Chapter 18
A double-blind experiment is one in which
neither the researcher nor the participants know which participants receive the experimental treatment
A baseline in single subject research
establishes initial rates of behavior before an intervention
Interviewers may become more skilled with practice, which could cause differences between the results of participants interviewed early in the study and those of participants interviewed later. This threat to internal validity is known as
instrumentation
The internal validity of an experimental design is concerned with what question?
Did the independent variable really produce a change in the dependent variable?
In a research study in which the treatment involved quite intense physical training, 40% of the participants in the treatment group dropped out as compared with 5% of the control group. This threat to internal validity is called
experimental mortality
"To what populations, settings, treatment variables, and measurement variables can this effect be generalized?" might most appropriately be asked in relation to
external validity
It is reasonable to expect volunteer participants to be similar in nature to
other volunteers from similar populations
A researcher finds that the control group performs above its usual performance when compared with the experimental group. This effect is named the
Avis effect
Individuals performing well merely because they are being observed (and not necessarily because of any effect of treatment) are considered to be under the influence of the
Hawthorne effect
The one characteristic of true experimental designs that preexperimental and quasi-experimental designs do not have is
random assignment to groups