Exam 2: Studying Behaviour Scientifically

One of the main limitations of archival measures of behaviour is that they are vulnerable to the social desirability bias.

Samantha conducts a study on her campus to better understand voting behaviour. She finds that the majority of students support one candidate. Samantha may not be able to generalize her findings to the larger population of all Canadians, because most of the students at her school are within a certain age group, and many have similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Samantha's problem is a lack of

What approach to understanding do scientists prefer and why?

Dr. West wanted to know about the media preferences of all students at Western University. The student body is 60 percent female and 40 percent male. So he conducted a survey in which 60 percent of the participants were women and 40 percent were men. In this study, Dr. West has used

Case studies enable us to make better generalizations than do naturalistic observations.

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 goal of meta-analysis is to

A psychologist is interested in studying stress. Since stress can mean different things to different people, she decides that she would like to assess stress by measuring people's blood pressure. This psychologist has just created a(n)

In experimental research, the researcher ______________ the independent variable and _________________ the dependent variable.

A researcher is conducting an experiment to gather evidence about the most effective study techniques for committing material to memory. They randomly assign students to one of three groups that are instructed to learn a list of words using one of three techniques. If every participant studies one list of words in each of the three conditions, what kind of design is this?

One of the primary techniques for reducing both the placebo effect and experimenter expectancy effects is random selection.

Which of the following would be most useful in helping you determine if two variables are associated with one another? A(n)

You are interested in the effects of both alcohol and cannabis on driving ability. So you run a between groups experiment. There are four groups: one group drinks alcohol only, one group smokes cannabis only, one group drinks alcohol and smokes cannabis, and the final group consumes no drugs at all. All participants then operate a driving simulator and you record driving speed, accidents and lane violations. You find that there are more driving problems in the group that consumes both alcohol and cannabis. In this study the independent variable is

Which of the following statements regarding animal research is true?

If a research study found that career motivation was higher among recent immigrants to Canada than long-standing Canadian residents, most people might readily offer several reasonable explanations for this finding. However, if a study found that career motivation was higher among long-standing Canadian residents than recent immigrants to Canada, most people might generate an equally convincing set of explanations. This example demonstrates the problems associated with

While conducting a research interview, a participant becomes slightly embarrassed and decides to answer the questions in such a way as to make himself look more friendly and acceptable to the interviewer. This example most clearly demonstrates which limitation of interview methods in research?

Describe the characteristics of a good theory.

Meta-analysis is used to

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

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?