Exam 2: Personality Research Methods

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

A personality researcher administered her new measure of self-esteem to a group of participants. She waited two weeks and then gave the test to the same people again. She found that scores on the test changed quite a bit during the two-week period. Many participants who had scored low during the first administration scored high the second time, and many who had scored high initially scored low on the second administration. What problem does the researcher have with the new test?

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

Which of the following correlation coefficients indicates the strongest relationship?

Define validity. List by name the several kinds of test validity. Discuss each kind of validity by contrasting examples of tests that are low and high in it.

A test that measures consistently over time has a high

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. What might we conclude from this?

A researcher compares people who have gone to college with those who have not. He predicts and finds that people with a college education are less likely to smoke or drink than those who never went. In this example, the researcher is using

What is made difficult by the "file drawer" problem?

Describe a test or measure that is low in reliability. How can you know that it has poor reliability? Would a correlation coefficient for reliability be closer to 1.00 or -1.00 for this test? List some reasons why personality tests can be low in reliability.

When conducting personality research, in most cases a researcher should

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

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?

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

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

A researcher maintains that a person's self?esteem level is largely inherited from his or her parents. From this she derives the prediction that children with low self?esteem probably come from homes where one or both parents have low self?esteem. In this case, the prediction is the

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

A test maker conducts the appropriate statistical tests to make sure that all the items on his new personality test are measuring the same basic concept. He wants to demonstrate that the test has good

The use of nonmanipulated variables is required when an independent variable exists without the experimenter's intervention.