Exam 5: Identifying Good Measurement

RESEARCH STUDY 5.1: Dr.Rodriquez is considering conducting a study examining whether narcissistic people have poorer romantic relationships than those who are not narcissistic.One of her first tasks is to determine which of her participants are narcissistic and which are not.She decides to use the scale created by a colleague, the Donal scale.Question 1 reads, "I tend not to think about other people as much as I think about myself." Question 2 reads, "I do not have a high opinion of myself." Question 3 reads, "I think other people think I am really special." Before using the measure in her study, Dr.Rodriquez gives the measure to a group of participants on the first day of the semester and again on the last day of the semester.Dr.Rodriquez is examining the scatterplot of the data she collected on the first day of the semester and the last day of the semester.On the scatterplot, she sees that the dots are very close to forming a diagonal line.This indicates which of the following?

Your friend Alanna says that when examining validity, you always want to see positive correlations.Why is she wrong?

RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr.Sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling.Pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble.Bothered by not having a good measure that he can give to clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling.The measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. Dr.Sheffield gives his measure to his supervisor, who is also an expert in pathological gambling.His supervisor says that his measure appears to test all the components of pathological gambling, including feeling restless when attempting to stop gambling, jeopardizing jobs in order to keep gambling, and using gambling to escape from problems and a bad mood.Given this information, Dr.Sheffield's measure has evidence of which of the following?

In interrogating the construct validity of a measure, which question should a researcher ask?

A correlation coefficient and a scatterplot both provide which of the following pieces of information?

RESEARCH STUDY 5.4: Dr.Li is interested in creating a measurement of religiosity.According to the dictionary, religiosity is "the quality of being religious; piety; devoutness." He creates a measure comprising 10 statements.People respond to each statement using the following scale (1 = strongly disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 5 = strongly agree).Some of the statements are below. Statement 1: "I believe in a religion." Statement 2: "Part of who I am stems from my religious beliefs." Statement 3: "I believe that religion is unnecessary." Provide a suggestion for how Dr.Li could establish the criterion validity of his measure.

RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr.Sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling.Pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble.Bothered by not having a good measure that he can give to clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling.The measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. To test his measure, Dr.Sheffield gives his measure to a group of people in Gamblers Anonymous (GA) and another group of people in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).He finds that people in the GA group have higher scores on his new measure than people in the AA group.This procedure is known as a:

Naomi is studying the effect of popularity on academic success for her research methods project.To do this, she has elementary school students rate how popular each member of their class is.She then uses this information to rank the students on popularity (e.g., John is the most popular, Vanessa is the second-most popular).Which of the following best describes this variable?

RESEARCH STUDY 5.1: Dr.Rodriquez is considering conducting a study examining whether narcissistic people have poorer romantic relationships than those who are not narcissistic.One of her first tasks is to determine which of her participants are narcissistic and which are not.She decides to use the scale created by a colleague, the Donal scale.Question 1 reads, "I tend not to think about other people as much as I think about myself." Question 2 reads, "I do not have a high opinion of myself." Question 3 reads, "I think other people think I am really special." Dr.Rodriquez decides to test the internal reliability of her measure.Which of the following results would make her happy?

RESEARCH STUDY 5.4: Dr.Li is interested in creating a measurement of religiosity.According to the dictionary, religiosity is "the quality of being religious; piety; devoutness." He creates a measure comprising 10 statements.People respond to each statement using the following scale (1 = strongly disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 5 = strongly agree).Some of the statements are below. Statement 1: "I believe in a religion." Statement 2: "Part of who I am stems from my religious beliefs." Statement 3: "I believe that religion is unnecessary." Provide a suggestion for how Dr.Li could establish the face validity of his measure and a suggestion for how he could establish the content validity of his measure.

RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr.Sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling.Pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble.Bothered by not having a good measure that he can give to clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling.The measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. Dr.Sheffield decides to test the criterion validity of his measure.Dr.Sheffield gives his measure to a group of people that includes suspected problem gamblers and non-gamblers.Which of the following options below could he also do to get evidence for criterion validity?

Hosea is studying the relationship between caffeine consumption and problem-solving ability.Which of the following is a quantitative way to operationalize problem-solving ability?

Asking many similar questions when trying to measure a concept is done to:

Explain why many people feel that physiological measurements are the best way to operationalize a variable but why they may not, in fact, be the best.

Two researchers tell you they study the same thing.However, when you look at their research papers, they do not use similar methodologies or measurements.How is this possible?

Your friend Dominic is complaining about having to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), a test that is required to go to graduate school and is similar to the ACT and SAT.He complains, "Tests like the GRE don't really measure how well people actually do in graduate school." Dominic is questioning the of the test.

RESEARCH STUDY 5.2: Dr.Sheffield is a clinical psychologist who specializes in treating pathological gambling.Pathological gambling is defined as being unable to resist impulses to gamble.Bothered by not having a good measure that he can give to clients to determine whether they are suffering from this condition, he creates a new measure of pathological gambling.The measure has 15 questions, and it takes 20 minutes to complete. Dr.Sheffield wants to establish the discriminant validity of his pathological gambling measure.He gives his measure and three others to a group of 100 people.Which of the following provides the best evidence for discriminant validity?

Which types of reliability can be analyzed with scatterplots?

An educational psychologist is testing the discriminant validity of a new measure of numerical learning difficulties.He gives his measure to a group of students along with another measure of verbal learning difficulties, which he predicts should not be strongly related to numerical learning difficulties.Which of the following correlations would the psychologist hope to find in order to establish discriminant validity?

RESEARCH STUDY 5.3: Lauren, Sarah, and Jennifer are students in Dr.Shaffer's Research Methods class.For a class assignment, they are asked to devise an operational definition for romantic attachment, or love.Lauren decides to ask a group of married couples to report if they are in love with their spouse (1 indicates "Yes, I am in love" and 2 indicates "No, I am not in love").Sarah decides to watch couples sitting on campus and measure how close they sit together, assuming that people who sit closer together are more in love.Jennifer decides to recruit a group of newlyweds and measure the change in heart rate that occurs between the start of the study (when the person is alone) and the moment they see their spouse walk into the room. For each student described above, indicate whether the operational definition of her variable is self-reported, observational, or physiological.