Basic Concepts & Research Strategies

Question 1

four major questions in psychology

Answer 1

• what question am i trying to answer?
• what kind of data should i collect?
• whom should i measure?
• how will i collect those measurements and what will they be able to tell me?

Question 2

what is the goal of this question?
- what question am i trying to answer?

Answer 2

identify the relevant variables and relationship between them
- come up with your IV and DV

Question 3

what is the goal of this question?
- what kind of data should I collect?

Answer 3

assign values to variables in a way that is valid, reliable, and objective

measurement

Question 4

construct

Answer 4

ideas we care about that cannot be directly measured
- happiness

Question 5

operational variable

Answer 5

things we can observe that tell us about the construct
- 12 point scale on a person’s current mood

Question 6

operational definition

Answer 6

the way a researcher defines a construct an observable variable in a particular study
- a way to describe construct based on how the researcher chose to measure the operational variable

• operationalize: process of turning construct into variable

Question 7

what is the goal of this question?
- whom should i measure?

Answer 7

study a representative subset of the population

sampling

Question 8

sampling method

Answer 8

how the subset is chosen from the population
- ways to get people in your study

Question 9

what is the goal of this question?
- how will i collect those measurements and what will they be able to tell me?

Answer 9

draw statistically valid inferences about the relationships between variables

research strategy and statistical inference

Question 10

quantitative research

Answer 10

• assigning numbers to the variables you measure
• analyze results using statistics

Question 11

qualitative research

Answer 11

• interviewing participants, focus groups, and observing participants
• data is analyzed based on theory
• researchers create narratives based on theory

Question 12

correlational research

Answer 12

• variables are observed, not measured
• no random assignment

Question 13

quasi-experimental research

Answer 13

• participants are grouped naturally but not randomly assigned to conditions

Question 14

experimental research

Answer 14

• IV is actively manipulated
• participants are randomly assigned to condition

Question 15

external validity

Answer 15

how well do results represent people/context besides those in the original study
example:
people - if you are only sampling psyc 70 students, your study does not fully represent the college student population because participants are different than the average person
environment - say you are doing an experiment about friendliness in the workplace. you instruct the participant to say hello to as many people as possible. however, people are more likely to not be as friendly because your study is a more formal setting. whereas, their usually workplace contains people they are familiar/friends with. therefore, your study does not fully represent the realness of the situation which may lead participants to act differently

Question 16

generalizability

Answer 16

do the results apply to other studies, other people, or real-world situations?
generalizability aims to enhance a study’s applicability and validity to multiple situations outside of the experiment

Question 17

threats to external validity

Answer 17

• sampling bias
• novelty effect
• operation definition
• poor ecological validity

Question 18

sampling bias

Answer 18

non-representative samples make it difficult to generalize to the population
example:
- studying the effects of burnout on young people
- sample bias: only sampling college students
- not all young people go to college

Question 19

novelty effect

Answer 19

being in an experiment can cause people to act strangely/not how they normally act
- leads to results that does not accurately represent human experience

Question 20

operational definitions

Answer 20

results could be too specific to choice of operational definition
- trying to study attitude about climate change
- do people believe in climate questionnaire vs asking them to volunteer and measuring them how much they care
- these scenarios will give you different results which are not generalizable to the overall context

Question 21

poor ecological validity

Answer 21

study context is too different from real-world conditions we wish to understand
- laboratory environment may be too rigid or unnatural to be similar to real life situations

Question 22

internal validity

Answer 22

how sure are you that X causes Y?
- checking that the causal claim is correct
- requires eliminating alternative explanations for the relationship between X and Y

Question 23

extraneous variable

Answer 23

anything other than the manipulated variable that might be influencing the observed effect
- when people eat more ice cream, murder rates go up
- extraneous variable: temperature goes up which causes both anyway
must prevent extraneous variable from beocming a confound

Question 24

why cant you make causal claims from correlations?

Answer 24

correlations do not indicate the directionality problem
directionality problem: don’t know whether x cause y or y causes x
it is unclear which variable affects the other

Question 25

third variable problem

Answer 25

some unidentifiable variable is responsible for the observed relationship between two variables