Exam 2: Personality Research Methods

A test maker wants to show that scores on his or her new measure of schizophrenia are correlated with professional psychologists' ratings of schizophrenia. He or she is interested in establishing

To obtain an interaction in your research findings, you would need more than one

Give three reasons why statistically significant findings for a hypothesis may be, in reality, due to chance.

Among the disadvantages of the case study method is the

The sequence researchers move through when using the hypothesis-testing approach are

A test is said to have high internal consistency when it yields similar scores each time it is administered to the same people.

A psychologist develops a new test for measuring a construct he calls "need for Status." However, another psychologist to whom he shows the test says it looks like a measure of "need for Achievement." What type of evidence does the first psychologist need to collect to persuade the second psychologist?

A general statement about the relationship between constructs or events is called a

A formal prediction about the relationship between two or more variables is more commonly called a correlation.

A psychologist gives a group of participants 20 personality tests. He looks at the correlations between each test and each of the other 19 (a total of 180 correlation coefficients). He finds two correlations that are statistically significant-that is, that his statistical tests tell him would not occur more than five times out of 100. What should the psychologist conclude from his study?

Statistical tests of significance provide a yes or no answer to which question?

The correlation coefficient is an appropriate statistic when we want to understand the relationship between two measures.

You are studying the immediate effects of alcohol on people's feelings of well-being. Which of the following could be the dependent variable in this study?

Which of the following statements is true about theories of personality?

Which of the following is not true about a good theory?

Which of the following is correct about interpreting the results of statistical tests?

When scores from a test correlate with other measures of the same construct, researchers can determine the test's

Which of the following is a problem of test validity?

Which of the following is correct about the case study method?

A psychologist gives several personality tests to a group of participants. When sifting through her data, she is surprised to find that people born in the summer have a slightly higher (but statistically significant) need for Achievement than those born in the winter. She concludes that exposing children to the stimulation of the outdoors during the first few months of life (as the summer-born children were) results in a higher need for Achievement when the children become adults. How might we evaluate this conclusion?