PSY255 - Exam 1 Flashcards
I/O Psychology
The application of psychological principles, theory, and research to the work setting.
Personnel Psychology
Field of psychology that addresses issues such as recruitment, selection, training, performance, appraisal, promotion, transfer and termination.
Human Resources Management (HRM)
Practices such as recruitment, selection, retention, training, and development of people (human resources) in order to achieve individual and organizational goals.
Organizational Psychology
Field of psychology that combines research from social psychology and organizational behavior and addresses the emotional and motivational side of work.
Human Engineering (Human Factors Psychology)
The study of the capacities and limitations of humans with respect to a particular environment.
Scientist-Practitioner Model
A model that uses scientific tools and research in the practice of I-O Psychology.
Research Design
Provides the overall structure or architecture for the research study; allows investigators to conduct scientific research on a phenomenon of interest.
Experimental Design
Participants are randomly assigned to different conditions.
Quasi-Experimental Design
Participants are assigned to different conditions, but random assignments to conditions is not possible.
Nonexperimental Design
Does not include any “treatment” or assignment to different conditions.
Observational Design
The researcher observes employee behavior and systematically records what is observed.
Survey Design
Research strategy in which participants are asked to complete a questionnaire or survey.
Quantitative Methods
Rely on tests, rating scales, questionnaires, and physiological measures and yield numerical results.
Qualitative Methods
Rely on observations, interviews, case studies, and analysis of diaries or written documents and produce flow diagrams and narrative descriptions of events or processes.
Introspection
Early scientific method in which the participant was also the experimenter, recording his or her experiences in completing an experimental task, considered very subjective by modern standards.
Triangulation
Approach in which researchers seek converging information from different sources.
Generalize
To apply the results from one study or sample to other participants or situations.
Experimental Control
Characteristic of research in which possible confounding influences that might make results less reliable or harder to interpret are eliminated: often easier to establish in laboratory studies than in field studies.
Statistical Control
Using statistical techniques to control for the influence of certain variables. Such control allows researchers to concentrate exclusively on the primary relationships of interest.
Descriptive Statistics
Statistics that summarize, organize, and describe a sample of data.
Measure of Central Tendency
Statistic that indicates where the center of a distribution is located. Mean/median/mode are measures of central tendency.
Variability
The extent to which scores in a distribution vary.
Skew
The extent to which scores in a distribution are lopsided or tend to fall on the left or right side of the distribution.
Mean
The arithmetic average of the scores in a distribution, obtained by summing all of the scores in a distribution and dividing by the sample size.
Mode
The most common or frequently occurring score in a distribution.
Median
The middle score in a distribution.
Inferential Statistics
Statistics used to aid the researcher in testing hypotheses and making inferences from sample data to a larger sample or population.
Statistical significance
Indicates that the probability of the observed statistic is less than the stated significant finding indicates that the results found are unlikely to have occurred by chance, and thus the null hypothesis is rejected.
Statistical Power
The likelihood of finding a statistically significant difference when a true difference exists.
Measurement
Assigning numbers to characteristics of individuals or objects according to rules.
Correlation Coefficient
Statistic assessing the bivariate, linear association between two variables. Provides information about both the magnitude (numerical value) and the direction (+ or -) of the relationship between two variables.
Scatterplot
Graph used to plot the scatter of scores on two variables, used to display the correlational relationship between two variables.
Regression Line
Straight line that best “fits” the scatterplot and describes the relationship between the variables in the graph, can also be presented as an equation that specifies where the line intersects the vertical axis and what the angle or slope of the line is.
Linear
Relationship between two variables that can be depicted by a straight line.
Nonlinear
Relationship between two variables that cannot be depicted by a straight line; sometimes called “curvilinear” and most easily identified by examining a scatterplot.
Multiple Correlation Coefficient
Statistic that represents the overall linear association between several variables (e.g. cognitive ability, personality, experience) on the one hand and a single variable (e.g. job performance) on the other hand.
Meta-Analysis
Statistical method for combining and analyzing the results from many studies to draw a general conclusion about relationships among variables.
Statistical Artifacts
Characteristics (e.g. small sample size, unreliable measures) of a particular study that distort the observed results. Researchers can correct for artifacts to arrive at a statistic that represents the “true” relationship between the variables of interest.
Micro-Research
The study of individual behavior.
Macro-Research
The study of collective behavior.
Meso-Research
The study of the interaction of individual and collective behavior.
Reliability
Consistency or stability of a measure.
Validity
The accuracy of inferences made based on test or performance data, also addresses whether a measure accurately and completely represents what was intended to be measured.
Test-Retest Reliability
A type of reliability calculated by correlating measurements taken at time 1 with measurements taken at time 2.
Equivalent Forms Reliability
A type of reliability calculated by correlating measurements from a sample of individuals who complete two different forms of the same test.
Internal Consistency
Form of reliability that assesses how consistently the items of a test measure a single construct: affected by the number of items in the test and the correlations among the test items.
Generalizability Theory
A sophisticated approach to the question of reliability that simultaneously considers all types of error in reliability estimates (e.g. test-retest, equivalent forms, and internal consistency).
Predictor
The test chosen or developed to asses attributes (e.g. abilities) identified as important for successful job performance.
Criterion
An outcome variable that describes important aspects or demands of the job; the variable that we predict when evaluating the validity of a predictor.
Criterion-Related Validity
Validity approach that is demonstrated by correlating a test score with a performance measure; improves researcher’s confidence in the interference that people with higher test scores have higher performance.
Validity Coefficient
Correlation coefficient between a test score (predictor) and a performance measure (criterion).
Predictive Validity Design
Criterion-related validity design in which there is a time lag between collection of the test data and the criterion data.
Concurrent Validity Design
Criterion-related validity design in which there is no time lag between gathering the test scores and the performance data.
Content-Related Validation Design
A design that demonstrates that the content of the selection procedure represents an adequate sample of important work behaviors and activities and/or worker KSAOs defined by the job analysis.
Construct Validity
Validity approach in which investigator’s gather evidence to support decisions or inferences about psychological constructs, often begins with investigators demonstrating that a test designed to measure a particular construct correlates with other sets in the predicted manner.
Construct
Psychological concept or characteristic that a predictor is intended to measure. examples are intelligence, personality, and leadership.
Individual Differences
Dissimilarities between or among two or more people.
Mental Test
Instrument designed to measure a subject’s ability to reason, plan and solve problems; an intelligence test.
Differential Psychology
Scientific study of differences between or among two or more people.
Intelligence
The ability to learn and adapt to an environment; often used to refer to general intellectual capacity, as opposed to cognitive ability or mental ability, which often refer to more specific abilities such as memory or reasoning.
Mental Ability
Capacity to reason, plan, and solve problems, cognitive ability.
Psychometrics
Practice of measuring a characteristic such as mental ability, placing it on a scale or metric.
Intelligence Test
Instrument designed to measure the ability to reason, learn, and solve problems.
Psychometrician
Psychologist trained in measuring characteristics such as mental ability.
Cognitive Ability
Capacity to reason, plan,and solve problems; mental ability.
“g”
Abbreviation for general mental ability.
General Mental Ability
The nonspecific capacity to reason, learn, and solve problems in any of a wide variety of ways and circumstances.
g-ocentric Model
Tendency to understand and predict the behavior of workers simply by examining “g.”
Personality
An individual’s behavioral and emotional characteristics, generally found to be stable over time and in a variety of circumstances; an individual’s habitual way of responding.
Interests
Preferences or likings for broad ranges of activities.