Exam 2: The Tools of Psychological Research

When the variability of test scores is the critical factor in determine the grades the students received, which method of grading is being used?

Achievement tests measure an individual's:

Researchers studying the effects of caffeine tested the reaction times of women who first drank either a beverage with caffeine or a decaffeinated version of the same beverage.In this study, the type of beverage that each participant drinks would be:

When the probability the results of a research study were due to chance is less than 5%, the results are said to be:

The extent to which an experiment has effectively controlled for confounding variables is called:

The method involving recording naturally occurring behavior without any interference is known as ____________________.

Which type of study would control for participant expectations, but not expectations on the part of the investigator?

A student in Professor Hummel's class wants to know if the test scores were all close to the average, or if they were spread out.Professor Hummel could provide the student with:

An uncontrolled variable that changes systematically with the independent variable is a(n) ____________________ variable.

Researchers studying the effects of caffeine tested the reaction times of women who first drank either a beverage with caffeine or a decaffeinated version of the same beverage.In this study, the reaction time of each participant would be:

After a research study, a researcher maintains ____________________, which means that he or she is not to discuss or report personal information obtained in the research.

When the results of a scientific observation are representative of real life, the results have internal validity.

The most frequently occurring score in a set of scores is:

Production at the factory was poor, so management had a team of observers film the workers on the job.The films showed everyone working at top speed, and production was the highest in a year.A likely explanation for the change in the workers' behavior is:

Control is one of the most important factors in which research method?

Sometimes the observations from case studies fail to generalize to other individuals or situations.This represents a problem with:

A group of researchers wanted to determine whether people were more likely to follow directions if the person giving the directions was in uniform.An individual wearing a security guard's uniform gave half the participants parking instructions, and half the participants were given parking instructions by an individual wearing street clothes.The researchers recorded whether the participants parked in the spot they were directed to.In this study, the independent variable is:

Which of the following occurs when each person in a population has an equal chance of being selected to participate in a research study?

You obtained the following data (1, 1, 2, 4, 7).The mean, median, and mode of these data are:

The middle point in a set of scores is: