research quiz questions

Having a representative sample is most important in which of the following example claims?

"Forty-three percent of psychology majors report being frustrated by people asking them if they are psychoanalyzing them."

Which of the following is a good reason a researcher may give for using observational methods as opposed to self-report methods?

"I want to measure something that people may not know how often they do it."

Which of the following is correct about sample size?

A large sample size still needs to be a random sample in order to be generalizable.

Which of the following is NOT possible?

A measure is valid but not reliable.

What is the first step in calculating the mean?

Add up all the scores.

Betty conducted a study to examine the effect of spouse handholding on pain tolerance. Participants were asked to keep one of their hands in very cold water while either holding the hand of their spouse or holding the hand of a stranger. Betty found that participants held their hands in cold water longer when holding the hand of a spouse, in fact she found an effect size of d = 1.80. Based on your knowledge of effect size conventions, how would you interpret that effect size?

Betty showed a large effect of spouse handholding on pain tolerance

The _____ is the arithmetic average.

mean

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."

Danesh has just read an article that describes a study that used a survey completed by participants to assess anxiety levels in adults. He is interested in the reliability of the survey and finds that the authors have provided information about both internal and test-retest reliability. However, there is no information about interrater reliability. Which of the following reasons explains why the authors do not report interrater reliability?

The anxiety scale is a self-report measure, and interrater reliability is needed only when two or more observers are providing ratings.

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%. If Dr. Sanchez increased his sample size to 1,000, which of the following would happen?

The margin of error would become smaller.

What does a large number for variance mean?

The scores tend to be spread out.

What do purposive, convenience, quota, and snowball sampling have in common?

They result in samples where some people are systematically left out.

RESEARCH STUDY 6.2: Dr. Ewell, a developmental psychologist, is planning on conducting a study that involves watching children play together to determine how sharing behavior occurs in same-sex friend pairs compared to opposite-sex friend pairs. Which of the following is Dr. Ewell likely to give to his research assistants to prevent observer bias?

a codebook

Naomi is studying the effect of popularity on academic success for her research methods project. To do this, she has elementary school students rate how popular each member of their class is. She then uses this information to rank the students on popularity (e.g., John is the most popular, Vanessa is the second-most popular). Which of the following best describes this variable?

an ordinal scale of measurement

Dr. Tanaka is an educational psychologist interested in students' attitudes toward science and the effect of those attitudes on performance on standardized tests. He chooses his local school district to study. There are 15 high schools, and he randomly chooses five. Then, of the 2,500 students in each of those five schools, he randomly recruits 250 students. This is an example of which of the following sampling techniques?

multistage sample

RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr. 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. 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

RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr. 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. To test his measure, Dr. Sheffield gives his measure to a group of his clients and at the same time measures how many times they have been gambling in the past month. He predicts that clients who score higher on his measure will also report gambling more times in the past month. This procedure is meant to provide evidence for which of the following?

criterion validity

The variance and standard deviation are based on how much each score deviates from the

mean.

For his research methods class, Felipe plans to watch how students treat other children in their classrooms who have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He will evaluate how positively or negatively the children are treated by their classmates. This is an example of what type of measurement?

observational measurement

A _____________ distribution will have many more low scores and fewer high scores.

positively skewed

RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr. 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. Dr. Sheffield wants to establish the discriminant validity of his pathological gambling measure. He gives his measure and three others to a group of 100 people. Which of the following provides the best evidence for discriminant validity?

that his measure is not strongly correlated with the number of friends people have

A single number that represents the total amount of variation in a distribution is known as the

variance.

Observer bias relates mainly to ________, whereas observer effects stem from ________.

researchers; participants

Darnell would like to calculate a measure of central tendency for his rank-ordered data. Darnell should use the

median

The ______ is the score that divides the distribution in half.

median

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.

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?

a ratio scale of measurement

RESEARCH STUDY 5.1: Dr. Rodriquez is considering conducting a study examining whether narcissistic people have poorer romantic relationships 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 Donal 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." Before using the measure in her study, Dr. Rodriquez analyzes the data she gets from her students. She looks at the relationship between each of the individual questions. She sees that participants who agree with Question 1 also agree with Question 3 and disagree with Question 2. This is a test of which of the following?

internal reliability

The most frequently occurring score in a distribution is the

mode

RESEARCH STUDY 5.1: Dr. Rodriquez is considering conducting a study examining whether narcissistic people have poorer romantic relationships 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 Donal 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." Before using the measure in her study, Dr. Rodriquez gives the measure to a group of participants on the first day of the semester and again on the last day of the semester. She then compares the scores between the two time points. This is a test of which of the following?

test-retest reliability