chapter 12

Question 1

what does the single participant tradition assume?

Answer 1

that most variability in the participant’s behavior is imposed by the situation and therefore can be removed by careful attention to experimental control

Question 2

what does the individual differences, group-research tradition assume?

Answer 2

that much of the variability is intrinsic and should be statistically controlled and analyzed

Question 3

why did psychologists begin using statistical methods?

Answer 3

to evaluate the results of experiments in which removing all sources of variability was not feasible

Question 4

the use of statistics is one way to avoid what?

Answer 4

to avoid being fooled into thinking that data are more reliable than they really are

Question 5

people or animals in single-participant design acting as their own controls (similar to a within-subjects design) avoids the possibility of what?

Answer 5

this avoids the possibility that the average picture is a distortion of the behavior of the individual participants, which is a potential whenever data are averaged over many participants

Question 6

__________ refers to the practical importance of a result

Answer 6

clinical significance

Question 7

_______ refers to the probability that a statistical test will find a significant difference when a difference actually exists in the population

Answer 7

power

Question 8

what does the power of a test depend on?

Answer 8

the size of the difference that exists in the population and the size of the sample drawn from the population

Question 9

what are two ways that a researcher can increase the probability of finding a significant result in an experiment?

Answer 9

1) increasing the size of the effect

2) increasing the size of the sample

Question 10

_______ the number of participants ______ the variability of the date

hint: increasing or decreasing?

Answer 10

increasing

decreases