Chapter 2 Research Methods Flashcards
Facilitated communication
Facilitator sits next to child w/ autism, child sits in front of keyboard to help motor skills
Prefrontal lobotomy
Surgical procedure that severs fibers connecting frontal lobs of brain from underlying thalamus
Heuristic
Mental shortcut that helps us to streamline thinking/make sense of world
Cognitive misers
Try to conserve our mental energies by simplifying the world
Representative heuristic
Involves judging probability of an event by its superficial similarity to a prototype, “like goes with like”
Base rate
How common a characteristic/behaviour is in general population
Base rate fallacy
Fail to consider other base rates
Availability heuristic
Involves estimating the likelihood of an occurrence based on the ease with which it comes to our mind
Cognitive bias
Systematic errors in thinking
Hindsight bias
Tendency to overestimate how well we could have successfully forecasted known outcomes, “I knew it all along”
Overconfidence
Tendency to overestimate out ability to make correct predictions
Five research designs
- Naturalistic observation
- Case study
- Correlation design
- Experimental design
- Survey
Naturalistic observation (What, strengths, weaknesses)
Watching behavior in real world settings without trying to manipulate situation
Strengths: High external validity
Weaknesses: Low internal validity, doesn’t allow us to infer causation
External validity
Extent to which we can generalize findings to real world settings
Internal validity
Extent to which we can draw cause-and-effect inferences from a study
Case study (What, strengths, weaknesses)
Examines one person/small number of people in depth, often over extended period of time
Strengths: Can provide existence proofs, allows us to study rare/unusual phenom, can offer insights for later systematic testing
Weaknesses: Typically anecdotal, doesn’t allow us to infer causation
Existence proofs
Demonstration that a given psychological phenom can occur
Self report measures
Questionnaires to assess variety of characteristics (personality traits, mental illness, interest)
Surveys (What, strengths, weaknesses)
Measure people’s opinion/attitudes
Strengths: Easy to administer, works well for some types of data, people have access to inner thoughts/may report them
Weaknesses: Question choice, self reports, selecting participants
Random selection
Ensures every person in a population has an equal chance of being chosen to participate
Reliability
Consistency of measurement
Test-retest reliability
Reliable questionnaire yields similar scores over time
Interrater reliability
Different people who conduct interview/make behavioral observations, agree on characteristics they’re measuring
Validity
Extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure
Response tests
Tendency of research participants to distort their responses to questionnaire items
Positive impression management
Tendency to make ourselves look better than we are
Malingering
Tendency to make ourselves appear psychologically disturbed with aim of achieving clear-cut personal goal
Correlation design (What, strengths, weaknesses)
Examines the extent to which two variables are associated
Strengths: Can help us predict behavior
Weaknesses: Doesn’t allow us to infer causation
Scatterplot
Grouping of points on 2D graph where each dot represents a single person’s data
Illusory correlation
Perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exists
Experimental design (What, strengths, weaknesses)
- Random assignment of participants to conditions
- Manipulation of an independent variable
Strengths: Allows us to infer causation, high internal validity
Weaknesses: Sometimes low external validity, difficulty with control (placebo, Hawthorne, demand char)
Random assignment
Randomly sorting participants into groups
Random selection vs random assignment
Ensures every person in a population has an equal chance of being chosen to participate; Randomly sorting participants into groups
Control group
Group of participants that don’t receive manipulation
Experimental group
Group of participants that receive manipulation
Between-subjects design
Researchers assign different groups to the control/experimental condition
Within-subject design
Each participant acts as his/her own control
Independent variable
Variable that experiment manipulates
Dependent variable
Variable that measures to see whether the manipulation has an effect
Operational definition
What a researcher is measuring
Placebo effect
Improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement
Blind
Unaware of whether one is experimental/control group
Nocebo effect
Harmless substance that creates harmful effect
Experimenter expectancy effect
Phenom where researchers’ hypotheses lead them to unintentionally bias the outcome of a study
Double-blind
Neither researchers nor participants are aware of who’s in experimental/control group
Demand characteristics
Clues that participants pick up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding researchers’ hypotheses
Informed consent
informing research participants of what is involved in a study prior to participation
Statistics
Application of math to describe/analyze data
Descriptive statistics
Numerical characteristics that describe data
Central tendency
Measure of “central” scores in data set/where group tends to cluster (mean, median, mode)
Variability
Measure of how loosely/tightly bunched scores are
Standard deviation
Measure dispersion that takes into account of how far data is from mean
Inferential statistics
Math methods that allow us to determine whether we can generalize findings from our sample to the full population
Extrasensory perception (ESP)
Perception of events outside the known channels of sensation
Pseudosymmetry
Scientific controversy where none exists
Statistically significant
Finding occurs by chance less than 5 in 100 times
Halo vs horns effect
Cognitive biases that cause a favourable/unfavourable effect
Hawthorne (observer) effect
Tendency to improve/modify aspect of behavior being experimentally measured in response to fact that subject knows they are being studied
Practically significant
How statistics relate to the real world
Effect size (Stat sig/not stat sig)
Large difference between groups studied; little difference between groups studied
Sample size (Stat sig/not stat sig)
Large number of participants; Small number of participants
Differences [Variability] (Stat sig/not stat sig)
Small differences across participants on variables measured; Large differences across participants on variables measured
Ethics in research (three)
- Concern for welfare - minimize harm/maximize benefits to participants/society
- Respect for persons - informed consent, decisions to participate, autonomy
- Justice - share benefits/risks among all populations
