Week 7 - Research Methods Flashcards
What are the goals is psychological research?
Description of behaviour, prediction of behavioural and explanation of behaviour.
What is descriptive research?
Describes phenomena as they exist rather than manipulating variables
Can help to identify a range of possible behaviours
What is prediction
A goal of research. What is the direction and strength of association of variables among variables?
What Is explanation?
Ultimate goal of research is to understand why behaviours occur.
Theories describe how variables are connected
Classical conditioning explains how simple associations develop
What’s a case study as a research method?
In depth observation of one person or small group
Qualitative research often relies on case studies.
Limitations is that they may not represent larger population
Subject to researcher bias
What is naturalistic observation as a research method?
In depth observation of phenomenon in its natural setting
Jane Goodall conducting chimpanzee behaviour
Limitations may include awareness of being observed
Bias
What your observing may not be able to be generalised
What is survey research as a research method?
Conducting interviews. Asking questions etc. limitations may be honesty, misjudging their attitudes
What’s a stratified sample
Stratified sampling involves determining proportion of total sample that each group will make up then randomly sampling from each category
What is correlations research
Research design that investigated the MAGNITUDE and DIRECTION of association between two or more variables
Key focus of correlations research to identify and describe relationships
Sometimes the foundation of an entire field of study (epidemiology is a branch of medical science that studies patterns of health and disease in populations
The nature of correlations research means that experimenters have difficulty in establishing cause and effect because they measure the relationship between two variables and cannot manipulate independent variables (low SES)
Can only suggest possible causal relationships
What is the Pearson product moment correlation?
Magnitude and direction of association between two variables can be quantified by the correlation coefficient
Symbol for Pearson’s correlation is r
Possible range of r (-1,+1)
Positive r indicated a positive relationships
Negative indicates a negative relationship (larger values on one variable are associated with smaller values on the other).
Magnitude (strength) of association is defined by the absolute value of r
Strong: > |.50|
Moderate: |.30| to |.50|
Weak: |.10| to |.30|
Trivial:
Correlation coefficients ‘r’ range from -1 to 1
If r=-.7 there’s a strong negative correlation
If r=-.03 there’s a trivial negative correlation
If r=+0.49 there’s a moderate positive correlation
If r=+0.9 there’s a strong positive correlation
Correlation doesn’t imply causation
What’s a scatter plot?
It displays the two scores from each person on a two dimensional graph
Score on one variable plotted against the score in the other variables
Easy to see distinct patterns related to different levels and directions of correlation
What’re Between subjects designs
At least two groups
Assigned to groups randomly
Requires large number of participants
Can’t control for individual differences
What a within subjects design?
At least two conditions
All participants involved in all conditions
Requires smaller participants
Controls for individual differences
Good when carry over effects are not likely
Same People for both groups, both in experimental and control group.
Potential problems:
Sequence effects - condition order matters
Carryover effects - earlier conditions may effect later conditions
What are some limitations of experimental research?
High constraint means little flexibility
Experimental conditions may not translate or generalise to real world settings
