5: Research Methods 3 Flashcards
What’s one way to rule out plausible 3rd variables?
Manipulate the variable that we are interested in.
How can we cut back on the number of possible third variables?
Ex/ Do violent video games cause violent behaviors?
Although there are a large number of third variables that can cut back on the correlation between violent behaviors and violent video games, we can solve this by…
CONDUCTING EXPERIMENTS!
What’s an example of an experiment we can conduct with violence and video games? (details)
We can get 50 participants to play a violent video game (the experimental group: the group that received intervention) and 50 to play a non-violent video game (the control group: the group that didn’t receive intervention). After, we can measure their violent behavior (note that the people playing the “non-violent” video game could have been calmed down by said game, so we must bypass that).
What is the independent and dependent variable?
The independent variable is the variable that you manipulate (predictor variable)
The dependent variable is the variable that is influenced by the independent variable and measured in the study (also known as the outcome variable)
What’s the difference between the experimental group and control group in an experiment?
The experimental group receives the intervention while the control group doesn’t receive an intervention (think violence and video games example)
How do we make sure that we have an equal number of aggressive/pacifists in each condition (violence and video games study)?
What might still happen?
By randomly assigning participants to conditions.
This way, EACH OF THE PARTICIPANTS has EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES to be assigned to the control or experimental group.
(note: Sometimes you can still get stacked results due to dumb luck. to solve this, you need to do checks).
What is an operational definition? What does it influence? Name an example.
An operational definition is a description of how we will measure our variables.
- it influences the conclusions that you can draw from the experiment.
Ex/ How can we define violent behavior in the Violence and video games study? Physical violence, verbal abuse, paintball guns, popping bubbles, etc.
Simon Lolliot’s “Shaved vs Non-shaved head experiment.
He wants to see if having hair vs not influences how “likable” he is in his class activities.
Class 1: (9:30am) He walks in with long hair and asks the class how likable he is.
Class 2: (2:00pm) He walks in shaved and asks the class how likable he is.
He finds that the class where he has long luscious hair tends to rate him higher on likability than the class where he’s shaved.
What could have brought about this result?
- CLASSES WEREN’T ASSIGNED RANDOMLY, THE GROUP ALREADY EXISTED
- Could have been more irritable later that day
- Aware of experiment, so could have acted diff.
- lots more other variables
What is a “Quasi-Experimental” design? Is it useful?
Quasi-experimental design refers to when we have two naturally occurring groups that we perform an experiment on.
They are useful, but limit the claims that we can make about causality.
What is a single blind? What is a double blind? Which is better and why?
Single Blind:
When the participants are unaware of the hypothesis/ which experimental condition that are in
Double Blind:
When both the participants and the experimenters are blind to which condition the participants are in and the hypothesis as well
We ultimately want a double blind, as shown in the “normal vs genetically superior mice race experiment”
What do you want your sample of participants to represent and why?
You want your sample of participants to be representative of the population, as this way, you findings are much more generalizable!
Why is randomization so good in selecting participants for experiments? Conditions? Results on the experiment?
Everyone in a given population has equal opportunities of being selected for the sample
Everyone in a given sample has equal opportunities to be assigned to a condition
Random samples allow us more confidence in generalizing our effects from the sample to the population as a whole?
What is reliability and validity?
Reliability asks, do our tests return consistent results over time?
Validity asks, do our instruments measure what we want it to measure?
