Research Methods Flashcards
Code of Ethics (BPS)
The code focuses on four primary principles: respect, competence, responsibility and integrity
Briefing
A meeting at which information or instruction are given to people, before they do something, such as at an experiment
Debriefing
Used during an experiment in which some form of deception was necessary. After the experiment, all the information is given to the participant
Deception
Deception is when a researcher gives false information to subjects or intentionally misleads them about some key aspect of the research.
Stimulus presentation
Stimuli is presented to the participant, this can be tricky in online studies, as stimulus may present differently due to screen or resolution differences for example
Outliers
An extreme observation or measurement, that is, a score that significantly differs from all others obtained.
Straightlining
occurs when survey respondents give identical answers to items in a battery of questions using the same response scale, i.e. giving the same response over and over again down a line of answers on a survey
Big Data
data that contains large (V)ariety, high (V)elocity, and increasing (V)olume
Data Scraping
A technique where a computer program extracts data from human readable output coming from another program
Data mining
the process of finding anomalies, patterns and correlations within large data sets to predict outcomes.
reactive research
People are aware that they are being studied, such as in an experiment or study
Non-reactive research
People are not aware that they are being studied, such as in an observational study
Systematic review
Detailed and comprehensive plan and search strategy appraising and synthesising all relevant studies on a particular topic
meta-analysis
Researchers combine the findings from multiple studies to draw an overall conclusion
Funnel plot
A visual tool for investigating publication and other bias in meta-analysis
Narrative synthesis
An approach to the systematic review and synthesis of findings from multiple studies that relies primarily on the use of words and text to summarise and explain the findings
grey literature
Research that is either unpublished or has been published in non-commercial form
descriptive statistics
Summarise and describe a given data set and give the central tendency and spread. they use concrete and known values
inferential statistics
Uses probability to infer and draw conclusions about a larger population from a smaller sample of data