Research Methods Flashcards
What is psychology?
Psychology is the study of the brain and behaviour.
What is procedural memory?
The memory for the performance of particular types of actions and is typically accessed below the level of conscious awareness.
What should your aims always start with?
“To investigate…”
What are the two types of alternative hypothesis?
Directional and non-directional
What is a directional hypothesis (one-tailed)?
A hypothesis that states the way they predict the results will go.
What is a non-directional hypothesis (two-tailed)?
A hypothesis that states there will be a difference, but not what the difference will be.
When is the null hypothesis accepted?
This hypothesis is accepted if the results of the test are not significant, or there is no difference.
What is the null hypothesis?
The hypothesis which states there will be no difference, or that any difference is down to chance.
What is the independent variable?
The thing that is manipulated/changed
What is the dependent variable?
The thing that is measured
What are extraneous variables?
Anything that impacts the dependent variable which is not the independent variable.
What is operationalization?
Explaining how the variables can be measured or controlled.
What is the target population?
These are the people that the researcher is interested in.
Why do we need to take a sample?
There are usually too many people in the target population to research them all.
What is a sample?
The people the researcher actually selects/uses in their study.
What is the sampling technique?
The way the participants are selected.
What is a random sample?
Each participant has an equal change of selection. E.g. random name generator
What is a opportunity sample?
Asking people who are available at that time to take part. E.g. a researcher may ask parents picking their children up from school.
what is a volunteer sample?
The researcher advertises the study and people who see the advert may get in contact and volunteer
What is a systematic sample?
When you select every nth name from a list.
What is a stratified sample?
Selecting people from every portion of your population in the same proportions.
What is the experimental method?
An experiment is an investigation in which the independent variable is manipulated in order to cause a change in the dependent variable.
What is a laboratory experiment?
This type of experiment is conducted in a well controlled environment- not necessarily a lab- and therefore accurate measurements are possible.
What are the strengths of a laboratory experiment?
- It is easier to replicate a laboratory experiment because a standardised procedure is used.
- They allow for precise control of extraneous and independent variable. This makes it possible to establish a cause and effect relationship.
What are the limitations of a laboratory experiment?
- The artificiality of the setting may produce unnatural behaviour that does not reflect real life- low ecological validity.
- Therefore hard to generalise to a real life setting
- Demand characteristics/experiment effects may bias the results.
What is a field experiment?
These experiments are done in the everyday environment of the participants. The experimenter still manipulates the independent variable, but in a real life setting.
What are the strengths of a field experiment?
- Natural environment leads to higher ecological validity
- less likelihood of demand characteristics affecting the results, as participants may not know they are being studied.
What are the limitations of a field experiment?
- Less control over extraneous variables
- Difficult to replicate the study
What are natural experiments?
Experiments conducted in the everyday environment of the participants but the independent variable is not manipulated but occurs naturally in real life.
What are the strengths of natural experiments?
- high ecological validity
- less likelihood of demand characteristics as they might not know they are being studied
- Can be used in situations where it would be ethically unacceptable to manipulate the independent variable
What are the limitations of natural experiments?
- Potentially more expensive and more time consuming
- No control over extraneous variables
- Very difficult to replicate
What is ecological validity?
The degree to which an investigation represents real life experiences.
What are experimenter effects?
These are the ways that the experimenter can actually influence the participant through their appearance and behaviour.
What are demand characteristics?
The clues in an experiment that lead the participants to think they know what the researcher is looking for.
What are confounding variables?
Variables that have affected the results, apart from the independent variable. This could be an extraneous variable that has not been controlled.
What is correlation?
A statistical technique used to quantify the strength of the relationship between two variables.
What is a correlation coefficient?
A mathematical measure of the degree of relatedness between sets of data.
What is the range of the correlation coefficient?
It have a value between -1 to 1
What does a correlation coefficient of 1 mean?
A perfect positive correlation with all points on the same line.
What does a correlation coefficient close to 1 suggest?
A strong positive correlation.
What does a correlation coefficient of 0 mean?
No correlation
What does a correlation coefficient of -1 mean?
A perfect negative correlation with all points on a straight line
What does a correlation coefficient close to -1 suggest?
A strong negative relationship
What are the strengths of using correlation coefficient?
