Research Methods Flashcards
(139 cards)
1
Q
What does psychology study?
A
Psychology scientifically studies how human and non-human minds represent and behave within the world. It is:
2
Q
Why is psychology considered historically new?
A
the first psychology lab in opened less than 145 years ago.
3
Q
Why is psychology considered complex?
A
each human brain has as many synapses – connections inside the brain – as there are known galaxies in the universe.
4
Q
What are the 3 stages to the scientific method?
A
Describe, Predict, Explain
5
Q
What questions do we ask to describe?
A
what do you see? What is
absent? Can we measure it?
6
Q
What questions do we ask to predict?
A
what will happen if I pull this lever? Does something change if I push this button?
7
Q
What questions do we ask to explain?
A
the internal mechanisms of this cube work in such-and-such way.
8
Q
How does psychology try to understand human nature?
A
Psychology attempts to understand human nature by using the scientific method: a collection of agreed-upon procedures for observing and communicating ideas about the world.
9
Q
What is a theory? Example?
A
a potential explanation for why or how something works.
e.g., one popular psychological theory states that humans think in “two modes”: a fast/heuristic one and a slow/rational one.
10
Q
What is a hypothesis? Example?
A
a prediction about what should occur in a specific context given a specific theory.
e.g., when rushed, people will make decisions following fast heuristics.
11
Q
What are the 3 natural limitations of the scientific method?
A
1.Psychologists believe that at least some (but likely not all) aspects of human nature can be studied through observation and scientific testing.
2.Psychologists assume that some aspects of human nature are fixed and predictable.
3.Psychologists formulate theories about a general/idealized person, not a specific individual.
12
Q
What is the question of fixedness?
A
how much of human nature is fixed, biologically determined, and universal, and how much of human nature is different between individuals?
13
Q
What are the three questions involved with the question of fixedness?
A
- How much of human nature is shaped by evolution?
- How much of human nature depends on our genes versus cultural learning?
- Are there any essential, necessary characteristics of human nature?
14
Q
What is the question of introspection?
A
do we ever truly know ourselves and why we do what we do?
15
Q
What are the questions involved with the question of introspection?
A
- Are we actually one person or many competing subparts?
- Why don’t we know exactly what we want?
- Why are we sometimes confused by our own behaviours?
16
Q
What is the question of computation?
A
do we think rationally like computers, or in a manner that is fundamentally different from logical information processing?
17
Q
What are the questions involved with the question of computation?
A
- In what sense are human beings rational?
- What is the relationship between the mind and the body?
- Would it ever be possible to create human-like intelligence in machines?
18
Q
What is the question of Uniqueness?
A
are human minds different from those of other animals? Why and how?
19
Q
What are the questions involved with the question of Uniqueness?
A
Are humans uniquely capable of consciousness, of language, of deep social interactions, etc.?
How much do psychological theories benefit from neuroscience?
20
Q
How has psychology been controversial?
A
- Psychology is historically tied to testing European ideals of human nature, and has been dominated by white, cis, male scientists.
- Psychology has played an active role in attempting to prove that there are differences in intelligence, personality, and motivation between people.
- Many psychological findings do not replicate, leading to a major shift in how we do statistics.
- Most non-psychologists care about prediction, not explanation.
21
Q
What are the three sources of knowledge?
A
Intuition, Observation, Authority
22
Q
How is knowledge in science obtained? Why?
A
knowledge in sciences occurs through observation and science is very against pure authority and pure intuition for acquiring knowledge.
23
Q
What is observation?
A
in being direct and internal it shares elements of intuition because it is the interaction between you and the world like intuition but it is much more sharable because it can be OBSERVED by others as well.
24
Q
What is Authority? What is an example?
A
Somebody tells you. Example, where and when you were born. Can be abused. it is too easy to exploit so it cannot be the only way we gain knowledge.
25
What is the problems with pure observation? Examples?
People don’t always agree on what they are experiencing. E.g., the dress illusion, yanni/laurel illusion, “fast rats study”
Observation is not always true!
E.g., visual illusions, the earth definitely appears to be flat.
Observation is not always possible.
E.g., How do we observe the internal thoughts and feelings of others?
Your observations can change!
26
What does science do to deal with the impossibility of observation? Examples?
Development of new tools: psychologists are inventing novel and cross-checking tools of measuring behaviour.
Examples include new tests, computerized tasks, fMRI, EEG, TMS, and others.
27
What does science do to avoid relying on pure observation?
Science does not rely on “pure” observation, but instead on observation following a set of community guidelines and rules.
