Exam 2: Studying Behaviour Scientifically

Dr.Jones is interested in conducting a survey of all the college students at her university.She is careful when conducting her research to make sure that each student on campus has an equal opportunity to participate in her survey.To create her survey sample Dr.Jones will use:

A researcher is concerned that his expectations about the effectiveness of a new drug are influencing the reports of participants in his studies.Specifically,he believes that this new drug is effective and has shared this information with participants in his research.In order to better control the effect of his own expectations on participants,this researcher should:

A hypothesis is best considered as:

All of the following decrease internal validity EXCEPT:

The ___________ procedure strengthens the internal validity of a study because it minimizes the effects of experimenter or participant expectations on the outcome of an experiment.

Scientists typically test their understanding through:

An educational psychologist wants to study the effectiveness of using the Internet as an instructional method for academic courses.She designs a study in which one group of students is assigned to take a course in a standard classroom with a live instructor.Another group of students is assigned to take the same course over the Internet.The psychologist then compares the course grades for students in each of the two groups.In this case,the instruction method (regular class vs.Internet class)would be considered the:

A researcher wants to know how much time students in a dorm spend watching TV,but she has noticed that students tend to leave the TV room when she comes in to see who is watching.To get around this problem,she decides to observe wear-and-tear on the TV remote control as a measure of how much time students spend watching TV.Like many psychologists,this researcher is using a(n):

A social psychologist is interested in studying aggression in sports fans.He goes to various sporting events and keeps track of the number of aggressive acts that occur between fans using a well-defined coding system.This psychologist is using which of the following ways of measuring behaviour?

An advantage of survey research is that it:

A stress researcher wants to look at the effect of meditation on anxiety.To do this,she creates two groups of subjects: one group receives instruction in meditation,while the other receives no training at all.One month later,she has subjects complete a questionnaire designed to measure anxiety and she looks to see whether there are any differences in anxiety between the two groups.In this experiment,the meditation condition (meditation vs.no meditation)is the independent variable and anxiety is the _____________ variable.

The size or absolute value of the correlation coefficient tells us:

An in-depth study of an individual,a group,or an event is called a _________________.

As part of their research on bystander apathy,John Darley and Bibb Latané created fake "emergencies" in their experimental laboratory and observed people's responses.When making these observations,what step of the scientific process were they engaged in?

A hypothesis is a tentative explanation or prediction about some phenomenon.

In ______________ research,the experimenter measures whether the manipulation of one variable causes a change in a second variable.

Researcher Jane Goodall frequently uses ____________ in her research on the behaviour of chimpanzees.

One of the significant advantages of correlational research is that:

The optimum operational definition for exam stress would be to focus on the psychological variable of self-reported anxiety.

Which of the following statements about naturalistic observations is true?