Research Methods Unit 1 Flashcards
Subjectivity
Truth defined by personal experience and or personal bias
Objectivity
Truth defiend by fact, as proven using the scientific method
Psychology
A systematic study of behavior and mental processes
Systematic
A process established by by guidelines and rules
Replication Problem
The inability in scientific fields to be able to replicate published experments and thefore brings into question their validity
Behavior
Actions that can be observed by others ( offering much experimental control)
Mental process
Internal and unobservable events
ex; thoughts and emotions
Focus
Piviotal to distinguishing credible and non-credible sources, but can lead to narrow mindedness in the field
Confimation bias
The belief that an individual really knew it all along
Tenacity
Accepting information just because it is consistantly restated
Authority
Information is easier to accept when it is from a credible souce of higher authority
A Priori
“Before Hand” reliance on logic an reasoning over experiece to gather information
Empericism
The process of learing and study through direct observation and experience
Why is objectivity important?
Because psychologists seek to understand information from an objective standpoint.
determinism
psychology is founded upon the idea that all effects have cause
Replication
An experiemnt must be replicable in order for the data to be of some merit
Data-Driven
The goal of research is to obtain data. Without data you have no credible justification
Why is describing a goal of psychology?
Psychologists aim to describe how people think, feel and act in various situations
How does understanding and explaining impact the goals of psychology?
To understand why a behavior occurs
How do predictions play a role in the goals of psychology?
Because to predict is to assume what the future will be
Why is control part a goal of psychology
Because in order to create a sucessful experiment one must have control over the phenomena being put into question. And certainty that a specific reaction will occur.
Ethics
A set of principals for behaving in a way that is morally correct
When was the APA guidelines created?
1953 (post initial research period)
Why was 2002 an important year in APA history?
Because post 9/11 the interrogation tactics used where brought into question as to whether or not they where in violation of physically and pschologically harming prisoners
What is Beneficence and Nonmalficense defined as ?
A researcher must constantly evaluate the costs and the benefits in the acts of their research
How is Fidelity and Responsability defined
That psychological researchers are responsible for their research and how that not only affects them, and their institution but the greater society as well
How is Integrity defined?
That a researcher must be honest in all their researching endevors
How is Justice defined?
A reseacher must treat people with fairness and must attempt to prevent bias in their data to the best of their ability
How is respect for the peoples rights and dignity defined?
A researcher is responsible for designing an experiment in which the participants feel safe and the information that is used for data remains confidential
How is protection from harm defined?
All subjects must not be subjected to physical nor psychological harm (this can be flexible given reasonable cause to an irb and suffcient warninging to the participant)
What is an Institutional Review Board and who is made up of?
An IRB is a board which reviews the ethical standing and the practicallity of a researchers experiment. An IRB often includes someone from the experiments demographic, a community member, an administrator, and a fellow researcher
What does maintaing privacy refer to ?
maintating privacy refers to the researchers goal to keep all subject specific information private. This is done by maintiaining animity and researcher blindness by abstracting the data from the person to prevent bias
What does confidentiality refer to ?
All information about the participant must be kept private (a step bellow aninimity)
What does coercian refer to ?
Coercian refers to the act of forcing a participant to do something against their will. (this is prevented against by allowing the participant to opt out at any time.)
What does informed cosent refer to ?
Informed consent refers to the responsbility the researcher has to inform the participant of at least the basics of an experiment and any potnetially harmful aspects of the experiment (they do not have to disclose everything at this time)
What does sharing results refer to?
A researcher must share all the findings of their research regardless of personal or company benefit to not disclosing specifc information
What are the two forms of debreifing an experimentor can do?
Dehoaxing= breaking the illusion of an experiment and telling the participant what really happened
Desencitizing= checking back up on the participants post experiment to see if the experiment had any lasting harmful impacts on the individual (ex: ptsd)
What does shared benefits refer to?
Shared benefits refers to the fact that within an experiment all participants must be treated equally and by the end of the testing period all participants must have experienced equal benefits from said experiment.
What are ethical compliances with computer simulations?
Ethical compliance with computer simulations refers to a researchers ability to avoid unessesary harm by simulating an experiment post the initial test, or as a follow up experiment
What is the ethical compliance for using group vs individual research?
In a large group experiment and in an individual case study aninimity is important to categorizing the data in a non biased manner and therefore no personal data would be put on display with regards to the individuals findings
What does the ethical compliance of internal review refer to?
That if the IRB initially turns down an experiment then a researcher can confer with their collegues about how to best go forward with tweaking the experiment for further review
What is the ethical compliance of “ If it’s harmful don’t give up”?
This refers to if a expriment is rejected because it posits uncessary harm than a resercher is expected to qunatify the experiment to it’s essential piece and tweak based around that to create a non-harmful alternative
What does the ethical compliance of a pilot study refer to?
A pilot study is a experiment which tests the fundamental aspect of an experiment as a secondary form of proof that it should be moved forward by the IRB for it’s full and more exstensive form.
Basic Research
Research with the goal of describing,
predicting, and explaining fundamental principles of behavior.
Applied Research
Research with the goal of trying to
solve an immediate real-life problem
Donald Broadbent basic research example
By using a dichotic listening test (two different audio inputs one for each ear of a headphone) he was able to establish that humans can split their attention and therefore laid the groundwork for attention researh. (Creating a basic/ fundamental concept for the field)
What is the cocktail party effect?
