of participants, each group a different age, over several years, assessing them on her variable of interest once every six months?

cross-sectional

A group of researchers investigated the effects of two vocabulary learning strategies on word retention two weeks later. In this example, learning strategy is the ________ variable and word retention is the ________ variable.

independent; dependent

The ability of a research study or psychological instrument to consistently produce a given result is called ________.

reliability

An upper-level psychology class is conducting an experiment on racial prejudice that involves having participants rate the likeability of faces in a set of photos. However, they tell participants that the study is about the effects of aging on likeability. When participants are finished, they are thanked for their time and leave the experiment. In this example, the class forgot to ________ in order to resolve the ________ in the study.

debrief participants; deception

________ is/are often conducted with large numbers of participants and can even be conducted by phone, email, or mail.

surveys

Professor Devine and her colleagues are interested in assessing whether active versus passive play causes a preference for sweet or salty foods in toddlers. They assign groups of children to either an active play, passive play, or no play group and record their food choices when presented with a variety of sweet and salty foods. In this study, ________ is the independent variable and ________ is the control group.

type of play; no play