Research Methods I Video Material

Question 1

What is Paul Feyerband’s perspective on science?

Answer 1

He believes there are times when any rule no matter how fundamental it appears should be ignored or the opposite should be done.
Furthermore states science is an anarchic humanitarian form, encouraging progress over law-and-order.

Question 2

What are the four ways of believing the world according to Peirce?

Answer 2

1) Method of Tenacity: you are static in your beliefs, your risk running into problems of your own beliefs.
2) Method of Authority: Powerful authority symbols have belief over the proper organization of the world, and to surrender viewpoints to that of authority. Not self-correcting as mistakes are continued, the mercy of powers exploitative nature. Quite pessimistic as the doctor has more training and so you should listen to them.
3) a priori reasoning: You have a pre-existing idea of things and you will accept new things so long as they align with pre-existing views. Confirmation bias as you will accept only things that affirm your belief. Not dismissible for mathematics as you build a foundation and build up from there.
4) The Scientific Method: This allows for a self-correcting model, always testing what is true and if incorrect then you can correct it.

Question 3

Logical Foundations of Science: What are the two schools of thought?

Answer 3

Empiricist: Where knowledge is derived from the world around you, broad school arguing knowledge is based on your experience of the world.

Rationalism: Some knowledge or modes of thinking are innate, not everything is from experience you inherit some things as a human. Rene Descartes points to individual idea’s ability to doubt. Other rationalists point to space and time, can see things as individual events or cause-and-effect because it is innate.

Question 4

Phases of scientific inquiry/4 goals of psychology

Answer 4

Describe: no theories just look at the world and figure what you are trying to explain.

Explain: Understand why the world is the way it is.

Predict: Take our understanding and test to confirm explanation.

Control: With confirmation, you can then attempt to prevent something from happening or treat something.

Question 5

What are the components of the Hypothetic-deductive Model?

Answer 5

A hypothesis can be a) an explanatory proposal to explain the connection, or b) a specific expectation for observations/a prediction.

Inductive Reasoning: reasoning from specific examples to general ideas. Can be wrong when an example contradicts the belief.

Deductive Reasoning: Reasoning from the general world to specific examples. Flawed when assumptions are not true.

Question 6

What are the steps of the Hypothetico-Deductive Model?

Answer 6

Make a systematic observation about the world.
Using inductive reasoning, create a proposed theoretical explanation/hypothesis.
Take a hypothesis and have deductive reasoning to create a prediction. Now you check if prediction is correct/incorrect which supports/disconfirms your theory.
Reality is it adds evidence to theory and not held as true, more evidence more likely to be true, can not be fully true though.
Only ever tests one hypothesis at a time, confirmation bias here, never consider how it could be wrong.

Question 7

Strong Inference: What is it?

What is a crucial experiment?

Answer 7

Consider multiple competing hypotheses in a crucial experiment simultaneously.

Crucial experiment: Theoretical explanations are put against each other, one has to be wrong.

Question 8

What is the difference between descriptive and experimental research?

Answer 8

Descriptive: You are describing the world around you

Experimental: You are manipulating the world to see the corresponding effect. Cause-and-Effect is the focus here.

Question 9

Correlational Research

Answer 9

Type of descriptive research where you are looking at the degree of relatedness between two variables.

Question 10

Single-Variable research

Answer 10

Type of descriptive research where you look at a single variable.

Question 11

Surveys

Answer 11

Asking participants about selves and measuring the responses. Hope the results hold across a number of participants. A large group of individuals.

Question 12

Social Desirability Bias

Answer 12

Participants record information that they wish were going on or to fit with society’s standards.

Question 13

Archival Research

Answer 13

Look at past research for information not focused on before.

Question 14

Case Studies

Answer 14

Can be descriptive or experimental but are often not. Delivered to one/two individuals, can not be generalized to other individuals.

Question 15

Observational or Naturalistic Observation

Answer 15

Descriptive research observing individuals in situations they routinely find themselves. Done in an environment where you would see the normal behaviour of participants.

Question 16

Internal Validity

Answer 16

The extent to which you can draw causal conclusions from the study. High in experimental studies, medium in quasi-experimental, and low in descriptive studies.

Question 17

External Validity

Answer 17

The extent to which you can generalize the results of your study to the world. If done in a laboratory then it is low, quasi-experimental in the middle, high in descriptive. We are asking how confident we are that the results will be constant in another situation.

Question 18

Converging Evidence

Answer 18

Occurs when a number of evidence points in a specific general direction. The claim of smoking causing cancer, never done in humans but in the petri dish with human cells, animals, descriptive.

Question 19

Why Bother with Descriptive Research Then?

Answer 19

4 Goals

1) High in external validity and is needed
2) Do not need internal validity/cause-and-effect (vaccine for COVID, predict higher risk)
3) No good theory to test yet, may come from observing the natural world and making predictions based on empirical evidence.
4) Unable to do indicated experiments, either due to ethical reasons or not practical.

Question 20

Constructs

Answer 20

No tangible existence in the world, have to get a notion of what they are, can not be weighed but is meaningful. Intelligence, Cognition, disorders are such examples.

Question 21

Conceptual Definition

Answer 21

The extent of whatever construct you are talking about. Not specified in how we are going to measure the variable.

Question 22

Operational Definition

Answer 22

Construct is defined with respect to the measures with which you will measure it.

Can limit the results of the study depends on how you measure the variable. It may also be a poor measure for the variable, rare to get pure construct of a variable.

Question 23

What are the three classes of measures?

