Research Method exam 2 prep

Shoppers often leave reviews for products that they purchased online. Which of the following best describes the external validity of product reviews on an online shopping site?

The external validity is low because this is a self-selected sample of online shoppers.

Asking an expert or experts to evaluate a measure is used to establish ___validity.

face

if a measurement looks like it is a plausible operationalization of a conceptual variable, then it has

face validity

Dr. Gahan decides to create a questionnaire asking about people's attitudes toward immigration (a socially sensitive topic). He should be most concerned about which of the following?

fence sitting

When using correlation coefficients to evaluate reliability, which of the following is undesirable?

a negative correlation coefficient

which of the following is an example of observer bias in a study on arm strength and mood?

a research assistant records the participant as stronger in the happy condition than the sad condition, because that fits the hypothesis

in which of the following case would a large sample especially be needed?

a study of teenagers whose parents are both deployed overseas in the military

which of the following is an example of observer effects in a study of arm strength and mood?

a study participant perform with more strength in the happy mood condition because of subtle, encouraging cues from the research assistant.

a restaurant owner uses a response card with four items in order to evaluate how satisfied customers are with the food, service, ambiance, and overall experience. which result would show the card's criterion validity?

a. if people give favorable answers on the card also come back to the restaurant c. if people who give favorable answers to the card also give favorable answer to a short survey that comes with the check.

Dr. Gore is conducting a survey examining people's opinions toward funding for Collegiate Athletics on his campus. He notices that several participants agree with all 12 questions this is most likely due to

acquiescence

Dr. Gore is conducting a survey examining people's opinions toward funding for collegiate athletics on his campus. He notices that several participants agree with all 12 questions. This is most likely due to

acquiescence

in order to use the known groups paradigm to establish criterion validity, which of the following is necessary?

after testing, the groups should have significantly different scores on the measure.

establishing construct validity is most important for which of the following?

an abstract concept

Choose the correlation coefficient r with the strongest relationship.

-.76

Which of the following statements is true of observational data?

Observational measures can be used to make frequency claims.

Why are double-barreled questions problematic?

They may have poor construct validity

which of the following is true of question wording?

researchers may alter the wording of a question to determine if it does have an effect on the results.

A sample is to _________________ as a population is to _________________.

part; entire

another term for probability sampling is

random sampling

A sample is always __________ a population.

smaller than

statistical significance depends on which of the following?

sample size and effect size

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. Imagine that Dr. Ewell wants to videotape the children interacting in the park. Which of the following is true?

He will likely need to get permission to videotape the children prior to doing so.

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"

if a student uses an unrepresentative sample, which of the following questions should you ask when assessing its external validity?

"are the characteristics that make the samples biased actually relevant to what is being measured"?

"A strong relationship was found. Children with more positive relationships with their parents had higher academic performance than children with less positive relationships with their parents." from this information, you know that the r is in the study was closet to

+.50

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. Imagine that dr. Ewell calculates a correlation for his two raters which of the following would be the best value for dr. Ewell to find?

0.89

which of the following does not depict a statistically significant association?

Correct: r = .26, 95% CI [-.08, .60]

a correlation-based statistic called ___ is commonly used to determine internal reliability

Cronbach's alpha

Dr. Gore is conducting a survey examining people's opinions toward funding for collegiate athletics on his campus. He notices that several participants agree with all 12 questions. This could be an example of all of the following EXCEPT: - fence-sitting .- acquiescence. - yea-saying. - a response set.

Fence-sitting

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%. What does this mean?

If the study was done many times, the estimate of father and certainty would be between 19% and 27%

which of the following is true of sample size?

It primarily affects statistical validity.

Dr. Reyes is examining whether exercise is linked to mood. She recruits a sample of college students and asks them to answer whether they exercised at least three times last week (yes or no) and to rate their mood in the last week (1: Not happy at all to 5: Very happy). Her results show that students who exercised in the last week also reported happier moods. Can Dr. Reyes make a causal inference from her study? Select the best explanation for the response.

No, Dr. Reyes' study meets only one the three causal criteria: temporal precedence.

Why would behavioral observation be a good research method for studying a high-frequency behavior (e.g., number of words spoken in a day or number of steps taken in a week?

Participants would not be able to accurately keep track of so much data

Hosea is studying the relationship between caffeine consumption and problem-solving ability. Which of the following is a categorical way to operationalize caffeine consumption?

