Exam 2: Studying Behaviour Scientifically

Dr. West wanted to know the average entry grades for students at Western University. So he looked at student applications for the last 50 years and determined that the grade average to be accepted was 83.5. Dr. West has used

If an experimental procedure involves deception then what are the ethical obligations of the experimenter toward the participants?

Dr. Mitchell has just had a paper rejected from the Canadian Journal of Psychology. The editor suggested that demand characteristics might account for the results. Most likely, what kind of study did Dr. Mitchell conduct?

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

Kyle could feel himself coming down with a nasty cold. His roommate, Dave, had been bragging about a new cold remedy he had discovered, guaranteeing that the remedy cured the common cold. Kyle went to Dave's room and asked him some questions about this new cure. Kyle was demonstrating critical thinking skills by asking

Internal validity represents the degree to which

An unobtrusive measure assesses behaviour without participants being aware that they are being observed.

Dr. Mitchell has just had a paper rejected from the Canadian Journal of Psychology. The editor suggested that experimenter expectancy effects might account for the results. Most likely, what kind of study did Dr. Mitchell conduct?

Considering the following data set: (3, 4, 4, 0, 4, 1, 5), which of the following statements is/are FALSE?

A statistic that indicates the strength and direction of a relation between two variables is called a(n)_____________________ coefficient.

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. In this design, what is the dependent variable?

Researchers often manipulate more than one independent variable in experiments because it better captures the complexity of human behaviour.

Imagine that someone has developed an absurd theory that asserts that every child with blond hair will be over 6 feet tall when they are adults. An adult friend of yours is blond but happens to only be 5'6". This example best demonstrates which of the following advantages of the case study method?

Why are operational definitions important?

Dr. Archer, who wants to study the effects of poverty on crime, selects a group of individuals, and collects information about each individual's annual income and criminal record (or lack thereof). Dr. Archer finds that income is negatively correlated with crime. On the basis of these findings we can conclude that

Dr. Paulo was interested in art appreciation between men and women. So, he showed a number of paintings to a group of men and to a separate group of women. The paintings were illuminated in either low light or higher, intense light. He found that there was no difference between men and women in the low light, but under higher intense light, the women liked the paintings better than the men. This result illustrates the concept of

Amy conducts an experiment in which she discovers that brunettes have more fun. She has three brunette females and three blond females go to the same party and record how many times they were asked to dance. In her experiment, Amy has defined the dependent variable as the number of times they were asked to dance, and the ___________ as hair colour.

The size or absolute value of the correlation coefficient tells us

A researcher decides to collect some data to test the hypothesis that playing violent video games is related to violent behaviour. They ask a group of parents from a local elementary school to estimate two things over the last six months: how many hours per week of violent video games their children played, as well as the number of violent incidents they can recall their children being involved in. Which of the following is not a limitation inherent to this design?

Your textbook describes the research by Diener and Seligman exploring factors related to happiness. They found that happier students spent more time socializing with people and had more satisfying relationships compared to unhappy undergraduates. They did not find a relationship between levels of happiness and amount of money individuals had. Explain how this is a correlational study. Using this study, also explain why cause and effect cannot be determined from correlational designs due to: 1) the bidirectionality problem, and 2) the third variable problem.