28
How do we deal with the reliability of observation?
openness, falsifiable hypotheses, double-blind experiments
29
What is openness in regard to experiments?
all psychological data and measurement instruments should (ideally) be available for anyone to use, allowing others to evaluate them and check their reliability.
30
What is a Falsifiable hypothesis?
psychologists formulate inflexible predictions that can clearly be shown to be false with scientific observation alone.
31
What is a double Double-Blind experiments?
whenever possible, neither the participant nor the person getting the data should be aware of what the hypothesis is.
32
How do we deal with biases and differences in opinion?
Scientific Skepticism, Peer review, Replication
33
What is scientific Skepticism?
scientists begin from a position of skepticism and do not immediately trust or get attached to any theory or observation.
34
What is peer review?
scientific findings go through rigorous review from other scientists before getting published, to make sure biases did not sneak in.
35
What is replication?
no single study “proves” anything – science advances theories by accumulating dozens of confirmed or disconfirmed hypotheses. We only provide confirmation that something is more and more likely to be true. You also need to be able to keep replicating the work if you have truly discovered something.
36
What are the 5 formal steps to the scientific method?
Hypothesize, Operationalize, Measure, Analyze, Report
37
What is a hypothesis?
a hypothesis is a prediction, derived from a theory, about what should happen in a given situation.
38
What are confirmatory studies?
Begin with a falsifiable hypothesis from theory, and then seek to find data that either confirms or disconfirms it.
39
What are exploratory studies?
seek to describe some phenomena by collecting data, but don’t have any predictions at the onset of the study. Instead, we collect and describe data, looking for interesting patterns.
40
Why do psychologists spend most of their time doing exploratory studies?
psychologists spend most of their tie doing exploratory studies because the study is so new we are still trying to figure out how to define the phenomenon
41
What is an operational definition?
A description of a psychological property in measurable terms.
42
What is an example of a good operational definition for stage fright?
heart-rate immediately before the performance begins (good)
43
What happens if you have a bad operational definition?
if you have a bad operational definition you might not actually be measuring what you think you are.
44
What is an instrument?
anything that can provide us with a measurement of the
operational definition (e.g., a heart-rate monitor).
45
What three properties does a good instrument have?
validity, reliability, power/sensitivity
46
What is validity?
the instrument actually measures what it claims to measure.
47
What is reliability?
the instrument gives similar measurements each time it is used
to measure the same thing.
48
What is power/sensitivity?
the instrument can detect small differences in the measure (e.g., a beats-per-minute difference of 100 vs. 101).
49
What gives us data?
Operational definition + instrument can, when administered to a set of participants, give us data: a collection of measurements.
50
What is quantitative data?
data which is a numerical measurement (e.g., beats-per- minute). This is the most common type of data in the sciences. More common
51
What is Qualitative Data?
data which is non-numerical and descriptive (e.g., interview transcripts, pictures). A lot of exploratory studies use this.
52
What do we need to do to make sense of data?
we need to transform it into something interpretable:
53
how do we transform data into something interperatable?
Descriptive statistics
Inferential statistics
54
What are Descriptive statistics?
mathematical tools used to summarize data into more useful ways of understanding it.
55
What are inferential statistics?
mathematical tools used to help us decide if the data confirm or disconfirm some hypothesis.
56
What do psychologists do after data is collected and analyzed?
psychologists present it to their
peers, either at conferences or in academic journals.
57
What is Peer review?
is the process through which scientists receive feedback about their work from other scientists in the field.
58
What is the job of the peer reviewer?
Be skeptical of the claims in order to identify any alternative explanations.
Assess if the instruments appear valid, sensitive, and powerful.
Double-check if the statistics were properly carried out (especially inferential statistics)
59
What is the middle ground between intuition and authority?
observation
60
How do psychologists solve the problems with pure observation?
psychologists rely on the scientific method, develop novel instruments, and collect data using a rigorous method that ends in peer review.
61
What is the goal of theories?
If all goes well, over a long period of time our theories will be better matched to the true state of the world, and we will be able to derive better and better predictions about human nature.
62
What are study designs/study methods?
a set of guidelines for how data is collected for a study; each one has applications, benefits, and important limitations.
63
What are the 4 types of study designs?
Naturalistic Observation.
Case-Studies.
Correlational Studies.
Experiments.
64
What is naturalistic observation?
observing participants in their natural habitat (“in the wild”) and coding their behaviours in response to various everyday situations.
65
What are the pros to naturalistic observation?
Removes demand characteristics, maximizes external validity.
66
What is demand characteristic?
Situations in which a person behaves in ways that aren’t natural to them because they know they are in an experiement. A kind of bias that participants have because of their knowledge that they are in an experiment.
