Research methods

Michele believes her boss is an extremely difficult person. To see if her belief has merit, she asks all of her co-workers who have also had problems with him in the past if they believe the same thing. Michele's conclusion may be erroneous because of what?

Luke really likes the new sports car, but is undecided about whether to spend the money to buy one. He creates a lists of 15 reasons why he likes the car. Is this a good idea?

Even after having all of his arguments refuted by his girlfriend, Ryan proclaims that everyone is entitled to their own opinions and he isn't changing his. Ryan is exhibiting which flaw?

Dr X attends a party where several people offer suggestions for things she could study in her search. One person suggest her to study if dogs have different personalities. Although she believes this is a silly idea, Dr X decides to conduct a study to see if it is true. Which characteristic of science is she exemplifying?

When Samantha is told about an article that claims listening to music increases intelligence, she is full of questions. What characteristic of science demonstrate?

Tom is investigagting how different strategies for reducing anxiety can improve test performance, while Jerry is studying the impact of stress on memory recall. Tom's research would be considered _______, whereas Jerry's _________

The president of your company has asked you to evaluate a proposal to buy a rival business. The president gives you the proposal, which includes past and projected sales of the company. Which of the following research skills do think will be least helpful in this task?

Santiago is applying to be a resident assistant. He believes his leadership abilities are above those of typical applicants. Yet, when asked during his interview to provide examples of times he was a good leader, he cannot think of any. Which of the follow explains why he struggled to answer the questions?

When something happens that is the exception to the rule or distinct from the majority of other cases, it is called

Tia wants to determine what people find offensive. She thinks about times that other people have offended her and concludes that what is offensive to her is probably offensive to most people. In this circumstance she is using which of the following to reach her conclusion about others?

Which of the following is based on casual observations rather than rigorous or scientific analysis?

A car salesperson tells Rudy that a particular model of car is the safest in its class. Rudy does not accept such claims at face value and demands to see the latest safety report. What characteristic of science is Rudy displaying?

A psychologist is interested in studying memory in the context of eyewitness testimony. What type of research is this?

You have just taken a job as a peer tutor. You notice that many of the students believe that they are doing better than other students in the course and that they will have no problem at all catching up. Which two flawas in thinking are these students expressing?

After graduate school, you begin your career as a counselor for clients who have an eating disorder. You want to be sure to provide your clients with the best possible treatment, but are unsure wheter treatment a or b is better. To test this, you collect data that will allow you to compare the two treatment types. Which type of skills will be most important for determining the superior treatment?

Replication within the research community leads to:

Basic research is research:

Of the following industries, which has the largest number of full-time employees with a psychology major?

According to the _____, the there is a tendency for more extreme outcomes to occur when considering a small sample as compared to a large sample.

The law of small numbers states:

Galileo once said, “All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” This is best representative of the:

Which of the following is the reason that good leaders often employ someone to play the role of devil's advocate before making an important decision?

Which of the following means a willingness to test ideas using the scientific method to draw conclusions?

Which of the following would be a creative approach to measuring aggression?

You know that people are often more generous when donating to a cause after seeing a moving photograph than hearing impersonal statistics. In this case, research on the _____ confirms that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Imagine that you are a fundraiser for the Susan G. Koman cancer foundation. When planning for an upcoming speech you remember the availability heuristic and decide to devote the majority of time to a _____ rather than _____.

_____ is a bias in which people only look for evidence that agrees with what they already believe to be true.

The “what you see is all there is” phenomenon is:

The _____ skeptical one is, the _____ likely they are to believe pseudoscience claims.

Juries may be more lenient when determining the innocence or guilt of individuals who appear attractive, sharply dressed, and well-mannered, because of the:

People are more likely to generate “yeah, but” examples for research claims that _____ their personal experience.

A case that is the exception to the rule would be known as the:

Which of the following is NOT an example of the better-than-average effect?

An outlier is:

_____ is most likely responsible for endorsement of the better-than-average effect.

Lili is developing a research question for the study she is conducting this semester. She sttles on, What is the meaning of life? The primary reason that the scientif method cannot be used to answer this question is

The key distinction between scientific and nonscientific questions is whether or not

Who are the peers in the peer-review process?

