Experimental Psych Unit 2

Semantic Differential Scale

worthless to valuable; can be/use any type of adjectives unlike the Likert scale that uses strongly disagree to strongly agree

Leading Question

wording leads people to one response more than others, weakening construct validity (How awesome am I at teaching?); biased

3 ways you could operationalize sleep quality

1.) Physiologically: EEG; 2.) Self-Report: Survey. 3.) Observational: Sleep-study

3 ways you could operationalize stress

1.) Physiologically: sweat response, brain waves, blood pressure, cortisol levels. 2) Self-Report: Survey. 3.) Observational: Response

2 ways you could operationalize academic motivation

1.) Self-report or observational: Hours spent studying. 2.) Observational: Look at grades

Part; Entire

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

Observational

Advantage: Helps us look at human behavior

an anonymous survey asking whether students want the campus mascot to be changed.

An in-person institutional review board (IRB) meeting would probably be required for all of the following studies EXCEPT:

random sampling

Another term for probability sampling is:

Divergent

Another word for discriminant validity is ______________ validity.

Causal Inferences; made

Bivariate association claims' failure to meet the criteria of temporal precedence and internal validity means that _________ cannot be_________.

From an ethical standpoint, in what way is researching prisoners with tuberculosis similar to researching children with ADHD?

Both groups of participants have less autonomy than other types of participants.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Cite Sources (According to Sheldon (2002)," ) and try to paraphrase instead of using direct quotations

Physiological

Disadvantage: Everyone's physiology is different (confounding variables); EEG, MRI

Self-Report

Disadvantage: Positive self-presentation; Advantage: Easy and Cheap

Interrater Reliability

Correlation or Kappa; 2 individuals showing consistent ratings of a behavior they are observing ( r > .7)

statement 1; statement 2

Dr. Li is interested in creating a measurement of religiosity. According to the dictionary, religiosity is "the quality of being religious; piety; devoutness." He creates a measure comprising 10 statements. People respond to each statement using the following scale (1 = strongly disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 5 = strongly agree). Some of the statements are below. Statement 1: "I believe in a religion." Statement 2: "Part of who I am stems from my religious beliefs." Statement 3: "I believe that religion is unnecessary." Dr. Li gives his new measure to a group of 100 adults in order to test the internal validity of his measure. To demonstrate internal validity, we would expect participants with higher agreement on ___________ to also show higher agreement on ______________ (i.e., there would be a positive relationship between which two items?).

He finds that the measure of gambling is not correlated with a measure of life satisfaction in the same two groups of people.

Dr. Reynolds 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 10 minutes to complete. Dr. Reynolds has decided to test the discriminant validity of his new measure. He has a group of first-time Gamblers Anonymous (GA) attendants complete his measure and finds that they score higher than a group of people who do not attend the group. Which of the following results would provide evidence for discriminant validity?

Validity of measures

Face/Content, Criterion, Convergent, Discriminant

It has a double negative

In his 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 have never not enjoyed thinking." What is the problem with this question?

Median

Middle number; used with ordinal and equal interval/ratio data (skewed)

Criterion Validity

Objective - something we can measure; most researchers are interested in this; known-groups paradigm; Relate to key behavior?- how well someone will do in graduate school in comparison with GRE score

Discriminant Validity

Objective; distinguishes from other constructs; shows your measurement isn't measuring something else (If you are measuring anxiety, you want to distinguish between something similar; distinguishing stress and anxiety are similar but separate); mostly negative correlations (r's) - r = -.18

Convergent Validity

Objective; positive correlation; taking a measure and seeing if it relates to other similar measurements (ACT vs. SAT scores

Likert Scale

Strongly disagree to strongly agree; type of question that asks for a degree of agreement

Quantitative Measurement

Take on a numerical form: 1.) Ordinal (Order - rank in class); 2.) Interval (intelligence), have a meaning between the numbers (what you get in a race), doesn't have an absolute zero; 3.) Ratio (someone is twice as tall as someone else, percentage in class) has an absolute zero

skewed to the left

The median is greater than the mean in a distribution that is

P Value

The probability level which forms basis for deciding if results are statistically significant; the more low this is, the less likely to have obtained the results if there was, in fact, no association between your variables (P < .05)

For a third variable to be plausible as the explanation in an established association, what must be true?

The third variable must be related to both of the measured variables in the original association.

Forced-Choice Question

people give their opinion by picking the best of two or more options

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

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

How do reverse-worded items address shortcuts?

They slow down readers, making them answer more carefully.

a measure is valid but not reliable

What is not possible regarding measures?

3

What is the mode of the following set of scores? 2, 3, 3, 5, 7

2

What is the standard deviation of the following set of scores? 2, 3, 3, 5, 7

a difference in the height between the bars

When examining an association claim using a bar graph, an association is indicated by which of the following?

A description of the study's hypotheses

You submit a study for approval by the institutional review board (IRB), and they tell you that written informed consent is required. Which of the following can be excluded from your informed consent document?

unusual

a biased sample consists of too many __________ cases.

