Exam 5: Research Methods In The Study of Abnormal Behaviour

In order for the 1990 Ontario Mental Health Supplement Study to identify the strongest predictors of later mental health problems, what type of research design did the researchers use?

Susan is a graduate student in psychology and she has been stumped for days trying to figure out why a child she is working with misbehaves. She rereads all of her case notes and plans to observe the child the next day at school. What would help Susan make sense of all the information she has?

People diagnosed with schizophrenia are randomly assigned to either an attention-training group or a social skills training group. Equal numbers of males and females were in each training group. Scores on a measure of thought disorder, a prominent symptom in schizophrenia, were examined after the end of the training sessions. In addition, there was a no-schizophrenia group. This study was a(n) ________________ design.

A requirement of all empirical research in psychology is:

Dr. Hyper treated 20 patients using a new therapeutic procedure. An outside observer rated the children's activity level on a laboratory task before and after the treatment; 80% of the children decreased their activity level following treatment, and Dr. Hyper concluded that the procedure was highly effective. What is the major problem with Dr. Hyper's experiment?

A meta-analysis conducted by Moncrieff and Kirsch (2005) concluded that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have no clinically meaningful advantage over placebos even though:

Which research method would be most useful in generating hypotheses about the cause of a newly discovered, rare form of abnormality?

The Smith et al. (1980) meta-analysis of psychotherapy outcome studies concluded that:

In a single-subject ABAB design, ABAB refers to:

Psychopathologists rely upon correlational research as:

Of parental divorce, unemployment, and addiction, parental divorce is the most significant risk factor for physical abuse of a child.

Case studies are not useful in:

Qualitative research conducted with formerly depressed women (Lafrance & Stoppard, 2006) revealed that the women:

There is a strong, positive correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates. Explain why.

In order to be certain that the effects are due to the experimental manipulation, experimenters typically include:

In the case study example of the 54-year-old white Canadian male who was imprisoned for zoophilia, generalization would be difficult to make because of the prisoner's:

The term science refers to both a method and a goal.

Jessica designs a study to investigate differences between patients with eating disorders and people without eating disorders. She constructs a self-report questionnaire with items related to problematic eating behaviours. Based on her research, she indicates that eating disorders can be defined by scores above 35 on her test instrument. This approach is best described as:

Define internal and external validity. Which is more important for an experiment? Why?

"Approximately 1500 new cases of AIDS were diagnosed in 1988 in San Francisco." This is an estimate of the ________________ of AIDS.