Research Methods

Question 1

Why is authority considered the weakest form of knowledge?

Answer 1

• Info comes only from trust in the authority
• Sometimes exploited for political, financial, or personal gain
• No sign of actual knowledge

Question 2

What are some reasons that you should not rely solely on your intuition?

Answer 2

○ Illusory correlation
○ Third variable problem
○ Susceptible to bias
○ Dunning-Kruger effect
○ Gambler’s fallacy
○ Confirmation bias
○ Hindsight bias
○ Post-hoc explanations

Question 3

What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Answer 3

confidence is highest when you have 0 knowledge, low when you are learning, and mid when expert

Question 4

What is the gambler’s fallacy?

Answer 4

believe in relationships in events when there is no relationship (roll three 6s in a row, or different numbers)

Question 5

What are post-hoc explanations?

Answer 5

ability to know things isn’t the same as ability to explain things

Question 6

What features does good science require?

Answer 6

Materialism, universalism, communality, disinterestedness, organized skepticism

Question 7

What is materialism?

Answer 7

• Everything in the universe is matter or energy
• Everything corresponds to the laws of physics and cause/effect

Question 8

What is communality?

Answer 8

• Method and results should be freely accessible and available for everyone
• Other scientists can recreate the experiment/study

Question 9

What is universalism?

Answer 9

• Using standard of observation, systematic, objective and agreed upon
• Language of scientists

Question 10

What is disinterestedness? How can this be accomplished?

Answer 10

• Scientist doesn’t care about the outcome of the experiment
• Saves experiment from being subject to confirmation bias
• Pre-registration: scientists say what and how they are going to measure

Question 11

What is organized skepticism?

Answer 11

• Studies are peer reviewed anonymously before they are published

Question 12

What are the goals of psychological research?

Answer 12

1. Describe behaviour
2. Predict behaviour
3. Determine causes of behaviour
4. Influence/control behaviour

Question 13

What are the different types of research?

Answer 13

○ Basic research: describing behaviour
○ Applied research: trying to influence behaviour using the basic research

Question 14

What are conceptual and operational variables?

Answer 14

○ Conceptual = variables that are resistant to direct measurement
○ Operational = measured variable that stands in for our conceptual

Question 15

What are situational and participant variables?

Answer 15

○ Situational = all aspects of the experimental situation
○ Participant = all the things the participant brings with them

Question 16

What is a confounding variable?

Answer 16

• A variable that varies with the independent variable, an unintentional result

Question 17

What is a non-experimental study? When would you want to perform one?

Answer 17

• Survey, naturalistic observation, longitudinal, archival, case study
• When there is no independent variable or test condition
• Used when independent cannot be manipulated

Question 18

What are standard deviation and standard error?

Answer 18

○ Standard deviation: describe how data are dispersed in a population
○ How much a result may vary from the average and still be normal (how wide normal curve is)
○ Standard error: how far the sample mean is from the population mean

Question 19

When is data statistically significant?

Answer 19

• When p < 0.5
• p is the probability of false results
• shows us that two conditions are significantly different (placebo and experimental condition)
• data furthest from standard deviation are the most significant

Question 20

What characterizes effect size?

Answer 20

• Cohen’s D value tells us the effect
• magnitude of effect of IV on DV (not correlation)

Question 21

What is P hacking?

Answer 21

• If you do enough testing, you may see something that is significant when it’s not

Question 22

What is construct validity?

Answer 22

• Does your independent variable truly measure your construct?
• Did you do a good job of operationalization?

Question 23

What are internal and external validity?

Answer 23

• Internal: can we trust the relation between IV and DV?
• External: does the experiment represent what’s happening in the rest of the world?

Question 24

What are some indicators of construct validity?

Answer 24

face validity, content validity, concurrent and divergent, discriminant variable, predictive variable

Question 25

What is content validity?

Answer 25

○ did we capture all aspects of our variable?
○ measuring love with heart rate, but love is more than just heart rate

Question 26

What are concurrent and convergent validity?

Answer 26

○ does your measure of the concept line up with other measures of the concept?

Question 27

What is the discriminant variable?

Answer 27

○ do your variables line up with unrelated variables?

Question 28

What is predictive validity?

Answer 28

○ the ability the measures to predict a future outcome

Question 29

What are the steps of the scientific method?

Answer 29

Observation > Idea > Past research > Hypothesis > Design study > Ethical approval > Collect data > Analyze data > Modify and repeated

Question 30

What variable characterizes correlation? How are they shown in statistics? When is a correlation significant?

Answer 30

• r = correlation, r2 = shared variance in sample
  ○ how much of the variance in one variable is related to the variants in another variable
• r > 0.3 is significant

Question 31

What are median, mode, and mean?

Answer 31

blah

Question 32

What is a histogram? How do you design one?

Answer 32

• Shows one variable on the x and number of participants on the y
• Create a number of bins to organize the variable on x axis
  ○ Count number of people within each bin and plot that on the graph

Question 33

What are mean, mode, and median?

Answer 33

• Mean - the average of the data set
• Mode - the number that occurs most often in the data set
• Median - middle value when data set is ordered least to greatest