General Experimental Psychology: Exam #2

Front 1

What two things do experimenters do to enhance/protect construct validity?

Back 1

1. Manipulation check

2. Pilot study

Front 2

What is a manipulation check?

Back 2

A test used to determine the effectiveness of a manipulation in an experimental design.

Front 3

What is a pilot study?

Back 3

A small study designed to gather information prior to a larger study, in order to improve the quality of a larger study. (Shorter; cheaper)

(Can be considered a "mini-experiment".)

Front 4

What do you have to make sure of when gathering participants for a pilot study?

Back 4

That they're from the same population.

Front 5

What is external validity?

Back 5

The degree to which findings generalize to:

*Other groups

*Other situations/contexts

Ex.; The fact that the participants of Dr. Schwartz's studies are primarily UTEP students raises the question asking whether her findings generalize to the entire population.

Front 6

What is conducted to assess external validity?

Back 6

Replication studies

Front 7

What is observation bias?

Back 7

When an experimenter's expectation influences the interpretation (interpretation of patterns of dependent variable) of the results.

Front 8

What major thing tends to cause observation bias experimenters?

Back 8

Open-ended questions

Front 9

One group, pretest/posttest design

Back 9

Design in which a researcher recruits one group of participants, measures them on a pretest, exposes them to a treatment or change, and then measures them on a posttest; an ineffective experimental design

Front 10

Maturation

Back 10

A change in behavior that emerges more or less spontaneously over time through natural development or spontaneous improvement; e.g. people slowly adapt to strange environments, children get better at walking and talking, plants get taller without any outside help

Front 11

Spontaneous remission

Back 11

Phenomenon that occurs when the symptoms of depression or other disorders get better, for no known cause, with time

Front 12

History threat

Back 12

Threat to internal validity that occurs when a "historical" or external event occurs to everyone in the treatment group at the same time as treatment, so it is unclear whether the change in the experimental group group is caused by the treatment received or by the historical event

Front 13

Regression threat

Back 13

Threat caused by a statistical concept called regression toward the mean; when a performance is extreme at time 1, at time 2 it is likely to be closer to a typical, or average, performance

Front 14

Attrition

Back 14

Occurs when people drop out of the study before it ends; aka "mortality"

Front 15

Testing effect

Back 15

A type of order effect in which scores change over time just because participants have taken the test more than once

Front 16

Instrumentation threat

Back 16

Threat that occurs when a measuring instrument changes over time from having been used before; aka instrument decay

Front 17

Demand characteristics

Back 17

A problem when participants guess what the study is supposed to be about and change their behavior in the expected direction

Front 18

Double-blind study

Back 18

Study in which neither the participants nor the researchers who evaluate them know who is in the treatment group and who is in the comparison group

Front 19

Design confound

Back 19

When a second variable unintentionally varies systematically with the independent variable

Front 20

Selection effect

Back 20

In an independent-groups design, when the two independent variable groups have systematically different kinds of participants in them

Front 21

Order effect

Back 21

In a within-groups design, when the effect of the independent variable is confounded with practice, fatigue, boredom, or carryover from one level to the other

Front 22

Regression to the mean

Back 22

An experimental group whose score is extreme at pretest will get better (or worse) over time, because many random events that caused the extreme pretest scores do not recur the same way at posttest

Front 23

Observer bias

Back 23

An experimental group's ratings differ from a comparison group's, but only because the researcher expects the group's ratings to differ

Front 24

Placebo effect

Back 24

Participants in an experimental group improve only because they believe in the efficacy of the therapy or drug they receive

Front 25

Null effect

Back 25

Finding that the independent variable did not make a difference in the dependent variable; no significant correlation between two variables

Front 26

Weak manipulations

Back 26

Changes in the independent variable that are not significant enough to affect the dependent variable

Front 27

Ceiling effect

Back 27

Special cases of weak manipulations or insensitive measures that cause independent variable groups to all score at the high end

Front 28

Floor effect

Back 28

Special cases of weak manipulations or insensitive measures that cause independent variable groups to all score at the low end

Front 29

Measurement error

Back 29

Factors that can inflate or deflate a person's true score on a dependent measure

Front 30

Situation noise

Back 30

A third factor that could cause variability within-groups and obscure true group differences

Front 31

Which kind of variability is random and, hence, does not threaten internal validity?

Back 31

Unsystematic variability

Front 32

Matched-groups design

Back 32

An experimental design in which participants who are similar on some measured variable are grouped into sets, then the members of each matched set are randomly assigned to different experimental conditions

Front 33

Between-groups design/independent-groups design

Back 33

An experimental design in which different groups of participants are placed into different levels of the independent variable

Front 34

Within-groups design

Back 34

An experimental design in which there is only a single group of participants, and each participant is presented with all levels of the independent variable

Front 35

Posttest-only design

Back 35

An experimental design in which participants are randomly assigned to independent variable groups and are tested on the dependent variable once

Front 36

Pretest/posttest design

Back 36

An experimental design in which participants are randomly assigned to at least two groups and are tested on the key dependent variable twice-once before exposure to the independent variable, and once after exposure

Front 37

Concurrent-measures design

Back 37

A within-groups design in which participants are exposed to all the levels of an independent variable at roughly the same time, and a single attitudinal or behavioral preference is the dependent measure

Front 38

Repeated-measures design

Back 38

A within-groups design in which participants are measured on a dependent variable more than once, after exposure to each level of the independent variable