Exam 11: Validity of Research Results in Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Research

Dr. Faust investigated the overall effectiveness of an experimental program to teach reading to children from cultures other than the U.S.. He found that the experimental program was much more effective than the standard reading program typically administered to these children. In this study, Dr. Faust investigated:

When scores improve simply due to having taken a pretest, this threat to validity is called:

If the inference that is made from the results of a study are correct, then the study has:

When we talk about inferring that the independent and dependent variables are related in the population of interest and the strength of the relationship is accurate, we are talking about:

Explain the threats to internal validity and be able to identify when they might exist in a research study.

A researcher does a one-group pretest-posttest study where she examines the effects of a reading program on children's reading comprehension level. She finds that the students' scores at the end of the school year are higher than at the beginning of the school year. She attributes the changes to the reading program. Her colleague argues you would expect that the children would improve anyway from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. Her colleague is arguing that the results are potentially due to:

When a significant amount of time passes between the first and second treatment so that participants may have experienced physical or mental changes that could be at least partially responsible for a change seen in the research participants, it could be an example of a history effect.

The ability to generalize results across settings is called:

The ability to generalize the results across variations of the treatment is called:

A researcher does a study of a mathematics program in a one-group pretest-posttest design. She gives the group of second graders a multiple-choice pretest. Unknown to her, the children had never taken a multiple-choice test. The children scored higher on the same test given at posttest. She argues that the children improved because of the mathematics program. That the children had never taken a multiple-choice test before and showed improvement at posttest suggests that one possible threat to her conclusion is a:

In a mixed methods study, if the quantitative part of the study appropriately followed from the previous phase of qualitative data collection, the study has achieved:

Explain the threats to external validity and when they might exist in a research study.

Name and define the four types of validity discussed in this chapter and describe their importance to research.

It is sometimes forgotten that the ability to generalize to the target population requires that:

The ability to generalize the results of a study to a population is greatest when:

Dr. Halen did an extensive literature search. As he worked his way through the literature he searched for research that disconfirmed his hypotheses. This is an example of:

To most accurately measure a construct, it is recommended that:

When there is differential maturation in two groups, this is also called:

Multiple validity is used to describe how well a researcher using mixed methods has tackled and resolved the applicable validity types.

A qualitative researcher is often concerned with identifying the immediate, intentional, particular, complex, and local causes of attitudes, actions, and events. This is known as: