Final Exam Flashcards
What would it take to change your mind about something you have a strongly-held belief for?
Diet Sweeteners - how came to believe they are bad for you
What I would need to know: not cancer causing, are not more addicting than real sugar, don’t lead to cardiovascular disease, don’t cause you to actually gain more weight, actually help with type 2 diabetes, don’t cause you to become more addicted to sweet foods, don’t cause an even greater incidence of obesity, don’t reduce metabolism
What are five (5) strategies you can use to increase the credibility of your qualitative research? Name them, provide definitions for each, and apply them to the scenario presented.
- Triangulation
- Researcher Reflexivity
- Disconfirming Evidence
- Prolonged and Persistent Field Work
- Member Checks
- Thick, Detailed Description
- Increase reliability of your observations
What are five (5) strategies you can use to increase the reliability of your observations?
- Target specific behaviors
- Use low inference measures - things any two people could look at and see (feet hit the floor at same time, fell, etc.)
- Use multiple observers
- Train the observers
- Keep the observers blind to conditions
- Strive for inter-rater reliability
What’s so good about pretest-posttest control group experiments? Be able to draw a diagram with the key elements and label the purpose(s) of each in the context of a real-world study.
Pretest-Posttest Control Group Experiments
- Control Group: To help reduce threats to internal validity. This is not required for experiments but is very important.
- Randomly Assigned Subject: to help ensure equivalence between the two groups…on the dependent measures as well as all others
- Pretest: to test for equivalence of the groups at the start and for baseline data to calculate pretest/posttest delta
- Subject Treatments: the experimental group gets the treatments, and the control group gets something unrelated to the DV
- Posttest: measure the delta between pretest and posttest and measure the delta between groups on the posttest
- Delayed Retention Test: to determine whether the effects are lasting or whether they fade quickly
- Experiment Specific information: subjects, dependent variable, treatments
Be able to write an APA 6th edition citation for a peer-reviewed journal publication.
Author, A.A., & Author, B.B. (year). Title of article. Title of Journal, volume #(issue #), nn-nn.
What are five (5) characteristics of good questionnaire questions? (Be able to fix faulty questions.)
- One that all the people understand in a consistent way…and in a way consistent with what the researcher intended it to mean - do with pilot studies
- One that can be administered in a standard way
- One that communicates to all respondents the kind of answers that are desired/acceptable
- One that the respondents are capable of answering (unless measuring knowledge is the goal)
- One that the respondents are willing to answer
Words of estimative probability
WEP’s: words that convey your degree of confidence or certitude in very clear terms. (Impossible, Unlikely, 50/50, Likely, Certain). Important for analysts or people making decisions to tell someone and convey to them clearly your understanding of the fact
Weasel Words
words that don’t convey at all with any degree of certitude or confidence what the likelihood of something is
Likert Scale
Make strong directional statement, provide 5 ways to respond (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree). One strategy I’d use is “no basis for judgement” or “change strong to complete” to reduce emotional element of it
What are statistical significance, effect size, and practical significance? What do they tell us?
- Statistical Significance: a mathematical test that gives a yes/no answer to the question: are the differences in the outcome we observe larger than from sampling fluctuation alone? - can purchase by increasing the number of participants
- Effect Size: tells us the magnitude and direction of the difference between two groups/samples of data. Tells us if one is higher than the other and by how many standard deviations
- Practical Significance: answers the question: so what? What does it mean? Tells so what taking into account values
Ex: Vanderbilt football - if won/lost and by how much
Why would you choose a single subject research design to answer a question? Given a case study, describe the design and draw a graph of the anticipated results labeling all the elements.
Purpose: Intended to provide strong evidence for cause and effect relationships for individuals rather than groups.
Design Requirements
1. Reliable measurement
2. Repeated Measurement
3. Clear description and control of the conditions
4. Baseline and treatment conditions
5. One variable at a time is investigated
A = baseline condition w/o treatment; B = treatment condition
For graph:
- Vertical axis - time (with units - days/weeks)
- Horizontal Axis - dependent measure (ex: time on task)
- A/B/A/B design w/ 7 data points per condition
- dotted line between conditions, connected lines for data points within each condition
- Want final B treatment to leave them with the treatment
Why would you choose an ex-post facto research design to answer a question? How would you go about conducting it? (Make sure to describe in detail the most critical design element.)
A way to provide strong evidence of a cause and effect relationship without doing an experiment. You would do this because there are some circumstances where it is impractical, unethical, or illegal to conduct an experiment to determine cause and effect.
Design for ex-post facto:
1. identify independent variables that are likely to have an effect on the dependent variable
2. Select a representative sample
3. Split them into two groups based on dependent variable and then pair-wise match them on independent variables. Then discard any unmatched subjects.
4. Count the number in each group. Are they significantly significant difference between the groups?
- Allows you to test for cause and effect relationship after the fact
Triangulation
3+ different ways we come to the same conclusions. The more varied ways we have that come to the same conclusion, more confident we can be about our conclusions.
Data: use of varied data sources
Theory: use of multiple perspectives/models
Investigator: Use of several researchers
Methodology: Use of multiple methods
Prolonged and Persistent Field Work
repeated, substantive observations; multiple, in-depth interviews; inspection of a range of relevant documents
Member Checks
Having participants confirm the accuracy of interview transcripts or observational field notes
- First level: taking transcripts to participatns prior to analysis and interpretation of results
- Second level: presenting interpretations and analyses to participants to validate conclusions
Thick, Detailed Description
reporting sufficient quotes and field note descriptions to provide evidence for researchers’ interpretations and conclusions
Plagiarism Identification
Looking for:
- citation of passage
- if direct quote, did they put quotation marks and citation with authors’ name, year and page numbers?
Questionnaire Question Types
- Rating Scale
- Rank Order
- Semantic Differential
- Likert Scale
- Multiple Choice
Semantic Differential
Take 2 different words (adjectives) with polar opposite meanings and choose which one the analysis is closest to
Questionnaire Question Types
- Rating Scale
- Rank Order
- Semantic Differential
- Likert Scale
- Multiple Choice
Researcher Reflexivity
researchers attempt to understand and self-disclose their assumptions, beliefs, values, and biases
Disconfirming evidence
after establishing preliminary themes or categories, the researcher looks for evidence inconsistent with these themes
Verbatim quotes
provide direct quotes from participants that serve as examples of selected themes
