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Intro To Research Methods In Psychology > Lecture 5 - Measurement > Flashcards

Lecture 5 - Measurement Flashcards

1
Q

What is Measurement?

A

A systematic procedure for the assignment of scores to individuals so that the scores accurately represent some characteristic of the individuals

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2
Q

What are some possible methods for measuring experience and behaviour?

A
  1. Self-report measures
  2. Observational measures
  3. Performance measured
  4. Physiological measures
  5. Linguistic measures
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3
Q

What is a Self-report measure?

A

A questionnaire is a research instrument consisting of a series of questions (or other types of prompts)

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4
Q

What are the advantages of self report measures?

A

• Can provide information about many things
• Can reach a large number of people, therefore more representative
• Cheap and convenient
• Standardised
• Can be done in person, online, by phone, etc

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5
Q

What are the disadvantages of self-report measures?

A

Self report biases
• Social desirability
• Depends on accuracy of recall
• Narrow focus of questions

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6
Q

What is an observational measure?

A

Trained individuals make judgements about behaviours of interest. These judgements are standardised across observers through the use of measurement instruments or checklists that allow behaviours to be counted or rated OR behaviour is automatically measured

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7
Q

What are the advantages of observational measures?

A

• Overcomes self-report biases
• Can provide realistic data

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8
Q

What are the disadvantages of observational measures?

A

• Depends on the ability of the observer
• Expensive and time-consuming

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9
Q

What is a performance measure?

A

Rigorously developed tests or tasks to accurately measure the individual differences in psychological variables using accuracy and reaction time

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10
Q

What are the advantages of performance measures?

A

• More objective than self-report
• Often computerised, making data easier to store accurately

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11
Q

What are the disadvantages of performance measures?

A

• Reductive
• Generalisation beyond the lab can be questionable

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12
Q

What are physiological measures?

A

Measures of biological response to natural or experimentally manipulated events

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13
Q

What are the advantages of physiological measures?

A

• Objective outcome measurements
• Very accurate

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14
Q

What are the disadvantages of physiological measures?

A

• Can be difficult to collect
• Expensive

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15
Q

What are linguistic measures?

A

Measures of characteristics of text data using specific software (e.g word count, sentiment analysis, pronoun use)

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16
Q

What are the advantages of linguistic measures?

A

• Easy to collect text data
• Lots of naturally occurring text interactions

17
Q

What are the disadvantages of linguistic measures?

A

• Quite crude (e.g. cannot detect sarcasm)
• Assumes that what people say reflects
what they truly think

18
Q

What kind of characteristics are measured?

A

Directly observable (age, height, weight, etc)
NOT directly observable (happiness, stress, attitudes, etc)

19
Q

What are psychological constructs?

A

Psychological constructs are descriptions of those aspects of behaviour or experience that we cannot directly observe or measure e.g. emotions, traits, attitudes, identities and abilities
Cannot be directly measured, only indirectly

20
Q

What are the four ways of thinking about psychological constructs?

A
  1. Natural kinds
  2. Social kinds
  3. Practical kinds
  4. Complex kinds
21
Q

What are natural kinds?

A

Psychological constructs are unchanging and ahistorical entities that exist whether or not they
are recognised as such. They have intrinsic properties that establish a natural set of kind members, making them the thing they are.

22
Q

What are social kinds?

A

Psychological constructs are socially constructed entities. A collection of phenomena defined by
a property or feature that is a social property or feature agreed upon by members of society.

23
Q

What are practical kinds?

A

Psychological constructs are descriptions that are useful in a scientific context

24
Q

What are complex kinds?

A

Psychological constructs emerge from the co-occurrence of elements within systems.

25
Q

What are the two processes that must be engaged in when deciding how to measure variables?

A

Conceptualisation - carefully thinking through a constructs meaning
And
Operationalisation - connects language of abstract ideas with that of empirical measures

26
Q

What is a conceptual definition?

A

A conceptual definition explains a variable in abstract, theoretical terms
e.g. Salary refers to the pay an employee receives for doing work, usually defined in a contract

27
Q

What is an operational definition?

A

An operational definition defines something (e.g. a variable, term, or object) in terms of the specific process or set of validation tests used to determine its presence and quantity.
Defines something in terms of the operations that count as measuring it.
e.g. We operationalised salary as the amount of money in euros paid to the employee by their employer per year before tax is deducted

28
Q

What is the unit of analysis?

A

> Refers to the level at which data is collected when measuring variables in social sciences
Usually individual
Can be group, community, organisation, social category, social institution or society

29
Q

What are categorical variables?

A

They have two or more categories but with no intrinsic order. These categories are often referred to as “levels” of the variable - can be further classified as
being nominal or dichotomous or binary

30
Q

What is nominal?

A

Have two or more categories but do not have any intrinsic order

31
Q

What is dichotomous or binary?

A

Have two categories only and can be fixed or designed

32
Q

What are ordinal variables?

A

They have two or more categories and an intrinsic order i.e. they can be ranked

33
Q

What are continuous variables?

A

Also known as quantitative variables - can be further classified as Interval and Ratio

34
Q

What is interval?

A

Have a numerical value and can be measured along a continuum

35
Q

What is Ratio?

A

Are interval variables that meet an additional condition - a measurement value of 0 (zero) must mean that there is none of that variable

Intro To Research Methods In Psychology (9 decks)

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