Lecture 2

Question 1

survey, self report measures- AD and DIS

Answer 1

advantages= low cost and easy to administrate on a large scale.

Disadvantages= social desirability effect, tendency to agree (acquiescence bias), only measures explicit attitudes thoughts and self-perception, requires respondent’s self-awareness.

Question 2

Experience sampling method- what is it?
what are potential issues?

Answer 2

ask ppts to report thoughts, feelings, and behaviours repeatedly over a certain period of time. Response frequency could be daily up to several times a day.

Potential issues- the very act of self-monitoring can influence what is being measured.

Question 3

observational measures- what is it
what are AD and DIS?

Answer 3

involves recording what is being done/how often something is done.

Advantages= used when its not appropriate to give instructions to a ppts, can be used in naturalistic settings.

Disadvantages= only measures overt behaviours, observer bias (computer scoring can minimise this)

Question 4

performance measures- what is it?
AD and DIS?

Answer 4

intelligence, reading/math performance. Typically accuracy measures. Also used response times.

Differences across individuals reflect differing abilities, differences across tasks reflect differences in information processing mechanisms.

Advantages- objective.

Disadvantages= poor ecological validity

Question 5

how do we measure the unconscious mind?

Answer 5

Cognitive tasks like implicit association tests and priming are used to measure the unconscious mind.
In a priming paradigm, participants are exposed to a certain stimulus (prime), and their response to a subsequent stimulus (target) is measured

• The prime is supposed to activate mental representations which could affect processing of the subsequent stimulus
• In masked priming, the prime is presented followed by a junk visual material (mask). This prevents the prime from entering conscious processing

Question 6

What is factor analysis?

Answer 6

factor analysis; statistical technique to reduce a large number of variables into fewer ‘factors’. The rationale is to analyse the patterns in which variables (items) vary together (covariance); variables (items) indicating the same underlying construct are expected to convey

Question 7

what is exploratory factor analysis?
what is an issue with this?

Answer 7

This does not assume a particular factor structure but uses the data to determine the number of factors,
correlations between variables and a factor (factor loadings),
(and the higher the factor loading the more important the variable is to the factor).

ISSUE WITH THIS- it is difficult to conclude which variable goes with which factor as there are often overlaps

Question 8

what is confirmatory factor analysis

Answer 8

Researcher hypothesises a factor structure and test how well it fits the actual data, then the factor loadings, factor correlation and some fit indexes are estimated. You can conclude how well your ideas actually fit.