- Calculates the strength of a relationship between variables
- Useful as a pointer for further, more detailed research
What are the limitations of using a correlation coefficient?
- Cannot assume cause and effect as a strong correlation between variables may be misleading.
- A lack of correlation might not mean a lack of relationship, as it could be non-linear.
What does a correlation coefficient around 0 suggest?
It may disguise a non-linear relationship
What are naturalistic observations?
Watching the behaviour of humans or animals in a natural environment. The variables are not manipulated- the experimenter remains inconspicuous.
What is a structured observation?
The researcher determines precisely what behaviours are to be observed and uses a standardised checklist to record the frequency with which they are observed within a specific time frame
What is time sampling?
Observations may be made at regular time intervals
What is event sampling?
Keeping a tally chat or each time a type of behaviour occurs
What is point sampling?
Focusing on one individual at a time for a set period of time.
What are unstructured observations?
Record everything that happens.
What are the strengths of naturalistic observation?
- High ecological validity
- Allows studying of animals that cannot be observed in captivity
- Can study situations that can’t be artificially set up
What are the limitations of naturalistic observation?
- Observer may affect behaviour if detected
- Difficult to replicate
- Often a need for more than one observer
Why would you use closed questions in questionnaires?
To generate data for easy analysis.
Why would you use open questions in questionnaires?
For more detailed and invidual answers
What should you do in a questionnaire?
- Keep it clear & easy to understand
- Ask purposeful questions to get relevant information
- Pre-code closed questions for quick analysis of answers
- Carry out a pilot study first and make changes if need
- Use attitude scales to test the strength of feeling.
What are the strengths of questionnaires?
- Can test many people quickly
- Easy to generate quantative date and easy to analyse
- Collects large amount of date about people’s thoughts and behaviour
- Convenient, as a researcher does not have to be present.
- Can quickly show changes in attitudes or behaviour before and after specific events
What are the limitations of questionnaires?
- social desirability bias
- May not tell the truth, particularly on sensitive issues
- Postal surveys may have a low response rate
- Difficult to phrase questions clearly
- May obtain different interpretations of questions
What are interviews?
They are face to face conversations. These can be unstructured, or structured. Structured interviews use pre-determined questions. They are recorded for later, in- depth analysis.
What are the strengths of interviews?
- Detailed information can be obtained and avoids oversimplifying complex issues
- Greater attention to individuals, important in clinical psychology
- Unstructured, casual interviews may encourage openness in answers.
What are the limitations of interviews?
- Difficult to analyse if unstructured and qualitative in nature
- Time consuming and expensive
- Possible interviewer effects
What are case studies?
They are in-depth investigations of a single person, group, event or community. Typically data is gathered from a variety of sources and by using several different research methods.
What are the strengths of case studies?
- Provides detailed (rich qualitative) information.
- provides insight for future research
- permits investigation of otherwise impractical or unethical situations.
What are the limitations of case studies?
- Can’t generalise the results to the wider population
- Researchers own subjective feeling may influence the case study
- Difficult to replicate
- Time consuming
What does validity mean?
Whether your experiment actually measures what you’re planning to measure
What does reliability mean?
How consistent the results are
What is correlation?
Where two things are measured in order to identify if there is a relationship between the two
What is a positive correlation?
When one variable goes up, so does the other.
What is a negative correlation?
Where one variable goes up, the other goes down.
What does it mean if there is no-correlation?
When there is no apparent link between variables.
What letter represents the correlation coefficient?
R
What does the correlation coefficient tell us?
How strong the correlation is.
The further….the weaker the correlation?
The spread from the line of best fit
What are the strengths of analysing correlation?
- Very visual
- statistically precise
- very replicable and therefore reliable
- line of best fit controls for outliners
- exploratory data is useful for further research
What are the weaknesses of analysing correlation?
- Can’t assume correlation equals causation so it can be misleading
- Requires specialist software for a very accurate reading
- Anomalies can throw things off.
What is a field experiment?
A field experiment is when it takes place in the natural environment of the participant like a Quasi experiment, but the independent variable is manipulated.
What are self-report techniques?
Both questionnaires and interviews are types of self-report methods. This is because the participant reports their own thoughts and feelings about a particular matter,
What are open questions?
