Research Methods Exam Questions Flashcards
You have been asked to carry out a questionnaire to investigate how much bullying happens in the
workplace.
Outline one strength of using a questionnaire in your investigation
‘One strength is it allows thoughts and feelings to be
accessed (1) which is important as I am asking about
something that cannot be easily observed – personal
experiences of bullying (1).’
Name a measure of central tendency you could use to analyse responses to this question.
mode, median or mean.
Explain how you could obtain a self-selected
sample for your investigation.
I would place a poster in a local workplace asking for
people to volunteer to be a participant by sending me
an email.
Explain how using a self-selected sample could affect the representativeness of your
investigation.
As a self-selected sample is made up of volunteers,
the representativeness of my investigation may be
affected as they will be a certain type within the
workplace of people and so may not be an accurate
reflection of the wider population.
Explain how you would check the external reliability of your questionnaire. (bullying)
I would check my questionnaire has external reliability
by testing it on a different group of people twice (1) so
they would answer the questions on bullying at the start
of one week and then I would get them to do it again at
the end of the week (1) to see if answers were similar
or the same depending on the type of question (1).
whats an alternate hypothesis
an alternative hypothesis
predicts a difference.
Explain why they did not use a random sample instead.
It is quick and more convenient to carry out opportunity
sampling as it is just who is available at the time however,
random sampling is more time-consuming [1] as they need
to obtain the names of everyone in the office before
selecting 10 participants.’
Explain why the psychologist used an independent measures design in this study
Reduces the chance of demand characteristics impacting
the results [1]. If participants guess the independent
variable they may try harder to complete more tasks
quickly either at home or in the office.’ [1]
Explain how experimenter bias may affect the validity of the findings in this study. (working from home v not)
‘The experimenter may have given a harder task [1] to
complete in one condition based on their own beliefs
about whether people should work from home or not [1].
This would make one task take longer than the other
swaying the results leading to a decrease in the internal
validity.’ [1]
Explain how the psychologist could use standardisation to reduce the impact of extraneous
variables in this study
‘One extraneous variable that could affect the study is
task difficulty [1] therefore the psychologist should use the
same tasks at home and in the office [1] otherwise this
would reduce the validity of the results.’ [1]
whats a strength of random sampling
A strength of random sampling is that there is no bias in
selection so… (link)
strength of repeated measures?
A strength of repeated measures designs is that there
are no participant variables
How would you ensure reliability in a questionaire
I would try to ensure my investigation was reliable by
testing that my happiness questionnaire gives
consistent results by trialling it on another group of
people first to make sure they get similar scores on two
different occasions
Explain one weakness of using a correlation for this investigation
Correlations are unable to establish cause and effect
because they only measure the relationship
between two variables after an event. This means…