Answer 23

Biological: GSR, Heart rate, reliable in techniques used to measure.

Behavioral: Blink rate, how a person moves, tone of voice. Has to be inferred upon and can not be sure.

Self-Report: Rating scales, weakness in social desirability bias.

Question 24

Time-Based measure

Answer 24

Frequency (how often), duration (how long), latency (how long did it last), and interval (in this period, how often did it happen).

Question 25

Performance-Based Measures

Answer 25

The intensity with which behaviour occurs, and accuracy of behaviour, or order, amount, names in memory.

Question 26

Behavioural Measurement in Naturalistic Observation

Answer 26

Reactivity/Hawthorne effect: People change because they know they are being observed. Countered by habituation, individuals grow used to you being there.

Can also observe effects of the behavior, found in changes in the environment.

Covert observation: watch in a way where the person is unaware of your presence.

Question 27

Ethics in Naturalistic Observation

Answer 27

Tri-Council (made of social sciences, engineering, and medical groups) makes up the rules.

Private space needs high standards to be met, rely on habituation.

Public Space is different in REB not being required in:

1) no intervention/interacting
2) no reasonable expectation of privacy (washroom is private)
3) Can not identify or single people out, must remain anonymous.

Question 28

Sources of measures (3)

Answer 28

1) Use existing measures, already known to be reliable and valid.
2) advanced technology like portable EEG.
3) Create own measure based on theoretical needs, should be brief measure, better to be brief except when a single item does not allow you to cover a lot compared to multiple items.

Question 29

Anonymity vs. confidentiality

Answer 29

Anonymity has participants being disconnected from results so the researcher does not know who answered what.
Confidentiality has researchers know who answered what only they can not disclose them to the public.

Question 30

Closed-Ended/Restricted-Format Questions

Answer 30

Have fixed responses to which participants can only respond to. Is typically superficial, but they are much easier to analyze, better for people unable to speak strong English but limit the quality of data.

Can be yes/no, multiple-choice, rating scales: Likert scales on a 1-5 disagree/agree scale, anything else is a rating scale.

Question 31

Open-Format/-Ended Questions

Answer 31

Opposite of closed-ended, unrestricted and freedom to write as much as they want but problem is people who cannot communicate well will not be able to formulate good responses, harder to analyze.

Question 32

Guidelines to writing Questions (HINT: BRUSO)

Answer 32

Keep them Brief, Relevant, Unambiguous, specific, and objective

Question 33

Double-barreled and double-negative Questions

Answer 33

Double-barreled questions ask two things at once, keep it simple to one so people can agree with one and disagree with the other.
Double-negative questions are worded in a way to confuse the reader into agreeing with your question because of the negatives you placed in the question.

Question 34

What to Consider about the participants themselves

Answer 34

Cognitive Ability, Cultural Factors, and Sensitive Questions (crime)

Question 35

Acquiescence Bias

Answer 35

The longer the survey the less thought participants put into their responses, screened with scales where you have questions people should not respond “strongly agree” to.

Question 36

Pre-Testing & Pilot Testing

Answer 36

Before you perform the test you have a person who knows the population for any problem.

Pilot Testing has a small sample of demographic selected to be tested.

Question 37

Snow-Ball or Chain-referral sampling

Answer 37

Capitalize on people familiar with the disease.

Question 38

APA Code of Ethics

Answer 38

Standard 8 was followed by Canadians while working on their own version of APA.

Question 39

Reactive and Proactive of CPA and APA

Answer 39

Tri-Council calls in REB to review ethics of experiments, APA has IREB to review ethics both are proactive reviews of the organisations.

Reactive was the way prior to APA and Tri-Council, people would react to studies upon learning of them.

Question 40

Pretest/Posttest Design

Answer 40

You take a measurement before treatment, and then introduce the treatment and measure once complete. There is a problem here because the simple passage of time may have confounded your variable. Solution is to add a control group in the design to see how passage of time affects your measurement.

Question 41

Solomon 4-Group Design

Answer 41

The problem of pretest/posttest design is it prepares the participants s they know what to expect.

Solomon 4-Group Design fixes this, two groups run a traditional pretest/posttest design and the other two have no pretest to see whether the pretest had an effect on the other two groups. They are between-groups design and so have low power, they exist only to confirm the results of the first two groups.

Question 42

Ex Post Facto Designs

Answer 42

Ex post facto variables exist by nature and can not be manipulated. Thus, we can only measure them

Question 43

Main problems of quasi-experimental

Answer 43

When you have ex post facto variables which can not be manipulated and can not be randomly designed as such you can not assign a causal conclusion, this results in a lower than experimental internal validity. This changes when you randomly assign people to conditions, so why could you not randomly assign them? They exist in clusters like a classroom so if one treatment is given to an individual of the group the whole group gets that treatment.

Question 44

Extraneous Variables

Answer 44

Suck either way, can add noise with random effects

Or can add bias with systematic effects.

Question 45

Confounding Variables

Answer 45

Not only are they extraneous but they are associated with the independent variable so they affect the dependent variable in some way.

Question 46

Procedural confounds

Answer 46

Occur when your groups are doing something different when performing the same test. Could be one group doing it have different researcher or do it at a different time of day.

Question 47

Operational Confound

Answer 47

These are confounds where the independent variable has something it was not meant to possess. It could sadden the participants or excite them.

Can be checked with positive/negative manipulation check to see if it had/had no effect.

Question 48

Person Confound

Answer 48

Where participants across both conditions are different from each other in some significant manner.
Example could be skill in test, age, ethnicity.