Exam 2: The Tools of Psychological Research

Researchers use ____________________ to decide whether data collected in a sample are representative of some population.

In order to learn whether the people in Newburg opposed or supported the expansion of the town's elementary school, Mayor Tyson randomly selected and interviewed 100 of the town's 10,000 residents.In this instance, the 100 people who were interviewed by the Mayor would be considered to be:

In some experiments, participants receive a(n) ____________________, which is an inactive "sugar" pill that looks just like the drug used in the experimental condition.

In a random sample:

Meredith is a doctor whose patients are participants in a research study testing a new cholesterol medication.Neither Meredith nor her patients knows whether the patients are receiving the new experimental drug or a placebo.This is an example of:

In random assignment, a researcher makes certain that each participant has an equal chance of being assigned to any of the groups or conditions in an experiment.

In ____________________ research, one actively manipulates some aspect of the testing environment to observe its effect on behavior.

You read that there is a statistically significant difference in the rate of depression among men and women.This means that the difference is not likely to be due to:

Professor Haskins conducted a study which showed that participants remembered new material better when they learned the material and were tested on the material in the same setting.Professor Haskins has also noticed that students tend to do better on term exams when they take the exams in the same room as the one in which the class normally met.This suggests that the results Professor Haskins obtained in the memory study:

Researchers studying human memory presented people with two lists of words.One list included the names of objects; the other list contained abstract nouns.The researchers found that people could remember more words from the list with object names.In this study, the type of word in the word list (object name or abstract noun) would be:

Dr.Burns is trying to determine whether the behavior that was observed in a sample is representative of behavior in the larger population.To help in making this determination, Dr.Burns should use:

Which of the following is part of scientific method?

A researcher who observes a behavior, detects regularities in the behavior, generates a hypothesis about the behavior, and checks the accuracy of his or her predictions through additional observation is utilizing:

The main advantage of a single-blind research study is that it minimizes the effect of:

Random assignment to either the control or experimental group is an important aspect of experimental procedures.Random assignment is used to ensure that:

Two variables have a(n) ____________________ correlation if the values of one variable increase as the values of the other variable also increase.

If a researcher found that family income and divorce rates had a strong positive correlation, it would indicate that:

Any uncontrolled variable that changes systematically with the independent variable is:

Defining memory in terms of the number of comprehension questions answered correctly after reading a short story would:

A student in Dr.Wagner's class is asking for the average and range of scores for the test first.The student is asking Dr.Wagner to provide: