Quiz 2 Psych 100

Betty decided to conduct an experiment on the effectiveness of a new anti-anxiety pill. She decided that participants who had been diagnosed with anxiety would be in the treatment group and participants who had never been treated for anxiety would be the control group. Which aspect of proper research design did Betty ignore?

random assignment

Imagine that researchers were interested in learning about public support for gay marriage. If the researchers analyzed Facebook posts regarding the acceptance or rejection of homosexuality (via opinions in status updates, article posts, or groups they officially like), they would be:

studying online behavior

An article headline claimed that "Drugs Cause Homelessness" due to a positive relationship found between homeless populations and drug use. Educated psychologists thought this might be flawed, because they thought unemployment was influencing both drug use and homelessness. This is an example of:

a third variable

Dr. Sharma wants to study the extent to which stress is related to suicidal ideation in people who suffer from depression. She gathers information about the level of stress, depressive symptoms, and suicidal thoughts a set of participants experience the day after they attend the funeral of a loved one. Because this study is assessing people under conditions that are not typical of everyday life, it is lacking in __________ validity.

ecological

The ability to arrive at broad conclusions based on smaller ones is known as __________. It requires that the sample under investigation be representative of the larger population from which it was drawn.

generalizability

What is the advantage of a field study over a laboratory study?

increased external validity

The degree to which a study allows unambiguous causal inferences has ________.

internal validity

Among the examples below, the strongest correlation coefficient is:

-0.90

What would be the best method for examining the relationship between age and driving behavior?

correlational method

The __________ method is a research approach in which participants describe their experiences and behavior of a given day through systematic recollection on the following day

day reconstruction

The degree to which a study finding has been obtained under conditions that are typical for what happens in everyday life is called ___________.

ecological validity

Students who study for 7 hours over the course of a week will perform better than students who cram for 7 hours the night before the exam. The independent variable in this hypothesis is:

method of studying (spaced or cramming)

An example of an operational definition for anxiety is a:

person's description of anxiety

You want to study the effects of gender on math achievement. However, you know that you cannot randomly assign some people to male and others to be female, so you cannot have a true experiment. In this scenario, what type of research design would you use?

quasi-experiment

When researchers collect in-the-moment (or, close-to-the-moment) self-report data directly from participants as they go about their daily lives, they are:

studying daily experiences

Dr. Fikshunal is interested in how our bodies respond to being excluded from a group. Therefore, she decides to monitor the heart rate and cortisol levels of participants as they engage in their environment and indicate experiences when they felt ostracized. In this scenario, Dr. Fikshunal is:

studying daily physiology

For your senior project, you want to learn more about the effect of brain damage on an individual's ability to learn a new language. You don't really have the time or resources to observe or interview and talk to people with brain damage. Ethically, you can't manipulate the independent variable. You need something that is quick and easy so you can turn your project in on time. Based on what you know about different research methods and designs, which approach to research would you use?

survey

Participants in a study on the effects of Viagra are assigned to groups. One group receives a sugar pill while the other group receives Viagra. The number of erections over 30 days is recorded by participants in a journal. In this example, what is the independent variable?

the Viagra

One reason for using random assignment is:

to help ensure that participant characteristics don't become confounding variables

In order to determine causal effects between variables researchers use:

true experiments