Chapter 2 Study Questions and Definition

Psychology Chapter 2 Study Questions and Vocabulary Study questions: 2. What are the five steps and examples of the scientific method? 1. Define and describe the issue to be studied. Ex. Understanding beer drinking among college students. 2. Form a testable hypothesis. Ex. Students who buy pitchers of beer tend to drink more than students who buy beer in bottles. 3. Choose an appropriate research strategy. Ex. Conducting study that measures how much beer college students who buy pitchers consume versus how much beer college students who buy bottles consume. 4. Conduct the study to test your hypothesis. Ex. Run the study to see if hypothesis is accurate. 5. Analyze the data to support or reject your hypothesis. Ex. If results do not support hypothesis you can revise the hypothesis, if results do support hypothesis you can make additional predictions and test them. 5. What is an example of naturalistic observation? -parents and their toddlers at dinnertime on two occasions. 8. What are case studies used for? -used for in-depth observation of one subject 10. What are case studies valuable for? -providing in-depth information on rare and unusual conditions that we may not otherwise be able to study. 11. What is the main disadvantage of a case study? -case studies lack generalizability because of this conclusions that are drawn from case studies are limited to the topic being studied 12. Why are correlational studies conducted? -to test the relationship between two or more variables: television watching and violent behavior, the presence of malls in a community 16. What is the third variable problem with correlational studies? -researchers do not control the main variables in a correlational study 19. What is the difference between a population of interest and a sample? -a population of interest is where in the ideal experiment, researchers would include every person they are interested in studying, and a sample is a portion of subset of the population of interest20. What is the difference between a random sample and a sample of convenience? -in a random sample, every member of the population has an equal chance of being selected to participate in the study. In a sample of convenience, groups of people are easily accessible to the researcher. Ex. Students in psychology class are a sample of convenience 21. How does random assignment to experimental conditions work? -to eliminate the influence of such confounding variables, experimenters randomly assign participants to conditions. 22. What are examples of quasi-experiments? -suppose you want to see if smoking cigarettes during pregnancy cause lower birth weight babies. For ethical reasons, you cannot assign some pregnant women to smoke and prevent others from smoking. Instead, for your smoking condition, you must select pregnant women who already smoke. 26. When is using deception research all right? 28. What are five fallacies that prevent critical thinking and an example of each? 1. Irrelevant conclusion. Ex. Tom reads an experiment by Dr. Bailey. Tom is very upset that r, Bailey withheld food from rats so that they would run mazes in order to seek a food reward. Asked about the experiment, Tom criticizes its results as invalid because he ?would never trust the results of someone who starves animals.? 2. Composition. Ex. Jeannette reads an experiment by a team of five researchers led by Dr. Hawthorne, whom Jeannette greatly respects. Later Jeannette is asked what she thinks of the particular team of researchers that produced the article. Jeannette comments that ?it is a great team,? figuring that any team with Hawthorne on it must be great. 3. Personalization. Ex. Mrs. Dittman criticizes a particular statistic as yielding questionable results. Mrs. Fleming has used that statistic in her research. She decides that Dittman is criticizing her personally and attacks Dittman as ignorant and incompetent. 4. False cause. Ex. One day jack wears his fraternity t-shirt and the results of his experiment are positive. A couple weeks later Jack is again wearing his t-shirt and his results again work out. Jack decides that it is probably a good idea to wear his fraternity t-shirt on days when he will find out whether his results have worked out. 5. Ad hominem argument. Ex. Mr. Faver has been asked to comment on the research of Mr. Dunn. Faver has never liked Dunn and sees his chance to get back at what he perceives as injustices Dunn has committed toward him. Faver remarks that Dunn received his degree at a university that is not very well known and therefore people really should not trust Dunn?s results. Vocabulary 1,3,4,6,9,11,12,15,17,20,21,22,25,26,27 Case study- an in-depth observation of one personconfederates- individuals who pose as participants but who are really working for the researcherconfidentiality-researchers do not reveal which data were collected from which participantcorrelation- relationship between two or more variablesdependent variable- the variable in an experiment that measures any effect of the manipulationgeneralizability- how well a researcher?s findings apply to other individuals and situationsindependent variable- the variable in an experiment that is manipulatednaturalistic observations-research studies that are conducted in the environment in which the behavior typically occurspopulation of interest-researchers including every person they are interested in studyingquasi-experiment- a research study that is not a true experiment because participants are not randomly assigned to the conditions of the studyrandom assignment- participants have an equal chance of being placed in any condition of the studyrandom sample- every member of the population has an equal chance of being selected to participate in the studyrepresentative sample- reflect the whole population as much as possiblesample-a portion or subset of the population of interestsample of convenience-