Exam 6: Research Validity

For her senior thesis, Nancy surveys fellow students about cheating. Her findings suggest that cheating is virtually non-existent on her campus. This is not consistent with the fact that, in the past semester, two dozen students have been found guilty by the Honor Board of cheating. Which of the following explanations would fall under the heading of "reactivity?"

Paul wanted to insure that the results of his study could be generalized so he manipulated the independent variable and then identified and measured all the dependent variables that he thought might be affected by the independent variable. What type of validity was Paul focusing on?

A researcher hypothesizes that Hispanic children will do worse on a verbal aptitude test than will Asian children. As she administers the tests to each child, she unintentionally gives the Asian children lots of hints and extra time to finish but she has no interaction with the Hispanic children and takes their papers away as soon as the allotted time has passed. This is an example of

In a study designed to assess the effectiveness of a new therapeutic technique to help patients stop smoking, research participants are asked to record in a diary each time they smoke a cigarette. At the beginning of the two week experiment participants are very careful about noting every time they smoke a cigarette. However by the end of the two weeks they often forget to record each cigarette they smoke making it appear that they smoked less at the end of the experimental treatment. The results in this study are confounded by

Without internal validity, an experimenter cannot

Most psychological researchers want to know about behavior of people in general, but are often restricted to studying the college students immediately available to them on their campus. "All people" is the ______population while "college students" is the___________ population.

The confounding effects referred to collectively as "maturation" include all of the following plausible rival hypotheses EXCEPT

An urban community clinic wants to try a new method of getting drug addicts to kick their addiction. They advertise for participants in their lobby, and allow volunteers to choose to participate either in the treatment or control group. Three months later, they find that 65% of the volunteers are off drugs. This example illustrates the possibility of __________ as a plausible rival hypothesis.

We like to believe that the only major influence on participant performance in an experiment is the manipulation of the independent variable. In fact, some research has shown that

A health psychology student wanted to know if giving an electric shock to participants each time they inhale from a cigarette will reduce how deeply they inhale. She arranges for smokers to be randomly assigned to two groups: the first group receives no shock and the second group a painful shock for each puff. Some participants quit the experiment, mostly from the painful- shock group. At the end, there was no difference between the two groups on depth of inhaling. Which of the following is a correct conclusion?

In an experiment on the effects of massed versus distributed practice on learning, introductory psychology students who volunteered for extra credit were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Both groups were to practice a perceptual-motor task five times for 10 minutes each. Group 1 did all five 10-minute practice sessions in one evening while group 2 was asked to do one 10-minute practice session a night for five consecutive nights. All of the participants in Group 1 completed the experiment, but only 30% of the participants in Group 2 showed up for all five nights. This study is an example of confounding by

Which of the following are types of experimenter attributes that may bias a research study?

Which of the following is an example of the construct of research participants?

If an experiment is ecologically valid, then the effect of the treatment used in that experiment should be

In most cases there is a _________ relationship between internal and external validity.

Although external validity is a desirable quality in an experiment, it is often attained at the expense of

When the results of a study can be generalized across different but related dependent variables, that is called

The confounding variable where participants are lost from one research group and not others is called

"Regression artifact" refers to the mathematical fact that

A sports psychologist develops a new technique that might improve accuracy in shooting free throws in school children. To test her technique she arranges to give the new program to a girls' physical education class and the standard technique to the boys' physical education class. She finds that indeed the girls' accuracy in shooting improved more than the boys' accuracy. A colleague correctly points out