Exam 2: Research Methods in Psychology

Discuss why phrenology is an example of discipline whose methods are now considered as highly reliable but surely not valid.

Describe the main methods used in qualitative research to obtain qualitative data.

The static group comparison design is prone to sample selection biases.

Greta, a PhD student in psychology, is preparing her thesis proposal. The institutional ethics committee at her university will approve her research if:

Questionnaires are an excellent technique as they can provide information about every type of phenomenon because people very generally very good at introspection and self-report.

Dr Law wants to study whether caffeine consumption is positively associated to exams' performance. Dr Law is undertaking a(n):

The correlational method provides clear scientific evidence of cause and effect relationships.

Which of the following is not a stage of the scientific research method?

Why it's always advised to read published papers with a sceptical mindest?

One of the techniques used to analyse qualitative data consists of trying to develop a theory starting from the data, using a bottom-up approach rather than interpreting the data based on pre-existing theories. This method is known as __________.

Split-half reliability consists of:

Technological advances may render measures of accuracy and reaction time obsolete, leading to a possible extinction of behavioural methods in psychology.

To be approved on a reliable scientific journal a study needs to go through a process of peer review.

Decision based on intuition and anecdote must be avoided in psychology research practice as they are non-scientific approaches.

In a factorial design different conditions can vary either __________ or __________ from each other.

Dr Brown is interested in finding out whether different types of beverages and nicotine influence students' performance on a memory task. She randomly allocates 200 university students into three groups. Thirty minutes before the task, she asks Group A to drink 30ml of black coffee, Group B to drink 30ml of orange juice and Group C to drink 30ml of Coke. In addition, she makes sure that in each group half of the participants are regular cigarette smokers and smoke one cigarette 10 minutes before the memory task. How many independent variables are used in Dr Brown's experiment?

Ecological validity is also referred to as external validity.

With respect to a basic experimental design, which of the following statement is correct?

The variable that is manipulated by the experimenter is called __________. The variable that is measured by the experimenter is called __________.

Both spread and standard deviation are considered measures of dispersion.