An individual can split their attention over multiple sources (ex: being in a conversation and hearing your name said from across the room)
Why is Stayer and Johnston’s phone study an example of applied research?
Because Stayer and Johnston base their attention research off of Broadbent’s cocktail party effect to test whether or not it was the act of holding the phone or talking on the phone was more distracting for a driver
Labratory Research
Research that occurs within the
controlled confines of the scientific laboratory
Field Research
Research that occurs in any location
other than a scientific laboratory.
Mundane Realism
The degree to which an experiment
mirrors real-life experiences; considered less important than experimental realism
Experimental realism
The depth to which participants
become involved in the experiment; considered more important than mundane realism
Manipulation check
A manipulation check is engaging with the experiment participants to make sure the control is being effective
Hypothesis
An educated guess about a relationship
between variables that is then tested empirically
What is the first step in developing a hypothesis?
The first step is finding a topic that interests you by finding/ creating an identifying question or issue
What is the second step in hypothesis development?
The second step is exploring relvent findings in books, journals or other sources (must be primry sources)
What is the third step in hypothesis development?
Compile the facts in order to integrate your findings into a testable hypothesis
What are the two fundamental components of an empirical question?
- It must be answerable with data
- Must be capable of creating a precise definition
What is a causal relationship?
A causal relationship is this therefore that (and can be based upon a correlation)
What is correlational relationship ?
A correlational relationship is this in relationship to that (is not likely founded upon a causal relationship)
Formal hypothesis
A specific statement of issues to be explored and expressed in terms of opperational defitions defined within the context of the hypothesis.
Construct
A hypothetical factor (e.g., hunger) that
cannot be observed directly but is inferred from
certain behaviors (e.g., eating) and assumed to follow from certain circumstances (e.g., 24 hours without food).
Operational definition
A definition of a concept or
variable in terms of precisely described operations, measures, or procedures.
What is the first component of a good theory?
It fits the known facts and predicts new observations ( look at the literature)
What is the second component of a good theory?
It is parsimonious (otherwise known as the simplist definition fits (the more well researched the theory is the more parsimonious it should become)
What is the third component of a good theory?
It is precise in predictions and is falsifiable (otherwise saying that a good theory should be replicable and new interpretations of it should further the research on it.
Where do we get the operational definitions of constructs?
We get them from past literature which has defined them
Reliability
The extent to which measures of the same
phenomenon are consistent and repeatable; measures high in reliability contain a minimum of measurement error.
Validity
In general, the extent to which a measure of X
truly measures X and not Y (e.g., a valid measure of intelligence measures intelligence and not something else).
Content Validity
Occurs when a measure appears to be
a reasonable or logical measure of a trait (e.g., as a measure of intelligence, problem solving has more content validity than hat size).
Criterian Validity
Form of validity in which a psycholog-
ical measure is able to predict some future behavior or is meaningfully related to some other measure.
Construct Validity
In measurement, it occurs when the
measure being used accurately assesses some hypothetical construct; also refers to whether the construct itself is valid; in research, refers to whether the operational definitions used for independent and dependent variables are valid.
Nominal scale
Measurement scale in which the
numbers have no quantitative value but rather identify categories into which events can be placed.
Ordinal scale
Measurement scale in which assigned
numbers stand for relative standing or ranking.
Interval scale
Measurement scale in which numbers
refer to quantities and intervals are assumed to be of equal size; a score of zero is just one of many points on the scale and does not denote the absence of the phenomenon being measured.
Ratio Scale
Measurement scale in which numbers refer
to quantities and intervals are assumed to be of equal size; a score of zero denotes the absence of the phenomenon being measured.
Convergent Validity
Occurs when scores on a test
designed to measure some construct (e.g., self-esteem) are correlated with scores on other tests theoretically related to the construct.
Discriminant Validity
Occurs when scores on a test
designed to measure some construct (e.g., self-
esteem) are uncorrelated with scores on other tests theoretically unrelated to the construct.
Descriptive Statistics
How the data is described
What is the data and what does the data show?
Infernential statistics
What is immedietly beyond the data (aka how do we generalize the data from the sample to the greater population)
How do you transform an abnormal distribution to a normal distribution
Through broadening the sample pools and continually testing the hypothesis through repetition
Frequency table
A number table representing the frequency at which something happens ( ex: a 1-10 anxiety scale it measures how many people chose each number)
What is univariate analysis?
Univariate analysis refers to the analysis of a single variable (as opposed to bivariate or two variables compared in correlation to one another on am x, y graph)
What is a right skewed graph?
a right skeweed graph is where the peak is in the low values and the tail is headed to the right
What is a left skewed graph?
A graph where the peak is in the high values and the tail is facing left
What is a normal distribution?
A normal distribution otherwise refered to as a bell curve is the ideal generalized graph with a singular peak in the middle representing the average of a data set
What is the celling effect?
The celling effect refers to having a manipulation in an experiment that is so easy no participant fails the test (creating a left skewed graph)
What is the floor effect?
The floor effect refers to when the experimental manipulation is so difficult no participant is able to perform well (resulting in a right skewed graph)