Whether the participant drank soda in the 24 hours prior to the study.

a survey question that has you rate a response from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" is an example of

a likert scale

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

negatively worded questions have low construct validity because

because they capture people's ability to understand and the question rather than their true opinion

How are quota sampling and stratified random sampling similar?

both identify subgroups that need to be studied

Dr. Pierre is interested in studying levels of anxiety in children who have lived through a major natural disaster. as she plans her study, she is considering various operational definitions of anxiety. which of the following is an example of an operational definition for anxiety that she could consider?

changes in heart rate while viewing images of the aftereffect of a natural disaster

the difference between a cluster sample and a stratified random sample is

cluster samples use randomly selected clusters; stratified random samples use predetermined strata

Which of the following hypotheses would be best tested with a survery?

college students with part-time jobs have high self-esteem

what is the term for a researcher's definition of the variable in question at a theoretical level?

conceptual definition

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

A professor gives a class a self-report measure of conscientiousness and finds that people who score high on the measure are more likely to be on time for class. this is evidence for the measure's

criterion validity

If I demonstrate, in a sample of people, that my new self-report measure of extroversion correlates with an observation of the number of conversations each person has in a day, I have demonstrated __________ validity.

criterion validity

for which type of validity do we need to collect empirical evidence?

criterion validity

the temporal precedence criterion is also known as the __ probelm

directionality

another word for discriminant validity is ____ validity

divergent

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?

he finds that the measure of gambling is not correlated with a measure of sensation-seeking in either of his two groups of people

Julian creates a survey asking participants first to report how happy they are in their marriage and then second to report how happy they are in their life. His advisor, Dr. Fuentes, recommends that he create a second version of the survey that reverses the order of these questions. Why is Julian's advisor recommending this?

he is concerned that julian's results could be affected by question order

when you are interrogating the external validity of a sample, which of the following is most important question to ask?

how was the sample collected?

which of the following determines the construct validity of a survey question?

how well it is worded

what information should you consider to examine the external validity of the claim, "two-thirds of american college students sleep less than six hours a day"?

if the study used probability sampling

a research finds that when 40 people take a five-item measure of extroversion, their answers to each of the five items are correlated. this is

internal reliability

Dr. Leising conducts observational studies of adolescents interacting with peers during problem-solving tasks. She records each 30-minute interaction and then has the students in her laboratory code prosocial behaviors in the adolescents as they view each video. Because she has several students coding the videos, she calculates how reliable their scores are with each other by having them all code the same videos periodically. Which type of reliability is Dr. Leising calculating?

interrater reliability

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." What is the problem with this question?

it is a leading question

which of the following is advantage of polling organizations using internet panels over landline panels?

it is easier to follow up with internet panels and track how their opinions change over time

why is the use of representative samples especially important in frequency claims?

it is unlikely that the accuracy of estimates can be checked

which of the following is true of interrater reliability?

it requires the use of two or more raters/observers

if a question has response options such as strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, and strongly disagree, this is known as a(n)

likert scale

Dr. Guidry conducts a study examining the relationship between the number of friends one has and the experience of daily stress and life satisfaction. She randomly samples 1,500 elderly men and women in Nashville, Tennessee (the state capital), located in the southern United States. Below are her findings. Life satisfaction and experience of daily stress: r = -.57 (p = .01) Number of friends one has and experience of daily stress: r = .09, not sig. Number of friends one has and life satisfaction: r = .36 (p = .04) Dr. Guidry finds that the relationship between the number of friends one has and life satisfaction is stronger for men than for women. in this study, gender (male or female) is considered a(n).

moderator

the difference between a cluster sample and a multistage sample is

multistage samples sample both clusters and participants; cluster samples just sample clusters

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

Zariah placed five identical pairs of black socks on a table and asked passersby to rate which pair of socks were their favorites. Although the socks were exactly the same, people rated the last pair of socks as having the highest quality. How should Zariah interpret this result?

people are not always able to accurately explain their responses

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. Imagine that Dr. Ewell wants to videotape the children interacting in the park. Why would most psychologists have no problem with the ethics of Dr. Ewell's study?

people in a public park do not expect their behavior to be private

A (an) _____ measure operationalizes a variable by recording a participant's ____.

