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Research Methods Flashcards

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1
Q

What are the 6 ethical issues

A 
Deception
Informed consent 
Protection of participants from physical and psychological harm
The right to withdraw
The right to withdraw data
Confidentiality and Privacy
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2
Q

Give examples of studies involving deception

A

Asch
Milgram
Cruchfield

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3
Q

What estimate of studies use no deception and who found this?

A

Menges

3% use no deception at all

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4
Q

How could deception be seen as always negative, despite the benefits?

A

It prevents informed consent. Researchers have an obligation to protect their participants and psychologists should be seen as professional and therefore trustworthy.

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5
Q

What should a debrief do?

A
  • Inform the participants of the purpose
  • Ensure no negative consequences
  • Give the participant the right to withdraw data
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6
Q

Why can’t informed consent be given when deception is required?

A

Because informed consent involves the participants giving their consent in full knowledge of the aims of the study and the expectations of them. Not possible if things need to be kept from them

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7
Q

What are the exceptions to giving consent?

A
  • Children under 16
  • People detained (prison/patients)
  • Field experiments
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8
Q

What are the guidelines for physical harm as an ethical issue?

A

Not to expose participants to anymore risk of harm than they would in day to day life

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9
Q

What examples of psychological harm could result from experiments

A

Embarrassment
Loss of self esteem
Stress
Anxiety

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10
Q

How do psychologists protect their participants from psychological harm?

A

Using confidentiality

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11
Q

What are the guidelines for confidentiality?

A

Participants are not identified unless they give their permission and various methods may be used to disguise their identity. For example in case studies patients may be identified only by their initials such as KF or HM.

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12
Q

List 5 ways in which ethical issues can be dealt with

A
  • seeking consent
  • avoiding deception
  • giving right to withdraw
  • debriefs
  • confidentiality
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13
Q

What are ways of obtaining consent indirectly and avoiding deception?

A
  • Presumtive consent: asking people of their views on a situation and if accepted the procedure is used but NOT on those asked
  • Prior general consent: a group of possible participants are asked about a procedure and those who consider it acceptable are selected for the study
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14
Q

What does an experiment allow for?

A

Allows us to establish a causal link between the IV and the DV. Following an experimental procedure we should be certain that the alteration we have made in the IV has caused the change in the DV.

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15
Q

What are common confounding variables?

A 
Intelligence of participants
Personality of participants
Gender of participants
Time of day
Weather
Noise levels
Temperature
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16
Q

What are the advantages of laboratory experiments?

A
  • Cause and effect (able to make a link if conditions are controlled)
  • Repetition (others can repeat to see if they get the same results)
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17
Q

What are the disadvantages of laboratory experiments?

A
  • Lack ecological validity (too artificial compared to reality)
  • Demand characteristics (participants behaving differently based on the scenario)
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18
Q

What are the advantages of a field experiment?

A
  • High ecological validity (natural settings generally mean natural behaviour, most like real life)
  • Less risk of demand characteristics (participants may not be aware they are being tested)
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19
Q

What are the disadvantages of field experiments?

A
  • Less control of variables (more variables may affect outcome, cannot determine cause and effect)
  • Ethics (if participants are unaware they are being tested then how can they give consent/withdraw?)
  • Replication (difficult to make exact replicates)
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20
Q

What are natural experiments?

A

Experiments that take advantage of naturally occurring variables in a naturally occurring event

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21
Q

What are the advantages of natural experiments?

A
  • Less risk of demand characteristics
  • Research opportunities (researchers able to observe situations that would otherwise be unethical to set up as an experiment)
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22
Q

What are the disadvantages of natural experiments?

A
  • Lack of control over variables

- Replication (rarely able to replicate, therefore hard to establish validity)

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23
Q

What are the advantages of the Repeated Measures design?

A

The participants are the same each time (no confounding variables, everything is kept constant because they are the same people

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24
Q

What are the disadvantages of the Repeated Measures design?

A
  • Order effects
  • Boredom
  • Extra materials (e.g having to use 2 lists of words for a memory test - are they the same difficulty?)
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25
Q

What is Counterbalancing?

A

A method of reducing risk of order/boredom effects. Half the participants begin with the first condition followed by the second, and the other half the other way around.

26
Q

What are the advantages of the Independent Groups design?

A
  • No order effects

- Can use the same materials both times

27
Q

What are the disadvantages of the Independent Groups design?

A
  • Participants aren’t matched in terms of IQ, personality, age etc.
  • Need to have twice as many participants
28
Q

What are the advantages of the Matched Pairs design?

A
  • No order effects
  • Can use the same materials twice
  • Groups are similar in terms of individual characteristics
29
Q

What are the disadvantages of the Matched Pairs design?

A
  • Time consuming
  • Costly
  • Impossible to match people identically
30
Q

What are the advantages of Naturalistic observation?