67
What are the cons of naturalistic observation?
possibility of experimenter bias, since they are choosing what to attend to and code; cannot tell the true cause of any behaviour.
68
What are case studies?
observing and measuring the behaviour of a single (usually unique) participant over an extended period of time. Can be done observationally or by giving them tests.
69
What are the pros of case studies?
can help find rare/unique cases that would otherwise be washed out in averaging data across participants. especially useful for finding “black swans”, a situation where your hypothesis can be falsified by a single observation. If you have a hypothesis in psych that says particular brain regions are implicated in long term memory, it takes one person who has a rare case to falsify this hypothesis.
70
What are the cons of case studies?
possibility of experimenter bias, since they are choosing the case study; cannot conclude causation, since it could be true only for the individual person.
71
What are correlational studies?
estimate the numerical relationship/prediction between two measured variables (i.e., how much can you predict about one variable if I know the value of the other?).
72
What are the majority of the studies done in psych?
correlational designs
73
What are the 4 steps to a correlational study?
1. Choose two variables you are interested in.
2.Administer instruments to measure the two variables quantitatively in as many people as possible.
3.Graph the relationship for all collected data points (one variable on the X axis and the other on the Y).
4.Estimate the “direction” and “strength” of the correlation.
74
What is a positive correlation?
(the people with more sleep also generally have higher grades)
75
What is No correlation
(the amount of sleep doesn’t predict anything
about grades)
76
What is a negative correlation?
(the people with more sleep also generally have lower grades)
77
What is the directionality problem?
for any correlation, you can never whether Variable A caused Variable B or if B caused A.
78
What is the third variable problem?
for any correlation, a third, unmeasured variable may be affecting both of the measured ones.
79
What are spurious correlations?
situations in which two variables are strongly correlated without any causal relationship at all
80
What is a common mistake with correlational studies in the media?
Claiming correlations are causal is a common mistake, especially in the media
81
What are experiments?
a procedure for gathering data where one variable is manipulated/changed to see its causal effect on another variable.
82
What is the independent variable?
the variable manipulated during the experiment.
83
What is the dependent variable?
the variable measured
84
What is random assignment?
every participant is put into the experimental/control groups randomly (e.g., any person who participates in our experiment has an equal chance of being in the low-sleep or the high-sleep condition).
85
What is random selection?
participants should be randomly chosen from the broader population; they should be representative of people as a whole.
86
What is the solution to directionality?
you control the direction by choosing which
variable you manipulate and which you measure (“temporal precedence”)
87
What is the solution to the third variable problem?
if you randomly selection and assign, then your two groups will be theoretically identical in every third variable, meaning that the only difference will be from the manipulation you made.
88
What can experiments tell us that correlational studies cannot?
When done correctly, experiments alone can tell us about whether one variable causes changes in another.
89
What 3 things do we have to ask ourselves how many times would a person need to guess correctly to make us believe they have superpowers?
This number depends on several things:
Your prior belief that supernatural powers exist.
Your decision on how many times they can guess correctly by pure chance. Your decision on how often you are willing to forgive a mistake they make.
90
What are the mistakes we make in interpreting our data?
False alarm, Miss
91
What is a false alarm in inferential statistics?
accepting an event that occurred by chance as meaningful.
92
What is a miss in inferential statistics?
rejecting a real effect and attributing it to chance.
93
What are inferential statistics?
are mathematical tools that help us determine what the best numbers to choose are, allowing us to specify our prior beliefs while balancing between luck and mistakes.
94
What do inferential statistics first identify?
Inferential statistics first specify what performance we should expect by
chance alone (i.e., if your friend is NOT psychic).
We make a distribution of possible outcomes and their probability if we assume that your friend is not psychic (e.g., flip a coin 60 times – how many times should they guess by chance alone?).
95
What is statistical significance?
the critical boundary at which we decide that the event we observed is unlikely to have come from chance alone, and that therefore something else must going on (in psychology, this critical boundary is usually set at 5%).
96
Which of the experimental methods are most generally used by psychologists?
Psychologists generally use one of four methods to collect data, with
correlational studies and experiments being most common.
97
What do experiments control for?
directionality and third-variable problems.
98
What do inferential statistics help us decide?
Inferential statistics help us decide if a difference between the control and experimental groups is likely to have occurred by chance, or whether it is more likely that the difference is meaningful.
99
What is the theory-data cycle?
involves developing a theory about what people do and collecting data that are compared with the theory—the data either confirm or disconfirm the theory.
100
That is a theory?
a set of propositions about what people do and why.
101
What is a hypothesis?
a prediction about what will happen based on a theory.
102
What is data?
Observations from a study, usually in numerical form, collected from people at certain times or in certain situations.
