Hypotheses & Variables
A tentative explanation or an educated guess for a phenomenon or observation, based on limited evidence, that can be tested.
What is Hypothesis?
The only research design that establishes cause-and-effect.
What is an experiment?
Participants must be told the study’s true purpose after deception.
What is debriefing?
Results that are not due to chance
What is statistical significance?
a phenomenon where a person experiences real improvements in their condition after receiving a fake or inactive treatment
What is placebo effect?
A clear, quantifiable definition of a variable that ensures replication.
What is an operational definition?
A study that examines one individual in extreme depth.
What is a case study?
When participants alter behavior because they know they’re being watched.
What is the Hawthorne effect?
The middle score in a dataset (used for skewed distributions).
What is the median?
Assigning participants to groups randomly to ensure fairness.
What is random assignment?
The variable that is purposefully altered by researcher to look for effect.
What is Independent Variable?
This research method observes behavior in natural settings.
What is naturalistic observation?
A study where neither participants nor researchers know who received treatment.
What is a double-blind study?
The average distance scores deviate from the mean.
What is standard deviation?
A sample that mirrors the population’s demographics.
What is a representative sample?
The group in an experiment that receives no treatment (baseline).
What is the control group?
A problem where an unseen variable affects a correlation (e.g., ice cream and murder rates).
What is the third-variable problem?
Bias where people lie on surveys to appear favorable.
What is social desirability bias?
A dataset with two peaks in its distribution.
What is bimodal?
"I knew it all along" bias after learning an outcome.
What is hindsight bias?
Numerical data preferred for statistical analysis.
What is quantitative data?
Combining data from multiple studies to analyze effect sizes.
What is a meta-analysis?
Ethical rule requiring minors and parents to agree to a study.
What is informed assent?
When outliers pull the mean to the left (low side) of the mode.
What is a negative skew?
Flaws accidentally introduced into a study (e.g., unaccounted variables).
What is a confound?