physiological; biological data

Research study 6.1: Professor Singh creates a survey to measure how happy his students are with his teaching this semester. He is teaching two classes: Psychology and Law and introduction to neuroscience. He writes the following questions for his survey A. what was your favorite part of this class? B. Please rate how much you agree with the following statement using the scale below: this is one of my favorite classes all semester. ( 1 strongly agree, 2 agree, 3 neutral, 4 disagree, 5 strongly disagree) C. which of the following is most true of you? 1. i am a very serious student 2. I try only as hard as I have to D. How easy did you feel this class was? 1 easy----------5 hard. Which of the questions above is an example of an open-ended question?

question A

Research study 6.1: Professor Singh creates a survey to measure how happy his students are with his teaching this semester. He is teaching two classes: Psychology and Law and introduction to neuroscience. He writes the following questions for his survey A. what was your favorite part of this class? B. Please rate how much you agree with the following statement using the scale below: this is one of my favorite classes all semester. ( 1 strongly agree, 2 agree, 3 neutral, 4 disagree, 5 strongly disagree) C. which of the following is most true of you? 1. i am a very serious student 2. I try only as hard as I have to D. How easy did you feel this class was? 1 easy----------5 hard. which of the the questions above is an example of a question that uses a Likert scale?

question B

an educational psychologist is testing the discriminant validity of a new measure of numerical learning difficulties. He gives his measure to a group of students along with another measure of verbal learning difficulties, which he predicts should not be strongly related to numerical learning difficulties. which of the following correlations would the psychologist hope to find in order to establish discriminant validity?

r=-0.18

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. Dr. Ewell is concerned that the children will behave differently because of the presence of research assistants. He is concerned about:

reactivity

Professor Kramer has decided to measure how happy his students are with his teaching this semester. He is teaching two classes this semester—Psychology and Law and Introduction to Neuroscience. He gives his students a survey. Dr. Kramer needs to avoid which of the following if he hopes to avoid having a biased sample?

sampling only those students who come to class frequently

if a question has response options that are anchored with adjectives, this is known as a(n).

semantic differential format

Professor Kramer has decided to measure how happy his students are with his teaching this semester. He is teaching two classes this semester—Psychology and Law and Introduction to Neuroscience. He gives his students a survey. Dr. Kramer could reasonably use his sample to say something about which of the following population of interest?

students who have taken a class with Dr. kramer

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

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%.

the margin of error would become smaller

which of the following is true of operational definition?

the specification of operational definitions is one of the creative aspects of the research process

a correlation coefficient and a scatterplot both provide which of the following pieces of information?

the strength and direction of the relationship between two measurements

Hosea is studying the relationship between caffeine consumption and problem-solving ability. Which of the following is a quantitative way to operationalize caffein consumption?

the time spent solving a math problem

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." Dr. Rodriquez calculates a correlation coefficient (r) to examine the relationship between question 1 and question 2 and between question 1 and question 3. She finds a correlation coefficient of r=-0.73 between question 1 and 2 and a correlation coefficient of r=0.74 between questions 1 and 3. which of the following is true of her findings?

there appears to be good internal reliability in the scale

Why are techniques like cluster sampling and multistage sampling just as externally valid as simple random sampling?

they all contain elements of random selection

how do reverse-worded items address the issue of shortcuts in surveys

they slow down readers, making them answer more carefully

Professor Kramer has decided to measure how happy his students are with his teaching this semester. He is teaching two classes this semester—Psychology and Law and Introduction to Neuroscience. He gives his students a survey. Dr. Kramer plans to give his survey only to his psychology and law students because he sees them on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and he can spare class time (unlike in his intro to neuroscience class, which only meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays). which of the following is true?

this will lead to a biased sample because the type of students who take psychology and law may be different from the type of students who take introduction to Neuroscience

RESEARCH STUDY 6.2Dr. 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. Refer to Given the scenario above, Dr. Ewell decides to collect his data at a neighborhood park. He has his two research assistants pose as a married couple having a picnic. While having their picnic, they take detailed records of the sharing behavior of the children and note whether the pairs are same sex or opposite sex. This technique is known as:

unobtrusive observation

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." Dr. Rodriquez is concerned whether the measure will really measure narcissism or if it will measure some other related concept. She is concerned about the scale's

validity

how might a researcher deal with reactivity?

wait to begin observations

you are looking to purchase a new pair of running shoes. which of the following should you consider when looking at the Zappos.com headline "61% said this shoe felt true to size"

whether the people who rated the shoes share same characteristics as others who bought the shoe

If a scale or measure has good interrater reliability, it

will have a positive slop on a scatterplot

a response set can be in the form of

yea-saying answers