103
What is replication?
Means that a study has been conducted more than once on a new sample of participants and found the same basic results.
104
What is a vriable?
Something of interest that can vary from person to person or situation to situation. A variable has at least 2 levels, or values.
105
What is the manipulated variable?
one whose levels the researcher controls by assigning different participants different levels of that variable.
106
What is an operational deifnition?
specify the exact process for determining the levels or values of each variable.
107
What is descriptive research?
focused on one measured variable at a time with the goal of describing what is typical. They don’t tell us who is most likely to exhibit that behavior and in what circumstances
108
what is naturalistic observation?
psychologists observe the behaviour of people
Or animals in their normal everyday worlds and environments.
109
What is correlational research?
researchers measure 2 (or more) variables in order to understand the relationship between them.
110
What is experimental research?
conducted in a way that can support causal statements. Experiments have the value of isolating causal effects
111
What is the dependent variable?
the hypothesized effect
112
What does validity refer to?
refers to the appropriateness or the accuracy of some claim or conclusion.
Done by asking three questions:
o How well did the researchers operationalize the variables?
o Are the people they studied representative of the population of interest?
o Can we rule out the most plausible alternative explanations?
113
what is construct validity?
The specific assessment of how accurately the operationalizations used in a study can capture the variables of interest.
114
What is reliability?
the degree to which a measure yields consistent results each time it is administered
115
What is internal validity?
The ability of a study to rule out alternative explanations for a relationship between the two variables; one of the criteria for supporting a causal claim. Studies with confounds have poor internal validity.
116
What are descriptive statistics?
These statistics summarize participants’ differing responses in terms of what was most typical and how much people’s responses varied from the average.
117
What is frequency of distribution?
A descriptive statistic that takes the form of a bar graph In which the possible scores on a variable are listed on the x-axis and the total number of people who had each score is plotted on the y-axis
118
What is central tendency?
When you calculate the average number of points, you’re asking about the central tendency—the center of the batch of scores.
119
What is the mean?
a measure of central tendency that is an arithmetic average of a group of scores.
120
What is the median?
a measure of central tendency that is the middle most score; it is obtained by lining up the scores from smallest to largest and identifying the middle group. Descripitve statistic
121
What is the median?
a measure of central tendency that is the middle most score; it is obtained by lining up the scores from smallest to largest and identifying the middle group. Descripitve statistic
122
What is the mode?
A measure of central tendency that is the most common score in the batch of scores.
123
What is variability?
The extent to which the scores in a batch differ from one another is called.
124
What is standard deviation?
A variablility statistics that calculates how much, on average, a batch of scores varies around its mean. Descriptive statistic.
125
What is effect size?
A numerical estimate of the strength of the relationship between 2 variables. It can take the form of a correlational coefficient or, for an experiment, the difference between 2 group means divided by the standard deviations of the group.
126
What are Inferential statistics?
use sample results to infer what is true about the broader population.
127
What is statistical significance?
most important concept in inferential statistics. A process of inference that applies the rules of logic and probability to estimate whether the results obtained in a study sample are the same in the larger population.
- A significant result (a low p-value) does not mean that the hypothesis is “true.” It just means that the data are unlikely to occur under the null hypothesis.
127
What is Meta Analysis?
a process in which researchers locate all of the studies that have tested the same variables and mathematically average them to estimate the effect size of the entire body of studies
128
What is a False Positive?
a statistically significant finding that does not reflect a real effect.
129
What is P-Hacking?
: A family of questionable data analysis techniques, such as adding participants after the results are initially analyzed, looking for outliers, or trying new analyses in order to obtain p-values of just under .05 which can lead to unreplicable results.
130
What is HARking?
A questionable research practice in which researchers create an after-the-fact hypothesis about an unexpected research result, making it appear as if they predicted it all along.
131
What is the ethical principle of autonomy?
people must give informed consent for participating in research
132
What is the ethical principle of benefice?
proposed research is evaluated on its risks and benefits to participants and society.
133
What is the Ethical principle of Justice?
research should not be conducted disproportionately on one segment of the population
133
What is the Ethical principle of Justice?
research should not be conducted disproportionately on one segment of the population
134
What do we mean when we say that the theory data cycle is iterative?
researchers built support for a theory in a systematic way. Start with descriptive, move to correlatioal, use controlled variables to establish causation.
135
In comparative psychology what is the principle of replacement?
researchers should find alternatives to using animals if possible.
136
In comparative psychology what is the principle of refinement?
Researchers should modify the experiemental procedure to minimize or eliminate animal distress
137
In comparative psychology what is the principle of reduction?
Researchers should adopt experiemntal designs that require fewest animal subjects