A
  • High ecological validity
  • No risk of demand characteristics (if participants don’t know they are being watched then they won’t behave differently)
  • Detailed (information tends to be more in depth than that from a laboratory)
31
Q

What are the disadvantages of Naturalistic observation?

A
  • Reliability (it is subjective - observers may be biased and interoperate it differently)
  • Ethics (no informed consent and invasion of privacy)
  • Cause and effect (cannot control all variables)
  • Hard to replicate
32
Q

What are the advantages of Controlled observation?

A

-Greater control of confounding variables (therefore easier to establish cause and effect relationships)

33
Q

What are the disadvantages of Controlled observation?

A
  • Lower ecological validity since behaviour is mostly triggered by an unnatural event
  • Often participants know they are being tested - demand characteristics
34
Q

What are disclosed observations?

A

Where participants know they are being observed. This reduces ethical issues of consent and privacy but reduces validity due to increased demand characteristics.

35
Q

What are undisclosed observations?

A

Where participants are unaware of the observation. This raises ethical issues (privacy and consent) but increases validity by reducing demand characteristics.

36
Q

What are the ethical issues regarding observations?

A
  • Consent
  • Debriefing
  • Deception (Potential use of confederates)
37
Q

What are the advantages of correlations?

A
  • Research opportunity (allow the study of co-variables that would be impossible to create experimentally due to ethics)
  • Economic and fast (large amounts of data can be compared quickly and cheaply)
  • Easy to replicate
38
Q

What are the disadvantages of correlations?

A
  • Cannot determine cause and effect
  • Often misinterpreted (people assume cause and effect - e.g Bowly’s 44 thieves)
  • Extraneous variables can be causing the link
39
Q

What are spurious correlations?

A

Where two unrelated variables are correlated due to a third variable causing them both

40
Q

What are the advantages of case studies?

A
  • Provide a variety of in-depth detail that would be impossible to acquire through experimentation
  • Often provide the only way to study certain situations (e.g not possible to artificially create situations like Genie)
41
Q

What are the disadvantages of case studies?

A
  • Low population validity (just look at one specific case so cannot be generalised to the population)
  • Often uses retrospective data collection (unreliable)
  • Issue of confidentiality
42
Q

What are the advantages of Informal Interviews?

A
  • Interviewee feels relaxed

- Lots of information can be gathered

43
Q

What are the disadvantages of Informal Interviews?

A

Difficult to analyse when different patients discuss different topics

44
Q

What are the advantages of structured/formal interviews?

A
  • Easily replicated
  • Data easily analysed and compared
  • Data less likely to be influenced by interviewer
45
Q

What are the disadvantages of structures/formal interviews?

A
  • Questions may be ambiguous

- This format may encourage brief answers

46
Q

What is social desirability bias?

A

Where interviewees are likely to try to make a good impression on the interviewer when faced to face as opposed to in an anonymous questionnaire. Answers not likely to be genuine

47
Q

What are the advantages of questionnaires?

A
  • Lots of data can be collected cheaply and quickly

- Can be analysed easily

48
Q

What are the disadvantages of questionnaires?

A
  • Many may not be returned

- People may take advantage of the anonymous answering and lie

49
Q

What is the purpose of null hypotheses?

A

Because they are easier to prove

50
Q

What are the disadvantages of random sampling?

A
  • Time consuming

- Inevitably some of those selected will not take part

51
Q

What are the disadvantages of stratified sampling?

A
  • Time consuming

- Not a truly representative sample

52
Q

What are the disadvantages of opportunity sampling?

A

Just using people who are available at that time; not representative

53
Q

What are ways to reduce demand characteristics?

A

‘Single blind technique’
Where participants are not told details of the study or are told it is about something different.
Raises ethical issues such as deception

54
Q

What are investigator effects?

A

Where investigators influence the results based on what they expect to find

55
Q

How can you reduce investigator effects?

A

‘Double blind technique’

Where the participants and the researchers don’t know the conditions

56
Q

What are the pros and cons of quantitative data?

A

Easy to make comparisons because we can calculate means and standard deviations etc.

But can be seen as cold and overly clinical, failing to give depth and insight

57
Q

What are the pros and cons of qualitative data?

A

Provides more in depth analysis of studies

Is time consuming and difficult to analyse

58
Q

Summarise the 3 types of data

A

Nominal: number of data in a certain category

Ordinal: Puts data in order

Interval and ratio: Puts things in order, determining the difference between the bits of data

59
Q

What are the pros and cons of measuring the mean?

A

Takes into account all bits of data

Outliers can distort results

60
Q

What are the pros and cons of measuring the median?

A

Doesn’t get influenced by extreme values

Ignores most numbers collected - waste of time?

61
Q

What are the pros and cons of measuring the mode?

A

Easy to calculate

Not always a good measure of central tendency

62
Q

What are the pros and cons of longitudinal studies?

A

Allow changes in participants to be measured over time

Risk of participant attrition

Psychology (21 decks)

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