Social Psychology ch 2

What type of research focuses on prediction?

Correlational research

What sort of bias occurs when people respond to survey questions by trying to portray themselves in a favorable light rather than responding accurately?

Social desirability bias

Which of the following describes situations in which two independent variables have different effects on the dependent variable?

An interaction effect

Where are most social psychological experiments conducted?

In a laboratory

What term is used to describe an experimental result in which two independent variables combined have a different effect on the dependent variable than each one alone?

Interaction effect

Why would a researcher choose participant observation as a research method?

It allows investigators to get closer to what they are studying than any other method.

Which of the following is the primary disadvantage of observational research?

It cannot determine how variables are related to one another.

Which of the following is the primary disadvantage of correlational research?

It cannot establish causality.

Which of the following is the primary advantage of correlational research?

It enables prediction.

Which research method is best suited to theory building?

Observational research

Which of these steps comes earliest in the research process?

Review past research

Which of the following is the primary disadvantage of experimental research?

The high level of control can make generalizations difficult

What perspective takes the position that scientists are neutral truth-seekers and need not be concerned with how their research is applied?

The value-free perspective

Participants were told their attitudes about beauty norms were being studied, when in fact the study was about social interaction and eye contact between the participants. Why did the researcher use deception in this research?

To increase the likelihood that participant responses were as close as possible to real-world behavior.

When an organized system of ideas seeks to explain how two or more events are related, it is called _____.

a theory

Members of a research team who use deception to fool participants into thinking they are also participants when they are really part of the research team are

confederates

A technique where two or more researchers count images, words, sentences, ideas, or whatever category is of interest is called _____.

content analysis

The statistic that measures the relationship between two variables is called the _____.

correlation coefficient

If the test scores of students who have off-campus jobs are compared to the scores of students who do not work, work status is the _____ variable.

independent

The primary advantage of observational research is that _____.

it provides opportunities to study behavior in context

A study of how often children interact with other children on a public playground is an example of _____.

naturalistic observation

When researchers, using naturalistic observational methods, bring preconceived ideas to what they are studying, they are committing _____.

observer bias

After a researcher has developed a theory and generated hypotheses, the next step in the research process is to _____.

obtain approval to conduct the study

Placing research participants randomly into experimental conditions that guarantee each person has an equal chance of being exposed to a given level of the independent variable is called _____.

random assignment

If a researcher wants to recreate the environment of a previous study to see if the findings will be the same as the original, the researcher is engaging in _____.

replication

In choosing between greater control and greater realism in experiments, some researchers believe that using _____ will help.

virtual environment technology

Relationships can be studied by asking people to answer carefully constructed questions in _____.

surveys