Research Methods Flashcards
What is an independent variable?
The thing you change to see the effect on the DV.
What is a dependent variable?
The thing that your measuring.
What is an extraneous variable?
Other things that could affect the DV that you are not measuring.
What is a confounding variable?
Other variables that have affected your results.
What is demand characteristics?
Any cue from research situation or researcher that may reveal the aim of the study and participants act accordingly.
What’s is the investigator effects?
Where investigators behaviour may affect the DV.
What is the pilot study?
Trial run of the research to work out any problems.
What is randomisation?
The use of chance when designing investigations to control for the effects of bias.
What is standardisation?
Using exactly the same formalised procedure for all participants in a research study.
What are control groups?
Used for the purpose of setting a comparison. They act like a ‘baseline’ to help establish causation.
What is a single blind?
Participant doesn’t know the aim of the study.
What is a double blind?
Participant and researcher doesn’t know the aim of the study.
What are independent groups?
One group do condition A and a second group do condition B. Participants should be randomly allocated to groups.
(+) No order effects.
(+) Less likely to guess the aim.
(-) Participants variables.
(-) More participants used
What are repeated measures?
Same participants take part in all conditions of the experiments. The order of conditions should be counterbalanced to avoid order effects.
(+) Participant variables.
(+) Fewer participants.
(-) Order effects.
(-) Participants may guess the aim of the study.
What are the matched pairs?
Two groups of participants are used but they are related to each other by being paired on participant variables that matter to the experiment. Matched on variables which are considered to be relevant to the study (e.g. age, gender, etc)
(+) Participant variables.
(+) No order effects/ practise or fatigue
(+) no individual differences between groups as they were similar for the start due to being matched to their conditions
(-) Matching is not perfect.
(-) More participants (time consuming and expensive)
