Operational Definitions
The purpose of operational definitions.
What is replication of an experiment?
The group in research that does not get the independent variable.
What is control group?
A psychologist spends six months living in a remote village, observing how children learn language without formal schooling. She takes notes but does not interfere.
What is naturalistic objservation?
In a study about whether sunlight affects plant growth, it would be the plant growth.
What is dependent variable?
It's the information that is most considered when we use anchoring bias.
What is the information we hear or see first?
When someone wants to study wheat growth based on amount of rain, the best operational definition for growth.
The group in experiments that DOES get the independent variable.
What is experimental group?
Researchers collect data from 50 previously published studies on the effects of caffeine on memory and statistically analyze the overall trends.
What is meta analysis?
In a study about whether people living in rural dwellings feel more safe than those who live in urban dwellings, this would be the dwellings.
What is independent variable?
What is false? (random assignment)
When some wants to study how different type of music affect our heartbeat. The best operational definition of heartbeat.
What is the amount of time a heart beats in a minute.
A study on eating habits uses students from the professor's class who is running the experiment. It's the type of sample.
What is Convenience sample?
A team interviews a single individual who has an extremely rare form of amnesia. They gather detailed information about his life, symptoms, and brain scans.
What is case study?
A researcher investigates whether the number of hours of sleep affects how well participants recall a list of 30 random words the next day. This is the memory of participants.
What is the dependent variable?
What is to avoid bias and confounding variables?
This operational definition is lacking. Try to explain how. In a research study on whether happiness changes our productivity, the research operationally defines happiness as a feeling of joy.
What is there is no way to measure the feeling - too general/broad?
An example of a representative sample.
A psychologist sends out a questionnaire to 2,000 college students asking about their sleep habits and stress levels.
What is survey or correlation?
Students are randomly assigned to take the same math test in rooms set to 60°F, 70°F, or 80°F. Their scores are then compared. This is the temperature.
What is the independent variable?
It means falsifiability.
What is when a hypothesis of an experiment can be proven false.
A psychologist studies the impact of daily Instagram usage (measured in minutes) on self-esteem scores among teenagers using the Broad Self-Esteem inventory. Identify the operational definition of both Instagram use and self-esteem.
What is time in minutes and Broad Self Esteem inventory?
A researcher wants to study stress levels among high school students in the U.S. She surveys 100 students from a private prep school in Manhattan. It's what is wrong with this sample. (use vocabulary from our reading)
It is too small and not a representative sample.
Students are randomly assigned to either listen to music or sit in silence while studying. Their test scores are compared afterward.
What is experimentation?
Students receive either praise, constructive criticism, or no feedback after completing a task. Researchers then measure how long they persist on a second, more difficult task. This is the amount of time.
What is the dependent variable?