Exam 6: Research Strategies and Validity

The purpose of the correlational research strategy is to describe the relationship between two variables and measure its strength.

The descriptive research strategy is the only strategy that is not concerned with relationships between variables.

Describe the kind of question that each of the major five research strategies intends to answer.

Describe the decisions involved in planning the research strategy, research design, and research procedure stages of a study.

If there are two or more possible explanations for the results of a research study, then the study has a problem with external validity.

What is a confounding variable? How does it affect the validity of your research study? Describe a research study that contains an example of a confounding variable.

What is an extraneous variable? How can it become a confounding variable? Describe a research study that contains an example of an extraneous variable.

Experiments allow researchers to ____.

Which research strategies attempt to address the same question about the relationship between variables?

When participants in one treatment condition have characteristics that are different from the characteristics of participants in another treatment condition, then ____ may be threatened.

Deciding whether a study will compare different groups of individuals or examine changes within the same group of individuals involves a decision about the research ____.

A study examining the percentage of children age 3-5 who are enrolled in preschool is an example of what research approach?

An extraneous variable can become a confounding variable if it changes systematically along with the other variables being examined in a research study.

A researcher designs a study to determine whether female preschoolers prefer sweetened or unsweetened cereal. The researcher first presents the children with the sweet cereal and measures how much they ate. Later, during the same session, the researcher presents the children with the unsweetened cereal and measures how much they ate. The research finds that the group of preschoolers ate more of the sweetened cereal and therefore prefers the sweetened cereal. Is this conclusion justified?

A research study records a score measuring Facebook use and a score measuring happiness level for each individual in a group of 20-year-old women. The study intends to determine whether there is a relationship between the two variables. This study is best characterized as ____ research.

A researcher finds that room color influences the mood of 45-year-old women in a sample. To preserve external validity, the researcher should generalize these findings to which group?

A research ____ is a general plan for implementing the research strategy.

A research study finds that a group of participants who received relaxation training had lower exam anxiety scores than a group who did not receive training. However, the researcher suspects that the difference between groups may be caused by the fact that the participants in one group are generally smarter than those in the other. This study has a problem with ____.

Selection bias is a threat to external validity.

A researcher is conducting a study in which a treatment group is compared to a no-treatment control group. The treatment group is tested in the lab and the control group is tested in a classroom. Time is likely to be a threat to the internal validity of the study.