AP Psych Unit 2 - Research Methods

Which of the following is the strongest correlation?

-.90

Which of the following correlation coefficients represents the strongest relationship between two variables?

-.85

Which of the following is the median score?

6

In a normal distribution, what percentage of scores in the distribution falls within one standard deviation on either side of the mean?

68%

A test has a mean of 80 with a standard deviation of 4. Which of the following scores is within one standard deviation of the mean?

77

Research finds that, in general, the higher an incoming college student scores on a given test, the higher the student's college grade point average (GPA). Which of the following best describes this relationship?

A positive correlation

There is a negative correlation between TV watching and grades. What can we conclude from this research finding?

A student who watches a lot of TV is likely to have lower grades

Which of the following is an example of hindsight bias?

Aaliyah, after reading a definition on one of her flashcards, turns the card over to see the term and then tells herself she knew what the answer was all along.

What must a researcher do to fulfill the ethical principle of informed consent?

Allow participants to choose whether to take part

Dr. Larson was interested in whether classical music helps students perform better on a test. Dr. Larson randomly assigned half of the study's participants to a group that listened to classical music while taking a test. The other half of the participants did not listen to music while taking a test. The research design Dr. Larson used is

An experiment

Why is an operational definition necessary when reporting research findings?

An operational definition allows others to replicate the study

Which of the following questions is best investigated by means of survey?

Are people more likely to vote Republican than Democrat in the next election?

Which of the following is a positive correlation?

As study time decreases, students achieve lower grades

What is the best way to ensure that results of a study are generalizable to a population?

By using a random selection of people in that population

An individual with an exceptional memory is identified. For any given date, he is capable of recalling major events,the weather, and what he did that day. What research method is being used if a psychologist conducts an in depth investigation of this individual using questionnaires, brain scans and memory tests?

Case Study

Which of the following beliefs would most likely be held by an individual in a collectivist culture?

Children should be encouraged to develop harmonious relationships

Which of the following is most important when conducting survey research?

Choosing a representative sample

Audra is working on a puzzle book and comes across the following figure. The Gestalt law that would affect Audra's perception of the picture above is influenced by the law of

Closure

Which ethical principle requires that at the end of the study participants be told about the true purpose of the research?

Debriefing

Which method should a psychology researcher use if she is interested in testing whether a specific reward in a classroom situation causes students to behave better?

Experiment

After the student council election, a friend tells you he has known for weeks who would be elected president. What does this seem to illustrate?

Hindsight Bias

"Monday morning quarterbacks" rarely act surprised about the outcome of weekend football games. This tendency to believe they knew how the game would turn out is best explained by which psychological principle?

Hindsight bias

A scientist's willingness to admit that she is wrong is an example of...

Humility

A testable prediction that drives research is known as a

Hypothesis

Why is random assignment of participants to groups an important aspect of a properly designed experiment?

If the participants are randomly assigned, the researcher can assume that the people in each of the groups are pretty similar

Researchers have discovered that individuals with lower income levels report having fewer hours of total sleep. Therefore,

Income and Sleep are positively correlated

While taking a standardized test with randomly scrambled answers, you notice that your last four answers have been "c." Which of the following is true concerning the probability of the next answer being "c"?

It is unaffected by previous answers. It is as likely to be C as any other answer.

Which statistical measure of central tendency is most affected by extreme scores?

Mean

When a distribution of scores is skewed, which of the following is the most representative measure of central tendency?

Median

An old researcher looking for gender differences in 3-year-olds observes a preschool class and records how many minutes children of each gender play with dolls. She then compares the 2 sets of numbers. What type of descriptive research is she conducting?

Naturalistic observation

Which of the following best describes the graph above?

Negatively skewed distribution

Which of the following demonstrates the need for psychological science?

Our intuitions about human thinking and behavior are not always accurate

The tendency to exaggerate the correctness or accuracy of our beliefs and predictions is called.

Overconfidence

Which of the following is NOT an ethical principle regarding research on humans?

Participants should always be informed of the hypothesis of the study before they agree to participate

Which of the following is an example of negative correlation?

People who spend more time exercising tend to weigh less.

Julie is interested in developing a test to measure achievement levels of middle school students. Which of the following domains of psychology is most applicable to Julie's interest?

Psychometric

Researchers studying gender have found that...

There are more similarities than differences between the genders

Researchers are interested in finding out if voters are more likely to vote for congressional candidates who have more pleasant facial expressions. Starting at a random point, the researchers contact every hundredth person on the voter list to ask about candidate facial expressions. Which method are the researchers using in choosing the people they will call?

Random Sample

Which of the following is a measure of variation?

Range

All of the following are American Psychological Association ethical guidelines for researchers EXCEPT:

Research may not involve deception.

Which of the following represents naturalistic observation?

Researchers watch and record how elementary school children interact on the playground

Which of the following is used only in correlation studies?

Scatterplot

Standard deviation is a measure of how much

Scores in a group differ from the mean

Which descriptive statistic would a researcher use to describe how close a student's SAT score is to a school's average SAT score?

Standard deviation

Which of the following studies demonstrates a cross-sectional research design?

Testing first, third, and fifth graders at the beginning of the school year

A journalism student is writing an article about her school's new cell-phone policy, and she'd like to interview a random sample of students. Which of the following is the best example of a random sample?

The writer pulls the names of five students from a hat that contains all students' names. She interviews the five selected students

Which of the following is a potential problem with case studies?

They may be misleading because they don't fairly represent other cases

A research group conducted a study investigating the connection between self-reported number of hours slept in a given week and scores on a happiness measure. Based on the scatterplot above, the group can report that there is

a positive correlation

Drawing a random sample of people from a town for an interview study of social attitudes ensures that

each person in the town has the same probability of being chosen for the study

The purpose of random assignment is to

reduce potential for confounding variables

The correlation between two measures obtained on a group of individuals is graphically represented as a

scatterplot

Descriptive statistics __________, while inferential statistics _________.

summarize data; determine if data can be generalized to other populations

A researcher wants to conduct an experiment to determine if eating a cookie before class each day improves student grades. He uses two psych classes for the experiment, providing daily cookies to one and nothing to the other. At the end of the semester, the researcher compares the final grades of students in the two classes. What is the independent variable for this experiment?

the presence or absence of cookies

The generalizability of a study increases when

the sample is more representative of the population

A researcher calculates statistical significance for her study and finds a 5 percent chance that results are due to chance. Which of the following is an accurate interpretation of this finding?

this is the minimum result typically considered statistically significant

Professor Ahad has forty-three students in section one of the psychology classes she teaches and fifty-two students in section two. Section one meets at eight a.m. and, section two meets at one p.m. Professor Ahad gives all of her students the same final exam, and those in section two score significantly higher than those in section one. Professor Ahad concludes that her section one students are academically inferior to students in section two. The biggest problem with Professor Ahad's conclusion is that

time of day is a confounding variable in this scenario.