Which of the following is not a characteristic of a good hypothesis?

Which of the followig characteristics of good hypotheses is important for minimizing our natural flaws in thinking?

A marker researcher collects reactions to a new cookie before it hits the marketplace. The researcher tells some participants the cookie is low in calories, while othes don't receive this information. next, each participants each 3 cookies and then completes a questionaire. What is the independent variable?

A teacher has some of her students learn the words using a studying strategy she read about in a jorunal. She has the rest using the traditional approach. The teacher then administers the vocabulary test and compare the results. What type of research?

Which of the following is probably not very effective in helping the results contribute to the scientific knowledge of psychology?

Which of the following questions is outside of the scope of science?

Billy Ray is having a problem with weeds in his vegetable garden. He wants to determine the best way to control the weeds, but wants to approach it empirically. Which of the following is the best example of an empirical approach?

Dyala is planning her thesis and needs to generate a hypothesis. Because most people seem to think facebook is bad for college students, she decides to study how the use of fb can help students' transition to college. Which of the following strategies did dyala use to generate her hypothesis?

While surffing the internet, you come across a personality test that can determine your personality based on a combination of your favorite color, your favorite food and your favorite hobby. Upon taking the test, you are impressed by how accurate it is. Which of the following likely explains the test's accuracy?

The owner of a coffehouse wants to know if her customers will drink more coffe depending on the smell of the room. To test this, she hires a psychologist who sets up three similar rooms, each with its own smell then arranges to have thirty students spend an afternoon in each room while being allowed to drink all the coffe they like. The amount each participant drinks is recorded for each of the three scents. What is the dependent variable?

Andrea and Ben are doing a study to see if puppies and sunshine make people happy. To test this, they randomly assign 500 male and female participants to one of the following conditions: exposure to puppies and sunshine or no exposure to puppies and sunshine. Both conditions take place out on the college's quad. Participants complete measure of life satisfaction and general happiness. What is the IV?

In a study of first college students, 56 men and 88 women examined the influence of relaxation techniques on relieving anxiety associated with starting college. All students received a pamphlet containing information about good sleep habits. Next, half of the participants were taught a breathing exercise while the other half did nothing. What is the constant?

In an experimental design, the researcher manipulates the _____ and measures the _____

You see a video on the web where a prominent bunisesswoman explains that her experience in a specialized kindergarten class that focused on creativity and individuality is the reason for her success. You decide to test this by following a group of children from age 5 until age 25 to see if their educational experiences correspond with their career sucess. What type of design would be the best way to study this?

A psychologist was hired by a local winery to conduct a taste test of four new wines. For the taste test, the psychologist had 100 participants come into the lab, take a small sip of each wine, and rate the taste on several characteristics. Between each wine, participants ate a small cracker. What type of design did the psychologist use?

Each of the following is a part of the informed consent EXCEPT:

In an experiment designed to assess whether weight loss causes increased self-esteem, an acceptable operational definition for the dependent variable would be:

Which step in the research process is akin to a “fact-checker”?

A longitudinal study uses a(n) _____ design.

Which approach for generating a hypothesis would ask, “What would I do?”

Ali is a graduate student who is designing a study to examine the impact of weather on mood. Which of the following would be an appropriate operational definition of her dependent variable?

Statistics are necessary because:

Surveys and interviews are examples of:

Where would someone look to find the most cutting edge empirical findings?

Statistical tests provide researchers with:

Savannah is a psychologist interested in finding empirically verified information to guide the development of her research hypothesis. Which of the following should she use?

Sunny is interested in testing the hypothesis that accidents are a matter of repressed desires. To test this, she asks participants about recent accidents and their corresponding causes. Just as she suspected, her participants are unaware of the connection between their accidents and unconscious desires. She interprets her findings as support for her hypothesis that people are unaware that their own desires are causing their accidents. What is wrong with her research

Lucy believes that halogen light bulbs lead to better visual acuity than incandescent light bulbs. How would she operationally define the independent variable in her study?

How does a researcher know if he/she has picked a good research question?

