Causation
These are the three requirements that must be met to be able to claim causation.
What is empirical association, time order, and nonspuriousness?
This is the requirement of a true experiment that is the most difficult to achieve.
What is random assignment (to groups)?
These types of survey questions provide explicit response choices for the participant to choose from.
What are closed-ended questions?
This hypothesis says that there is no relationship between the IV and the DV.
What is the null hypothesis?
The time of day is hypothesized to affect the likelihood of victim injury in a robbery. This is an example of this type of hypothesis.
What is a two-tailed (nondirectional) alternative hypothesis?
This wonderful adage reminds us to address possible spurious relationships before inferring a causal relationship exists.
What is "Correlation does not imply causation!"?
This is not a requirement of a true experiment, but it can help determine the effectiveness of a treatment, particularly because it can allow for within-group comparisons to be made.
What is a pretest?
These small groups are used to facilitate an open-ended discussion to gather information at the group level.
What are focus groups?
This is the name of the chosen probability level at which point a big difference is considered "big enough" to be real.
What is the alpha level?
Suzy's IV is childhood victimization. Jon's IV is unemployment. Both studies have the same DV: adult criminality. Thus, Suzy's study addresses this element much better than Jon's.
What is time order (and, thus, causality)?
If I want to see a change in a population over time, the best way to do this would be to conduct one of these types of nonexperimental studies.
What is a repeated cross-sectional design?
This type of quasi-experiment uses matching (either at the individual or group level) to try to make the control group look as much like the treatment group as possible.
What is a nonequivalent control group design?
This is the process that involves administering a survey to a small group before actually distributing it to your entire intended sample.
What is a pretest?
If the p-value of our statistic is very high, it would suggest that the pattern that we see is likely due to this.
What is random error?
A new program to address alcoholism is randomly provided to half of the members of an AA group to test if it helps maintain their sobriety. The control group finds out the extra help that the treatment group is receiving, and decides that it's unfair and gives up on their AA program as a result. This is an example of this effect, which can invalidate the results of the study.
What is demoralization (a type of contamination)?
This type of variable can help explain the causal mechanism and is the variable that the IV works through to have the causal effect on the DV.
What is an intervening variable?
When subjects learn from the testing process and change their results on the posttest due simply to this learning process, this is an example of this source of invalidity in experiments and quasi-experiments.
What is endogenous change?
You can use this to combine multiple questions to measure a single concept.
What is an index or scale?
If our p value is .05, this would be our level of confidence that the relationship is real.
What is .95 (95%)?
If I run a true experiment, it really helps me be confident when I talk about a causal relationship. However, it makes it a little tougher to be confident about this.
What is the generalizability of my findings?
High research costs and subject attrition (losing people from your sample) and fatigue (people becoming bored with the study) are major problems with this type of nonexperimental design.
What is a fixed-sample panel design?
This is what makes before-and-after designs different from any other experimental or quasi-experimental design.
What is the absence of a control group?
This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage to participant observation field research.
What is the ability of participants to keep information from the researcher?
Just because a statistical finding is significant does not mean it is this.
What is important?
Our alpha level has been set at .05. If the probability of our statistic happening by chance is around 3%, this is the hypothesis we would reject.
What is the null hypothesis?