Research Methods In Psychology Flashcards
What is a hypothesis?
A hypothesis is a tentative belief about the way two (or more) variables interact/ impact each other
What is a standardised procedure?
A procedure that is the same for all participants except where variation is introduced to test a hypothesis
Define generalisability
A sample that is representative of the population
What is objective measurement?
Measures that are reliable (produce consistent results) and are valid (assess the dimensions they purport to assess)
What is a variable?
Any phenomenon that can take on more than one value I.e is free to vary along the dimension
What is the difference between a continuous variable and a categorical variable?
Categorical - can take on fixed values and only those fixed values (e.g make of a car, biological sex)
Continuous - has a continuum of possible values and varies along this range (e.g reaction time in seconds ranging from 0.5 s to 5s)
What is a population?
A population is the entire group of people that a researcher is interested in (e.g all the people in the world who have cancer)
What is a sample?
Smaller subsets of the population that are tested and these results are inferred back to the entire population. To be valid sampling must be representative (random picking)
What are the three designs for an experiment? What are they concerned with?
Descriptive - describing behaviour
Correlational - predicting behaviour
Experimental - establishing the causes of behaviour
What is a measure?
A concrete means by which to determine the value of a variable (e.g the word depressed can be defined as the number of times a depressed person is prescribed antidepressants)
What are dependant and independent variables?
Independent - manipulated by experimenter
Dependent - what is being measured
What is a theory?
A theory is a systematic way of organising and explaining observations; different schools of thought promote different theories
