Deck 6: A: Observational Research: The Many Forms of Discipline in Parents Bag of Tricks

Question 1

Within a 5-hour observation period during the school day a child was observed engaging in off-task behavior (e.g. ,daydreaming,watching television,playing with pencil,drawing with pencil)54 times for a total of 122 minutes.What would be the most beneficial descriptive statistic to describe these data and why? Calculate the descriptive statistic and report correctly.

Answer 1

5 minutes.

Question 2

Develop a study that uses active deception and explain when active deception is appropriate in research experiments.

Answer 2

Active deception,or purposefully misleading or lying to participants in a study,is acceptable only when the information could not be collected otherwise.If you wanted to study the reaction of individuals to bad news,you could not actually make bad events happen in their lives to observe their reactions.That would be unethical.However,if there is minimal and brief distress involved,you can randomly assign individuals into three different conditions: one group receives good news ,one group receives bad news (e.g. ,parked illegally and being given a parking fine),and the other group is given no news.After giving the news to the groups,you can observe their reactions based on a coding system and have the participants rate their level of anxiety.

Question 3

A chocolate company would like to design a research experiment to determine if the taste of their company's candy bar improves if the consumer knows the brand name of the chocolate before rating it.The chocolate company is using in-house researchers and seven different company's chocolate bars in their testing.What is the best research design for this research study?

Answer 3

An experimental design is necessary for this research question;there must be a control condition and an experimental condition.Additionally,it is also important that double-blind methodology is used,so that the researchers are unaware of what chocolate bar the participants are tasting and the participants are also unaware of what chocolate bar they are tasting so as not to influence the ratings.

Question 4

Develop a research study that would be appropriate for duration recording and specifically identify your research question.

Question 5

Describe how today's reality television shows lack ecological validity,though they boast of showing the true lives of the individuals they record.