simons questions

Which of the following is a true experiment?

After reading up on his biochemistry, Dr. Vapid thinks that vitamin P might be an effective treatment for schizophrenia. He recruits 124 carefully diagnosed schizophrenics and divides them into two groups. Group A receives a tablet containing 3.7 micrograms of Vitamin P every day and Group B receives a similar appearing placebo. The people who distribute the tablets do not know which is the placebo and which is the Vitamin P. After a fortnight, all the patients are evaluated on a battery of clinical tests. The results show no significant differences on any test between the two groups. Dr Vapid concludes that Vitamin P has no value for treating schizophrenia. What MAJOR problem do you see what this conclusion?

Dr Zapp and her co-workers observe primary school children in seventeen randomly chosen New Zealand playgrounds. A year's intensive and reliable observation reveals that boys attack boys (defined as the clenched fist of a boy A coming into contact with boy B) significantly more often than girls attack girls. Dr Zapp concludes that New Zealand primary schoolboys are more aggressive than New Zealand schoolgirls. What MAJOR problem do you see with this conclusion?

In 1976, Ulric Neisser claimed that cognitive psychology at that time had failed to address the everyday aspects and function of human behaviour, and he blamed this failure on the excessive reliance on artificial laboratory tasks that were widely used in cognitive psychology before the mid 1970's. This complaint can be summarised by saying that he thought the cognitive psychology of his time had flaws in:

Which of the following is an issue of external validity?

Which of the following is NOT an example of quasi-experimental research?

Which of the following is true for quasi-experiments?

Regression analyses are most frequently used in psychology to examine research conducted using:

Deborah is interested in how people's tendency to take risks varies with their age, sex, and income. She takes a random sample of New Zealanders over the age of 18 and measures their tendency to take risks using Zukerman's sensation seeking scale. (higher scores indicate a greater tendency to take risks.) The regression of sensation seeking scores on the three variable yields significant beta-weights of -0.30 with age; +.15 with sex (coded 1= female; 2= male) and -.20 with net income. the strongest effect is:

Same example. The percentage of variance in risk taking accounted for by age (alone) is:

Same example again. Deborah includes some more variable in her research- intelligence, whether respondents have partners , and whether they live in the north or south island. She redoes all the regressions. What would you expect to happen to the beta-weights of age, sex and net income compared to the previous results?

Consider the causal diagram below. Which variable could be a mediating variable

Which of the following is the most plausible criticism of the causal model in the preceding question?

If student respondents to a survey are asked " How many times this year have you talked to someone with red hair?" their answers are most likely to be:

Which of the following would be a reasonable factor favouring the use of open rather than closed questions?

Which of the following is a disadvantage of web-based surveying?

You have drafted up a questionnaire which you intend to give to recent immigrants to New Zealand so as to learn about their experiences. Which of the following should you take particular care to do?

Which of the following is true of ethical medical research?

Deliberate deception of participants as to what the research is about:

You have a choice between using a two item measure of extraversion (yes, there is one) and a longer scale. You would use the two-item measure if:

Which of the following is most true of the relationship between reliability and validity when we are measuring a personality trait?

For which of the following dimensions would you not be worried if the test-retest reliability turned out to be low?

Sarah has devised a 30 iten scale with which she intends to measure the trait of extraversion. She measures the cronbach alpha ( square ) of her scale and finds it to be 0.40. what implications does this have?

Linda has developed a psychological scale that is designed to measure the value that different people put on money. As part of her validation procedure, she compares the scores on this scale for people who have term deposit accounts and those who do not. ( the idea is that people who have these accounts should put a higher value on money). In doing this test, she is investigating

Linda shows her results to Xia who comments that although this is a reasonable test of validity, there is a problem with it. People who have term deposit accounts are more likely to have higher incomes or higher wealth and may not necessarily put a higher value on money. Xia's comment relates to the test's

many psychological tests are restricted in availability, and require the tester to be certified as a psychologist. Also a payment needs to be made for each administration. These practices are most easily justified by which of the following arguments?

which of the following is true of IQ test norms?

One ( and only one) of the following statements is true of the Flynn effect. which one?

You are doing a meta-analysis of 63 studies relating people's academic performance to their self-esteem. All the studies have been taken from highly esteemed journals of psychology or education. Your meta-analysis produces a mean correlation of 0.25 this number is likely to be

same meta-analysis. suppose we find that the correlation for people under the age of 35 is 0.24 and for people of 35 and over is 0.10. In this case, age would be a significant variable?