2 - Research methods Flashcards
How do you begin a study?
- First step: What is your question?
→ Is it clearly defined? What is your hypothesis? - What behavior do you want to measure?
→ Behavior is any activity that can be observed and somehow measured
→ How are you going to measure it?
How do we define a behaviour in research?
Independent and dependent variables, stimulus and responses, overt and covert behavior, appetitive and aversive stimuli, motivating operations
What are variables?
- Characteristics of a person, place, or thing that can change (vary) over time or from one situation to another
- Anything that can be defined and measured
- There are Independent variables (IV) and Dependent variables (DV)`
What is an independent variable?
- Anything that systematically varies across different conditions in an experiment
- It is manipulated or controlled by the experimenter
- These variables can also have levels
→ p.ex: when testing 3 types of drugs, each type will be a level - Research question example: Does the kind of food reward affect the rat’s speed in a maze?
–> IV: The type of food rats in each group receive when they reach their goal
What is a dependant variable?
- The response/behaviour that is affected by changes in the independent variable
→ It is dependent on changes in the independent variable
→ It is measured by the experimenter - Research question example: Does the kind of food reward affect the rat’s speed in a maze?
–> the speed of the rat to eat all the food reward in the radial arm maze
How do IVs and DVs tie into cause-effect functional relationships?
- The relationship between changes in the IV (stimulus) and changes in the DV (response, behavior) is the functional relationship
→ Cause(IV)-and-effect(DV) relationship
What is a stimulus?
- Anything that can potentially influence behaviour
- Also known as a ‘cue’ that signals a behaviour
→ Examples: Food is a stimulus that elicits the response of salivation when presented to a hungry dog
→ Example: A high mark on a test is a stimulus which elicits a response of a grin
What is a response?
- A particular instance of a behaviour
- The response of one organism can act as a stimulus that stimulates the response of another organism
→ p.ex: when a rat bites another rat, it is a stimulus that elicits the retaliatory response of the second rat to bite back, this is then a stimulus that causes the first rat to retreat which is a response
→ Examples: at a red light (stimulus), we press the brake (response); press the gas
How can we differentiate appetitive stimulus from aversive stimulus? Give an example for each
-
Appetitive stimulus: An event that an organism will seek out (tend to be pleasant)
→ not necessarily always physiological (but for this class, it will be)
→ Examples: Food when hungry; Water when thirsty -
Aversive stimulus: an event that an organism will avoid (tend to be unpleasant)
→ Examples: Extreme cold; Electric shock
What is a motivating operation? What are its types?
- Any procedure that affects the appetitiveness or aversiveness of a stimulus
-
Deprivation: prolonged absence of an event increases appetitiveness
→ p.ex: going without food for a long period of time obviously increases the appetitiveness of food, thereby increase its ability to serve as a reinforcer for certain types of behaviour -
Satiation: prolonged exposure to an event decreases appetitiveness
→ food is much less effective as a reinforcer if a rat has just eaten a large meal
→ p.ex: being forced to eat a 9th slice of pizza
How do we measure a behaviour?
Rate, duration, speed, latency, errors, reliability
- The definition must refer to some observable aspect of the individual’s behavior and be clearly defined
What are some aspects of measurements of behaviour?
- Measures should be objective, and unambiguous (clearly defined)
- We often use more than one measure to assess behaviour in an experiment
- Ensures they can be replicated across time and place
→ this notion is the most important - Reliable measures have high inter-rater reliability
What is inter-rater reliability?
- Measures/ratings should be reliable across multiple observers
- Ideally, behavior is measured by 2+ observers
→ Sometimes only a subset of the behavior
→ most important for qualitative research to ensure they reach the same scores - What is an acceptable IRR rate? 75%
Explain rate of response as a measure.
- One of the more popular measures
- The frequency with which a response occurs in a certain period of time
- This method of measurement is most appropriate when the response is of brief duration, with a well-defined start and finish
→ it’s a very easy way to quantify something
→ Example: number of phone pick-ups per hour; the # of cigarettes smoked in a day
Explain duration as a measure.
- The length of time that an individual repeatedly or continuously performs a certain behaviour
- This measure is appropriate when either increasing or decreasing the length of time the behaviour occurs
→ a student will want to increase time spent studying while decreasing time spent watching TV
→ Example: Total time spent on your phone each day; total time spent studying - Why is this not an ideal measure? It doesn’t take into account the quality of time spent studying
Explain speed as a measure.
- How quickly or slowly a behaviour occurs, or the rapidity with which one progresses through some type of distance
- Very popular in aging research and used to measure processing speed
→ Example:
→ Length of time for a rat to run through a maze; Length of time for you to finish reading this lecture
Explain latency as a measure.
- Length of time required for the behaviour to begin
→ with respect to classical conditioning, the strength of conditioning can be measured not by amount of saliva, but the length of time it takes for the dog to start salivating - Examples:
→ How quickly the rat begins running once it’s placed in the maze
→ How long you waited to start reading Chapter 2 since it was assigned
Explain number of errors as a measure.
- Measures any behaviour in which responses can be categorized as right or wrong
- Examples:
→ the number of errors a student makes on an exam
→ the number of wrong turns a rat takes before it finishes all the food
Name the types of research designs.
- Descriptive research, experimental research, group design, single-subject design, use of animal research
To measure learning is to measure ___ in behaviour
changes
What is descriptive research? What are its types?
- Naturalistic observation, case studies
- Involves simply describing the behaviour and the situation within which it occurs
→ p.ex: describing a group by obtaining information from participants through interviews - This research does not involve the manipulation of any variables
-
Naturalistic observation involves the systematic observation and recording of behaviour in its natural environment
→ Such behaviours may not occur if removed from environment -
The case study approach involves the intensive examination of one or a few individuals
→ These can be done in natural settings or detailed examinations in more structured settings (like in a clinician’s office)
What are some major problems with naturalistic observation?
- Difficult to assess cause and effect (or the functional relationship)
→ which variables are important to determine the observed behaviour?
→ p.ex: if you study childhood aggression by observing children interacting on a playground, you may see varying sets of behavior of aggression, but it’s difficult to determine why these behaviors are occurring because researchers cannot intervene or interact with the participants - Can’t control other variables
→ this method is often insufficient for gaining a full understanding of a behavior and variables that influence it
→ the only way to determine that is to perform an experiment - Behavioural scientists often have many preconceptions about behaviour because it is their job to study behaviour and they can be susceptible to biases
→ to avoid biases, researchers attempt to define their variables objectively and make observations in a consistent and unified manner
What are some major problems with case studies?
- takes a good deal of time, thus generalizations are based on very few cases (not representative of a larger group)
- Cannot answer certain questions about certain behaviour
–> p.ex: we can’t say that when a person falls off a ladder, they develop a fear of heights just because it occurred in one specific case - Difficult to establish causation; because case studies observe one person, we have no way of knowing if the observation is the norm or the exception
What is experimental research? What are its types?
- Control group designs, single-subject designs
- Experiments to discover cause-and-effect relationships between environmental events and behavior
→ p.ex: do children who like to read to better in school, or do brighter kids simply like to read more than other children - One or more independent variables are systematically varied (manipulated) to determine their effect on a dependent variable