Basic Vocabulary
A tentative statement about a relationship between two or more variables that can be tested through research.
What is a hypothesis?
When one variable increases and the other increases.
The distance between the smaller and largest number in a dataset.
What is the range?
What is it called when the researchers explain the research to participants and they agree to participate.
What is informed consent?
Seeking information that backs up when a person already believes.
What is confirmation bias?
The idea that a testable idea can be disproven.
What is falsifiability?
The major benefit of the experimental research method.
What is its ability to establish causation rather than just correlation?
A measure of central tendency that involves adding all values and dividing by the number of values.
What is the mean?
What is confidentiality?
Overestimating our own knowledge and abilities.
What is overconfidence?
A clear, precise, quantifiable definition of how a variable is measured or manipulated in a research study.
What is an operational definition?
A type of research method in which results from a number of studies are combined.
What is a meta-analysis?
When a dataset has two values that appear most often.
What is a bimodal distribution?
The general step researchers must take when doing research with human subjects.
What is IRB approval?
Looking back and saying that you knew the outcome before, even when you did not.
What is hindsight bias?
The large group that the research is meant to apply to.
What is a population?
The name of the process through which participants are assigned to a control and experimental group in order to avoid confounding variables.
What is random assignment?
What we would call your sample if it properly mimics the general population that you are studying.
What is a representative sample?
How is it different when getting permission from minors to participate in a study.
What is the researcher must obtain informed assent from the minor and informed consent from the parent?
The idea what people change their behavior when they know they're being observed.
What is the Hawthorne Effect?
Descriptive data of the type that might be gleaned from a case study (as opposed to numerical data).
What is qualitative data?
When two variables are positively correlated, but researchers don't know whether variable A leads to a change in variable B or the other way around.
What is a directionality problem?
When the bias of the researcher skews the results.
What is experimenter bias?
The process that must occur after the research is done if the research involves deception.
What is debriefing?
The general name for cognitive biases and mental shortcuts.
What are heuristics?