PSY4111-Psychology 1A Chapter Research Methods

Question	Answer
Prefrontal lobotomy	Surgical procedure that severs fibres connecting the frontal lobes of the brain from the underlying thalamus
Heuristics	Mental shortcuts that help us streamline our thinking and make sense of the world
Naturalistic observation	Watching behaviour in real-world settings
External validity	Extent to which we can generalise findings to real-world settings
Internal validity	Extent to which we can draw cause-and-effect inferences from a study
Case study	Research design that examines one person or a small number of people in depth, often over an extended time period
Existence proofs	Demonstrations that a given psychological phenomenon can occur
Correlational design	Research design that examines the extent to which two variables are associated
Scatterplot	Grouping of plots on a two-dimensional graph in which each dot represents a single persons data
Illusionary correlations	Perception of a statistical association between two variables where none exist
Experiment	Research design characterised by random assignment of participants to conditions, and manipulation of an independent variable
Random assignment	Randomly sorting participants into two groups
Experimental groups	In an experiment, the group of participants that relieves the manipulation
Control group	In an experiment, the group of participants that does not receive the manipulations
Independent variable	Variable that the experimenter manipulates
Dependent variable	Variable that an experimenter measures to see whether the manipulation has had an effect
Operational definition	A working definition of what the researcher is measuring
Confound	Any difference between the experimental and control groups other than the independent variable
Placebo effect	Improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement
Blind	Unaware of whether one is in the experimental group or the control group
Nocebo effect	Harm resulting from the mere expectation of harm
Experimenter expectancy effect	Phenomenon on in which researchers' hypotheses lead them to unintentionally bias the outcome of the study
Double-blind	When neither researchers nor participants are aware of who is in the control group
Demand characteristics	Cues that participants pick up from a study that allow them to generate guesses regarding the researcher's hypotheses
Random selection	Procedure that insures every person in a population has an equal chance of being chosen to participate
Reliability	Consistency of measurement
Validity	Extent to which a measure assesses what it purports to measure
Response sets	Tendencies of research participants to distort the responses to questionnaire items
Informed consent	Informing research Participants of what is involved in the study before asking them to participate
Statistics	Application of mathematics to describing and analysing data
Descriptive statistics	Numerical characterisations that describe data
Central tendency	Measure of the 'central' scores in a dataset or with the group tends to cluster
Mean	Average; a measure of central tendency
Median	Middle score in a dataset; a measure of central tendency
Mode	Most frequent score in a dataset; a measure of central tendency
Dispersion	Measure of how loosely or tightly bunch scores are
Range	Difference between the highest and lowest scores; a measure of dispersion
Standard deviation	Measure of desperation that takes into account how far each data point is from the mean
Inferential statistics	Mathematical methods that allow us to determine whether we can generalise findings from our sample to the full population
Meta-analysis	Investigation of the consistency of patterns of results across large numbers of studies conducted in different laboratories
File drawer problem	Tendency for negative findings to remain unpublished

Next up

PSY4111-Psychology 1A Chapter Research Methods

Description

Resource summary

Similar

	Created by Emma Day1338 over 8 years ago