A Level Research Methods Paper Flashcards
What is meant by a pilot study? Explain one possible reason why the psychologist decided to conduct a pilot study for this investigation.
The dream study question
A pilot study is a small scale trial of a research design conducted before doing the real research. The psychologist may have conducted a pilot study in order to check whether there needed to be any modifications to the procedures or materials used in the interview, for example checking whether questions need changing as they confused some participants.
The interviews produced qualitative data.
What is meant by qualitative data? Give one strength of collecting qualitative data in this study.
Qualitative data is non-numerical, descriptive data. A strength of collecting qualitative data in this study is that it enables the students to talk in detail about their dreams which provides rich detail and a deeper understanding of dream content.
Another researcher, who did not know the purpose of the study, carried out a content analysis of the interview data.
Explain how this content analysis could have been conducted?
This content analysis could have been conducted by the researcher getting to know the data thoroughly by viewing the material a number of times. Then devising a checklist of themes from the data which can be clearly operationalised, e.g. aggressive interactions. Then they would work through the data and code it, which is analysing the material and identifying each instance of the chosen categories. Then they count it tally the number of examples in each category.
Identify the operationalised dependent variable in this study.
Music and running experiment.
The seconds taken to run 400m
Explain why a histogram would not be an appropriate way of displaying the means shown in Table One.
Music and running experiment.
In order to draw a histogram you would need to have continuous data, however, thus data represents two separate conditions, therefore it is categorical rather than continuous so a histogram would be inappropriate.
What do the mean and standard deviation values in Table 1 suggest about the participants performances with and without music?
Music and running experiment
The mean times suggest that music has a positive effect in the participants running performance as participants completed the 400m faster with music, this is because the mean time is greater in condition A than condition B.
The standard deviation displays the spread of scores in each condition. The performance is more consistent in condition A than in condition B, as the standard deviation is smaller in condition A than in condition B.
Give three reasons why the researcher used a related t-test in this study and explain whether or not the results are significant.
The researcher used a related t-test as the experiment was a test of difference between running with and without music. The experiment was also a related design as they used a repeated measures design. Also the data used is interval data. Here the result is not significant at the 5% level because the calculated value of t, 1.4377, is less than the critical value of t, which is 1.833 at 0.05 for a directional hypothesis where the df is 9.
What is meant by a type 2 error? Explain why psychologists normally use the 5% level of significance in their research.
A type 2 error would occur where a real difference in the data is overlooked as it is wrongly accepted as being not significant and they accept the null hypothesis in error. The 5% level is used as it strikes a balance between the risk of making type 1 and type 2 errors