When is the ethical review of a study by the IRB conducted?

In an experiment there are always different levels of the:

A _____ is an element that the experimenter expects to change, vary, or that can have several different values, whereas a _____ is a factor that does not change and remains consistent.

Between-subjects design is to within-subject design as:

Why might a researcher consider it easier to publish a book than a journal article?

To create statistics. researchers need to transform information into:

Which of the following would most likely represent an ethical dilemma for a person?

As a financially challenged college student, you see a flyer on campus about a research study on the impact of sunburns. The advertisement says you will be paid 500 to have a 1 inch by 1 inch square of skin on your forearm severely burned with ultraviolet light. You know that sunburns can have long term consequences. However, you desperetely need the money, so you seriously consider participating. What ethical line has this research study violated?

Cyrus is reading an article and believes that he cannot say something better than the researcher already has. However, his professor said students could not use quotes in their APA style introductions. iNSTEAD OF USING QUOTES, cYRUS takes the researcher's sentence and changes one word of it by replacing the word with a synonim. Which of the following is true?

If a psychologist studies learning in pigeons, which of the following oversight groups would ethically approve the research?

Some participants overhear another participant, who is actually a confederate, say something negative about them. Whith ethical principle should Chauncey be most cocnerned about?

Deidra needs just one more participant to complete her data colelction for her undergraduate thesis. The last participant signs the cosnent form, but halfway through the study, the participant wants to leave. Deidra tells her that she must stay and finish the study, and the participant complies. What ethical principle has Deidra violated?

If a study you conduct involves the purposeful misleading or misdirection of participants, when and how do you notify participants of the description?

Which of the following would most likely represent an ethical dilemma for a person?

Marc wants to do a study on the influence of energy drinks on motivation. After conducting a literature search on PsycInfor for published research on this topic, Marc cannot find any research and concludes that this topic has never been studied. However, what else could explain this?

Teagan finishes up her thesis, but finds that her hypothesis was not supported. She looks at the data and finds that if she omits the data from 3 participants, her results work out as she predicted. Which unethical practice has she engaged in?

All of the following are forms of deception except

With regard to participants' emotional responses to the research study, the debriefing tells participants that:

In an experiment, the cover story is:

The biggest harm caused by participants who behave unethically is:

Which of the following is a cost of NOT conducting research?

Imagine that you are designing a study to investigate a sensitive topic. Which of the following study designs would cause the most unnecessary harm?

The file drawer problem is:

Nabil is examining whether taking the medicine, Lactaid, will make people more tolerant of lactose in dairy products. In order to do this, he assigns the participants in the control condition to eat dairy, knowing that they will not receive medication to help their digestive systems handle the lactose. In this case, which of the following should be of greatest concern to Nabil?

Margie received a marginally significant finding to her correlational study examining the relationship between wall color and participant mood. When writing up her results for publication she summarizes her efforts to say that certain colors cause better moods and other colors cause worse moods. What ethical violation has Margie committed?

Scientific integrity is

Imagine that you are a participant in a research study. Which of the following would you have the right to expect?

Minimal risk is to expedited review as:

Dr. Lavoy is the chair of her university's IRB committee. She receives a protocol that describes a study on aggression. As part of the planned study, apes will receive electrical shocks until they exhibit some form of aggressive behavior. What is likely her first concern?

Which of the following ethical principles is the most central to the utilitarian perspective of ethical understanding?

Malcolm is a researcher who wants to ensure that he protects the confidentiality of his participants. Which of the following would increase the confidentiality of his study?

Which of the following is NOT one of the principles outlined in the Belmont Report?

What is the Belmont Report?

If a research question requires the researcher to induce stress in participants:

Random assignment of participants to conditions help to establish:

What is plagiarism?

Selecting only homeless to participate in a study although we have no real theoretical reason to use the homeless violates which ethical principle?

An informed consent should address all of the following except:

A marriage counselor wants to evaluate the efficacy of a new approach to help couples communicate better. Before this study can be conducted, approval is needed from all of the following groups except:

If you are a professore, which of the following strategies would be best for ensuring that you are preserving your students' autonomy while recruiting them for a study?

