APA Style
APA is an acronym for this organization.
What is the American Psychological Association?
A variable whose values are chosen/manipulated by the researcher.
What is an independent variable?
Uses random assignment of participants to groups or conditions—to the different levels of the IV that is being manipulated. It is used to justify a causal conclusion.
What is an experiment/experimental design?
A calculated number based on the entire population.
What is a parameter?
A usually very large set of people about which we are interested in drawing conclusions.
What is the population?
The name of the section of the paper that describes participant characteristics, measures used in the study, and protocol.
What is the Method section?
The condition that provides a baseline or starting point for a comparison.
What is the control group?
In this design, a researcher does not directly manipulate the IV. For example, seeing the effects of gender on emotional expression.
What is a quasi-experimental design?
Graph that depicts frequencies on the y-axis and values of the variable on the x-axis.
What is a histogram?
The symbol used to denote the probability of any event, or an event more extreme, occurring.
What is p?
This part of an APA-formatted reference citation for a journal article is ITALICIZED.
What is the title of the journal (and the volume number)?
The different values taken by the independent variable. Also called conditions or treatments.
What are levels?
In this design, all levels of the independent variable are seen by each participant.
What is a within-subjects/repeated measures design?
Type of graph that depicts the relation between two continuous variables.
What is a scatterplot?
This theorem states that the sum, or the mean, of a number of independent variables has, approximately, a normal distribution, almost whatever the distributions of those variables.
What is the central limit theorem?
The only section of an APA style paper where a new paragraph is NOT indented.
What is the Abstract section?
An unwanted difference between groups, which is likely to limit the conclusions we can draw from a study.
What is a confound/confounding variable?
Term used to describe a study protocol whereby every participant in a study has an equal chance of being assigned to any of the conditions within an experiment.
What is random assignment?
When the frequency of participants' responses all congregate around the upper boundary of the measurement.
What is a ceiling effect?
Term used to describe when every member of a population has an equal chance of being a study participant.
What is random sampling?
The two options for placement of tables/figures.
What are after the reference list AND embedded in text after the first callout?
A variable that can take any of the unlimited number of values in some range.
What is a continuous variable?
The assignment of different participants to different orders of presentation, or different versions of the same condition, to reduce carryover effects.
What is counter-balancing?
Type of skew when the mean is lower than the median and mode.
What is negative skew?
Type of sampling whereby the existing participants recruit future participants from people they know.
What is snowball sampling?