Conceptual Definition

a researcher's definition of a variable at the theoretical level

If people who give favorable answers also come back to the restaurant

a restaurant owner uses a response card with 4 items in order to evaluate how satisfied customers are with the food, service, ambiance, and overall experience. Which result would show the response card's validity?

Open-ended question

allow respondents to answer any way they like

goal of inferential statistics

allows us to draw conclusions about the population we are interested in (using laws of probability)

Bivariate Correlation

an association that involves exactly two variables

IRB (Institutional Review Board)

any academic research needs to be proposed to their IRB, review for ethical violations and/or procedural errors

Mean

average (mew and M) Balance point; distorted by skew or outliers; used with equal interval/ratio (not skewed) data

Standard deviation

average distance from the mean

Core ethical principles

beneficence, justice, respect for rights/dignity, fidelity/responsibility, integrity

Test-retest Reliability

correlation, compare results, similar scores are reliable ( r > .5)

nonsignificant result

can't rule out the chance that the result came from a population in which the association is 0

Restriction of range

condensed/shortened; situation involving a bivariate correlation, not a full range of possible scores on one of the variables in the association, so the relationship from the sample underestimates the true correlation.

Negative Wording Question

contains negatively phrased statements, making its wording complication or confusing, potentially weakening construct validity (Which of the following is not...)

Causal Criteria

covariance, temporal precedence, internal validity (3rd variable problem)

Statistical Validity

degree to which statistical conclusions we draw from a study are accurate and reasonable

Informed Consent

each person learned about the research project, considers its risks/benefits, and decides whether to participate

Fidelity/Responsibility

establish relationships of trust; accept responsibility for professional behavior (in research, teaching, and clinical practice)

Faking Bad

giving answers on a survey that make one look worse than one really is

Statistical Significance

helps researcher evaluate the probability that the result would have occurred if the "null hypothesis" were true (E.g., a 0 association); results depend on effect size and sample size (the larger these are, more likely they are this)

Construct Validity

indication of how well a variable was measured or manipulated in a study

Internal Reliability

items on your measurement are similar to one another; cronbach's alpha; (r > .7)

.50

large or strong effect size

central tendency

mean, median, mode

.30

medium or moderate effect size

Mode

number that occurs the most; peak of distribution; used with categorical data

goal of descriptive statistics

organize and summarize data

Double Barreled Question

problematic because it asks 2 questions in one, weakening construct validity; not sure what your participant is responding to

Categorical Measurement

quantitative/nominal; differ by quality, not by number

Respect of rights/dignity

recognize that people are autonomous agents; protect people's rights, including privacy, right to give consent for treatment/research, right to have participation treated confidentially; understand that some populations may be less able to give autonomous consent, and take precautions against coercing people

Socially desirable (Faking Good)

responding in a way that makes you look better

types of measurement

self-report, observational, physiological; need all 3 of these to determine the best practice and data

Response Set

shortcut respondents may use to answer items in a long survey, rather than responding to the content of each item; Acquiescence and fence sitting

.10

small or weak effect size

Research ethics involves consideration of

society and science, professional issues, treatment of research participants

Fence Sitting

someone who goes down the middle or is neutral; doesn't strongly agree or disagree with anything; researchers avoid this by giving 4 options

Integrity

strive to be accurate, truthful, and honest in one's role as researcher, teacher, or practitioner

Justice

strive to treat all groups of people fairly, sample research participants from the same populations that will benefit from the research, be aware of biases

the principle of justice calls for a balance between

the kind of people who participate in research; the kind of people who benefit from it

Effect Size

the magnitude of a relationship between two or more variables; R or Cohen's d; larger effect sizes lead to more accurate predictions and are usually more important

Face/Content Validity

subjective; Face (It looks like what you want to measure - "looks like a duck") and Content (Measure contains all parts that your theory says it should contain - "Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck")

Acquiescence

tend to strongly agree with everything or give the highest rating

Reliability of measures

test-retest, interrater, internal

Operational Definition

the specific way in which a concept of interest is measured or manipulated as a variable in a study

what is true regarding moderators?

they can inform external validity

Correlation

to occur or vary together (Covary) systematically, as in the case of 2 variables; any study with all measured variables is this

Beneficence

treat people in ways that benefit them, don't cause them suffering, conduct research that will benefit society, benefits should out-weigh the cause

Plagiarism

type of research misconduct along with data falsification and fabrication

An association between 2 quantitative variables

type of statistic that will usually be a Pearson's "r"

An association between 2 categorical variables

type of statistic will be X2 (Squared) test for independence (Ex: Variable #1: Drinking level; Variable #2: Dementia

An association between a categorical and quantitative variable

type of statistic will usually be a "t-test" (Ex: Measured Variable #1: Legality of marijuana - categorical; Measured Variable #2: Purchase of junk food ($) - ratio)

Moderating Variables

variable that, depending on its level, changes the relationship between two other variables (Ex: Gender and texting vs. mental health)

there will be greater construct validity

what is not true of finding a stronger effect size in an association claim?