To ensure confidentiality, the researcher would do all of the following except:

A researcher notices that several participants do not appear to be carefully reading the questions on her survey. She decides not to include these participant' data in her study so that she has a better test of her search hypothesis. This behavior is problematic because of its

A researcher demonstrating scientific integrity would do all of the following except:

A journal editor decides to accept for publication only research in which the results are significant. All of the following are potential ethical problems resulting from this decision except

Audrey is interested in whether moving homes a lot as a child influences trust as an adult. She has participants self-identify whether they moved as a child or not and then complete some questionnaires about trust. What type of design is she using?

A researcher wants to codnuct a study on college student's conscientiousness and study habits. To measure conscientiousness the researcher examines students' dorm rooms to see how organized the rooms are, bklabla. What type of measure is the researcher using?

You notice that the participants are agreeing with everything that you ask them on a questionnaire even if the answer they give is unflattering. Which of the following biases may be a potential problem?

Marcus plans on measuring life stress and splitting participants into two groups: high and low. Lilja plans on manipulating stress by exposing one group to a snake and the other to guinea pig. Marcus' design is a ______ a Lilja's design is a ____

Corrin works at a clothing store in the mall. After a staff meeting where the employees learn sales are declining, she notices that some days the music in the store is really loud, while other days it is impossible to hear. She decides that the store manager is changing the music to see if it influences sales, and decides to try harder to sell clothes on days the music is loud. What problem does this exemplify?

In high school, Raul was involved in a terrible car accident when his friend fell asleep at the wheel. Despite the fact that Raul was in the hospital for a month in a full-body cast due to a broken back, when talking about the experiene, Raul recalles that time very foundly and says that it wasn't so bad. What problem does this exemplify?

Darius wants to measures conscientiousness to determine whether it varies depending on major. He decides to ask to look at each participants calendar and planner. What type of measurement?

Norah wants to videotape her roomate for a a project on sleeping behaviors. However, because Joanne knows she is being videotaped, she has troubled sleeping. Which potential problem represents?

FELICIA WANTS TO MEASURE THE TRUE number of miles her car gets per gallon of gas. She determines that she gets 25 miles per gallon. During this trip, she had the air conditioned on most of the time. Which of the following may be contributing to the error?

____ is a form of systematic error, while ____ is nonsystematic. Of these two, _____ is more problematic.

_____ is synonymous with accuracy. _____ is synonymous with conssitency

Quinn decides to interview the girls in her residence hall because all of the girls happen to be from very different parts of the country. What type of sampling is using?

Dr X is conducting a study on the effects of marijuana use on memory. Upon posting the study to recruti participants, 100 people sign up within the first 10 minutes. Dr X sample most likely suffers from which issue?

Which of the following is a quasi-independent variable?

Estefan wants to determine the presence of an anxiety disorder by revealing a persistently elevated heart rate and unusually high rates of cortisol. In this case, he is using which of the following to diagnose anxiety?

Researchers want to _____ retrospective bias and _____ demand characteristics.

Which of the following is most true?

On which of the following topics would a researcher most want to use a self-report measure?

the floor effect is

What is a true experiment?

A drawback of using behavioral trace is that is:

What is APA style?

To minimize the impact of demand characteristics, an experimenter should:

Random error is:

Researchers may fail to use simple random sampling because:

The _____ is the entire group of interest in a research study.

Self report is to behavioral as:

Reality television shows demonstrate the potential issue of _____ when observing the behavior of others.

In what section of an APA-style report would researchers interpret their research findings?

What is a behavioral observation?

If a researcher is interested in assessing participants' private thoughts, then he would be best served to use:

With regard to sampling, what does WEIRD mean?

How can a researcher minimize the likelihood of social desirability bias in participants' self-report responses?

If the speedomerter in your car conssitently shows that you are going more slowly than you actualy are, it has which type of error?

You ask history majors how interesting they find WWI and notice that almost everyone chose either at 6 or 7 on your 7 point measurement scale. Which of the following may be a problem?

Which of the following measurement problems is beyond your control?