The participant can give any answer they wish.
What are closed questions?
There are a set number of responses which the participant selects from.
What is a livert scale?
When there are a number of responses to a question with often demonstrates a degree of agreement.
What are the strengths of a case study?
- detailed & insightful, particularly with multiple sources
- Useful for unique or individual cases & diagnoses
- Can be used to inform future research
- Can investigate cases that we would never be ethically able to manipulate
What are the weaknesses of a case study?
- Can’t generalise
- Very time-consuming
- Non-scientific method (interview etc.) may lead to bias/false results, or unreliable sources
- difficult to interpret
- important to retain ethical boundaries
- may not be enough sources
- demand characteristics
What does reliability mean?
How consistent the results are and whether you can repeat the experiment to get the same results
What is correlation?
When co-variables are measured for a relationship
What is an experimental design?
It is how psychologists organise their groups of participants. It is different from experimental methods.
What are order effects?
The participant learning tasks or getting tired as a result of repeating an experiment under different independent variable conditions.
What is a pilot study used to test for?
- To test the design
- the measures used
- test for reliability, as opposed to retesting
- test to ensure all the ethical issues have been dealt with.
What is a quasi experiment?
An experiment which takes place in the natural environment of the participant, with a naturally occurring independent variable.
What is ethics?
’ the consideration of what is acceptable or right behaviour in the pursuit of a personal or scientific goal.’
What did the concentration camps result in?
The Nuremberg Code of Ethics
What are the main ethical issues that have to be accounted for?
- Informed consent
- Right to withdraw
- Deception
- Confidentiality
- Protection of participant
What is inter-rater reliability?
Whether the observers are scoring in the same way.
How can you check reliability?
Conduct the test again and see if you get the same results.
- Conduct a spearmans Rho test comparing the scores (if there is no correlation between the observers than it is not consistent so not reliable etc.)
How can you improve inter-rater reliability?
If observers are scoring differently, go back and operationalize observation categories until they all get the same.
What is a correlation coefficient?
A numerical value that represents the relationship of correlation between two variables.
When do you draw a bar chart?
If there is an independent variable.
How do you draw a bar chart?
Put the independent variable on the X axis and the dependent variable on the Y axis
When do you draw a scatter graph?
If there is no independent variable and they are measuring two co-variables.
What is qualitative data?
Any data that is not in numerical form.
What do qualitative methods include?
Interviews (semi-structured and unstructured), questionnaires (open questions), focus groups, personal accounts, observations etc.
Why do we use qualitative date?
- Quantitative date does not produce a true understanding of people
- more valid
- the aim is to understand individuals rather than generalise to the population
What is content analysis?
The method which transfers qualitative data into quantitative data in order to be able to analyse it.
How is content analysis performed?
- Transcribe data.
- Break down into themes (thematic analysis)
- Combine themes into larger categories- operationalize those categories
- Content analysis- Tally
- Conclusions drawn and new themes produced
What are the strengths of content analysis?
- If done correctly, allows us to make qualitative date quantitative
- More detailed
- More Valid
- Good exploratory research
Represents the complexity of human behaviour
What are the weaknesses of content analysis?
- Very time consuming
- difficult to draw conclusions
- subjective/ human errors
- the possible diversity of results can make it difficult to analyse
- Cannot generalise to the population
What are the measures of central tendency or dispersion?
mean, mode, median, range, standard deviation
When is it good to use the mean?
- As a standard average
- When there is a long list
- When there is a small range
When is it not good to use the mean?
- When there are anomalous results
When is it good to use the mode?
- When you are trying to find the most common answer
When is it not good to use the mode?
- If there is more than one mode
- If there are no repeated values
When is it good to use the median?
- When there is an outliner and you want something to represent the majority of the data
When is it not good to use the median?
- It could be misleading as it would not tell us all the extreme values
When is it good to use the range?
- When you want to find the difference between the lowest and highest value
When is it not good to use the range?
- When there are anomalous results
What is the advantage of quantitative data?
Can be demonstrated in a graph, to show causal relationships
What is the disadvantage of quantitative data?
Answers which are too specific might not provide an accurate representation.
What is standard deviation?
The average distance of data points from the mean