Research Method Notes

Research Method

1.    Hypothesis: expresses a relationship between two variables.

2.    Independent Variable: whatever is being manipulated in the experiment

3.    Dependent Variable: what ever is being measured in the experiment.

4.    Operational Definition: explain what you mean in your hypothesis. how will the variables be measured in "real life" terms.

5.    Hindsight Bias: the tendency to believe, after learning the outcome, that you knew all along.

6.    Overconfidence: we tend to think we know more than we do.

7.    The Barnum Effect: the tendency for people to accept very general or vague characterizations of themselves and take them to be accurate.

8.    Sampling: identify the population you want to study. The sample must be representative of the population you want to study.

9.    Experimental Method: looking to prove causal relationships. Cause = Effect

10. Confounding Variable: anything that could cause a change in B, that is not A.

11. Survey Method: most common type of study in psychology. Measure correlation. Cheap and fast. Need a good random sample.

12. Naturalistic Observation: watch subjects in their natural environment. Do not manipulate the environment.

13. Correlation Coefficient: a number that measures the strength of a relationship. Range is from -1 to +1. The relationship gets weaker the closer you get to zero.

14. Case Studies: a detailed picture of one or a few subjects. Tells us a great story...but is just descriptive research. Does not even give us correlation data.

15. Hawthorne Effect: just the fact that you know you are in an experiment can cause change.

16. Correlation Method: expresses a relationship between two variable. Does not show causation.

a.    Positive Correlation: the variables go in the SAME direction.

b.    Negative Correlation: the variables go in opposite direction.

17. Applied vs. Basic research

a.    Applied Research has clear, practical applications. YOU CAN USE IT!!!

b.    Basic Research expose questions that you may be curious about, but not intended to be immediately used.

18. Statistics: recording the results from out studies.

19. Mean(most common), median(average), mode(middle)

20. Descriptive Statistics: just describes set of data.

21. Other Measures of Variability

a.    Standard Deviation: the variance of scores around the mean.

b.    The higher the variance is, the more spread out the distribution is