Questions and Answers of Methods Behavioral Research

What is a meta-analysis?
Distinguish between an exact replication and a conceptual replication. What is the value of a conceptual replication?
Why is it important to pretest a problem for generalization? Discuss the reasons why including a pretest may affect the ability to generalize results.
What is the source of the problem of generalizing to other experimenters? How can this problem be solved?
How does the use of the Internet to recruit subjects and collect data impact external validity?
Find a meta-analysis published in a journal; two good sources are the Review of Educational Research and Psychological Bulletin. What conclusions were drawn from the meta-analysis? How were studies
How can the fact that most studies are conducted with college students, volunteers, and individuals from a limited location and culture potentially impact external validity?
Use PsycINFO to find abstracts of articles that included race, ethnicity, gender, or nationality as a key variable. Consider topics such as body image, rumination, academic achievement, or identity
Why should a researcher be concerned about generalizing to other populations?
Discuss the reasons that a researcher might obtain nonsignificant results.
What influences the probability of a Type II error?
What factors are involved in choosing a significance level?
Distinguish between a Type I and a Type II error. Why is your significance level the probability of making a Type I error?
What factors are most important in determining whether obtained results will be significant?
What is meant by statistical significance?
Distinguish between the null hypothesis and the research hypothesis. When does the researcher decide to reject the null hypothesis?
When a path diagram is shown, what information is conveyed by the arrows leading from one variable to another?
What is the purpose of partial correlation?
How does multiple correlation increase accuracy of prediction?
What is a regression equation? How might an employer use a regression equation?
What happens when a scatterplot shows the relationship to be curvilinear?
What is a correlation coefficient? What do the size and sign of the correlation coefficient tell us about the relationship between variables?
What is a measure of variability? Distinguish between the standard deviation and the range.
What is a measure of central tendency? Distinguish between the mean, median, and mode.
Ask 20 students on campus how many units (credits) they are taking, as well as how many hours per week they work in paid employment. Create a frequency distribution and find the mean for each data
Distinguish between a pie chart, bar graph, and frequency polygon. Construct one of each.
Your favorite newspaper, newsmagazine, or news-related website is a rich source of descriptive statistics on a variety of topics. Examine the past week’s news; describe at least five instances of
Distinguish among comparing percentages, comparing means, and correlating scores.
What is a cohort effect?
Distinguish between longitudinal, cross-sectional, and sequential methods.
Describe the interrupted time series and the control series designs. What are the strengths of the control series design as compared with the interrupted time series design?
Describe the nonequivalent control group pretest-posttest design. Why is this a quasi-experimental design rather than a true experiment?
Describe the threats to internal validity discussed in the text: history, maturation, testing, instrument decay, regression toward the mean, and selection differences.
Why does having a control group eliminate the problems associated with the one-group pretest-posttest design?
Why might a researcher use a quasi-experimental design rather than a true experimental design?
What is a multiple baseline design? Why is it used? Distinguish between multiple baseline designs across subjects, across behaviors, and across situations.
What is meant by baseline in a single-case design?
What is a reversal design? Why is an ABAB design superior to an ABA design?
Describe what a program evaluation researcher’s goals would be when addressing each of the five types of evaluation research questions.
Read each of the following research scenarios and then fill in the correct answer in each column of the table. Number of Number of Number of Number of independent experimental possible variables
Identify the number of conditions in a factorial design on the basis of knowing the number of independent variables and the number of levels of each independent variable.
Practice graphing the results of the experiment on the effect of amount and frequency of exercise on depression. In the actual experiment, there was a main effect of amount of exercise: Participants
Describe an IV Χ PV factorial design.
What are main effects in a factorial design? What is an interaction?
What is a factorial design? Why would a researcher use a factorial design?
Why would a researcher have more than two levels of the independent variable in an experiment?
What does a researcher do with the findings after completing a research project?
Describe the value of a debriefing following the study.
What is a manipulation check? How does it help the researcher interpret the results of an experiment?
What are experimenter expectancy effects? What are some solutions to the experimenter bias problem?
Design an experiment using a staged manipulation to test the hypothesis that when people are in a good mood, they are more likely to contribute to a charitable cause. Include a manipulation check in
What is the reason for a placebo group?
What are demand characteristics? Describe ways to minimize demand characteristics.
What is meant by the sensitivity of a dependent measure? What are ceiling and floor effects?
What are the general types of dependent variables?
What is the difference between staged and straightforward manipulations of an independent variable?
The procedure used to obtain your sample (i.e., random or nonrandom sampling) is not the same as the procedure for assigning participants to conditions; distinguish between random sampling and random
When would a researcher decide to use the matched pairs design? What would be the advantages of this design?
What are some of the ways of dealing with the problems of a repeated measures design?
What is a repeated measures design? What are the advantages of using a repeated measures design? What are the disadvantages?
Distinguish between the posttest-only design and the pretest-posttest design. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?
How do the two true experimental designs eliminate the problem of selection differences?
What is meant by the internal validity of an experiment?
Why don’t researchers who want to test hypotheses about the relationships between variables worry a great deal about random sampling?
Distinguish between haphazard and quota sampling.
Distinguish between simple random, stratified random, and cluster sampling.
Distinguish between probability and nonprobability sampling techniques. What are the implications of each?
How does sample size affect the interpretation of survey results?
What is a social desirability response set?
Define interviewer bias.
Compare the different questionnaire, interview, and Internet survey administration methods.
Suppose you want to know how many books in a bookstore have only male authors, only female authors, or both male and female authors (the “bookstore” in this case might be a large retail store,
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using questionnaires versus interviews in a survey?
What are some factors to take into consideration when constructing questions for surveys (including both questions and response alternatives)?
Select a topic for a survey. Write at least five closed-ended questions that you might include in the survey. For each question, write one “good” version and one “poor” version. For each poor
What is a survey? Describe some research questions you might address with a survey.
In the Chandra et al. (2008) study on television viewing and teen pregnancy, exposure to television with sexual content was associated with a higher likelihood for teen pregnancy. Can you conclude
What is archival research? What are the major sources of archival data?
What is a case study? When are case studies used? What is a psychobiography?
What is a coding system? What are some important considerations when developing a coding system?
What is systematic observation? Why are the data from systematic observation primarily quantitative?
Read each scenario below and determine whether a case study, naturalistic observation, systematic observation, or archival research was used. Archival Systematic Case study observation observation
Distinguish between participant and nonparticipant observation; between concealed and nonconcealed observation.
Why are the data in naturalistic observation research primarily qualitative?
What is naturalistic observation? How does a researcher collect data when conducting naturalistic observation research?
Distinguish between nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio scales.
What is a reactive measure?
Think of an important characteristic that you would look for in a potential romantic partner, such as humorous, intelligent, attractive, hardworking, religious, and so on. How might you measure that
Why isn’t face validity sufficient to establish the validity of a measure?
Take a personality test on the Internet (you can find such tests using Internet search engines). Based on the information provided, what can you conclude about the test’s reliability, construct
Discuss the concept of construct validity. Distinguish among the indicators of construct validity.
Describe the methods of determining the reliability of a measure.
Conduct a PsycINFO search to find information on the construct validity of a psychological measure. Specify construct validity as a search term along with terms such as aptitude test, personality
What is meant by the reliability of a measure? Distinguish between true score and measurement error.
What are some reasons for using the nonexperimental method to study relationships between variables?
How do direct experimental control and randomization influence the possible effects of extraneous variables?
What is meant by the problem of direction of cause and effect and the third-variable problem?
Distinguish between laboratory and field experiments.
Consider the hypothesis that stress at work causes family conflict at home.a. What type of relationship is proposed (e.g., positive linear, negative linear)?b. Graph the proposed relationship.c.
Distinguish among positive linear, negative linear, and curvilinear relationships.

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