You are convinced that an exam was unfair because none of the questions even remotely resembled what was taught in the class. In this case, you are questioning the exam's

A researcher asks participants to complete a personality measure. Two weeks later the researcher asks the same participants to complete the same emasure. Then compares the two scores. What is trying to evaluate?

Whenever your choose a measurement tool, you need to first determine if the instrument has acceptable

A researcher notices that mostly males have signed up for his study on changes to reaction times while sky diving. Which of the following may be a problem?

Drew wants a representative sample for his study. He indetifies the entire population and subdivides it. He then uses simple random assignment to see which members of the population will be a part of the sample. Drew is using which sampling strategy?

For your research methods class you are writing an APA style report. If you are currently discussing the rationale behind your research, your are likely writing which section?

Jen wants to determine how student's feelings about conservatism or liberralism influence their choice of major. Angelina wants to determine the characteristics of a successful college president. Jen should take a ________ approach, while Angelina should take a _______ approach

Roger is an incoming student who isn't sure what to pick for a major. Rather than just pick something to see if it is a good fit, Roger collects inforamtion on every major and uses what he learns to make a decision. What type of approach?

Juanita is applying for a job at a substance abuse treatment center. Seh has an interview that is more like a casual conversation that focuses on topics as they arise. What type of interview did Juanita most likely have?

Candem is a vegan who is interviewing the owner of a butcher shop about the ethics of the business. Which of the following is the greatest threat to the objectivity?

All of the following are qualities of a good interviewer except:

Jayna wants to interview several PTSD patients. During her interview, she wants to ask them about the trauma, their childhood, tehir friendships and their personalitty. Which of the following is the best question order?

Anita completed an analysis of several celebrity twitters in which she identified a central theme (vanity) that was common across many areas. What type of analysis is this?

Nolan is interested in studying shopping addiction, so he posts an advertisement online soliciting participants on several online retailers' sites. In his interviews, he discovers that his participants are very proud of their addiction. Which is most likely influencing his conclusion?

Tosha is interested in understanding the culture of hooking up. She decides to gather in depth information on a few individuals so she can have a more throrough understanding of their perspectives ande xperiences concerning hooking up. Which of the following research approaches is Tosha using?

Shantel believes that her boyfriend is about to propose. She hunts around in his bedroom and finds a receipt from Tiffany's and a note regarding a dinner reservation at a fancy restaurant. Shantel believes this evidence confirms her prediction. Which of the following approaches in Shantel using?q

Hugo's research methods professor gives him an assignment to create an interview. As it is his first time serving as an interviewer, he prepares 10 specific questions prior to the interview and asks all his questions in a specific order. What type of interview is creating?

Which of the following is part of developing an interview schedule?

Which of the following is a weakness of qualitative designs?

As a research project, mACK READS A NUMBER OF CASE FILES FROM ADULTS immigrating to the US. He wants to focus on reasons for immigrating. From the interviews, he generates categories and establishes themes. Which of the following best describes what is doing?

An itnerview schedule is most like which of the following concepts that was discussed in a previous chapter?

Jose is doing a study about stuudent's likelihood to cheat on an online test. He had questions about their demographic characteristics, how often they have cheated in the past, their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations and their grades. Which questions should Jose ask first?

Rick is interested in examining obituaries from the WWII. He establishes general concepts that frequently occur, and then settles on one that is most common. What type of analysis?

Stella invites a dozen residents to her office to disccus their lifestyle. Through those conversations, she identifies several small factors that seem to contribute to the problem of obsesity. What type of analysis is Stella doing?

In a multi-phase study Sue begins by conducting a focus group. She then uses that information to develop a written measure that is administered to a new group of participants. By using different measures to assess the same topic of interest, Sue is using:

Upon completion of data collection Julian will use statistics to look for meaningful relationships between the variables under investigation. In this study Julian is using:

The top-down approach is where researchers:

A quantitative researchers would be most likely to use _____ interviews, whereas qualitative researchers are more likely to use _____ interviews.

A _____ analysis is where a researcher examines how numerous properties contribute to patterns within the larger and more complex system.

As a general rule, interviewers should NOT: