Methodology 1
An ethical principle of research whereby participants are not placed under any pressure or coercion to be involved in the study.
What is voluntary participation?
A type of study in which researchers manipulate an independent variable and measure a dependent variable to determine a cause-and-effect relationship.
What is an experimental design?
The inferential statistics which is calculated to determine whether the difference between conditions or the relationship between variables is statistically significant or not.
What is p-value?
Any variables (other than the independent variable) identified after a study has been conducted which seem likely to have influenced the dependent variable.
What is a confounding variable?
This non-parametric inferential test is a standardised measure of the strength and direction of the relationship between two variables.
What is a Spearman's correlation co-efficient?
A method for recruiting participants into a study where each person in the target population has an equal chance of being selected for the study (i.e., to be part of the sample population).
What is random sampling?
Related to ethical conduct in research, this refers to intentionally misleading participants about the true purpose of a study or the events that will actually transpire.
What is deception?
A consideration when running an inferential test, this characteristic is related to an alternative hypothesis which does not indicate a direction of the mean difference or change in the dependent variable, but merely indicates that there will be a difference.
What is a two-tailed test?
A type of external validity which considers the degree to which the results can be generalised to the target population given the sample population of the study.
What is population validity?
A variation of random sampling whereby the population is divided into subgroups and weighted based on demographic characteristics of the target population which are relevant to the aim of the study.
What is stratified sampling?
To express a variable in terms of how it will be manipulated or measured.
What is operationalise?
A method of controlling for experimenter bias and demand characteristics in an experimental design by ensuring that both the participants and researcher do not know which condition the participants are in.
What is a double-blind procedure?
Determined by considering the p-value of an inferential test, this term in used in concluding whether there is likely a true effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable.
What is statistical significance?
The degree to which the effects observed in an experiment (i.e., changes to the dependent variable) are due to the manipulation of the independent variable and not confounds.
What is internal validity?
A threat to internal validity, this describes any aspects of a study that may have caused participants to behave as they think the researchers want or expect given the aim.
What are demand characteristics?
An experimental research design in which pairs of participants who are very similar in a characteristic(s) that may influence the dependent variable are selected and then allocated to different IV conditions.
What is matched participants design?
A method of controlling for order effects in a repeated measure design by randomly determining the order of each condition for each participant.
What is counterbalancing?
Processed data used to describe characteristics of conditions/variables. Includes measures of central tendency and measures of dispersion.
What are descriptive statistics?
This inferential statistics represents the range within which the true mean of the target population lies (within a specified degree of certainty).
What are 95% confidence intervals?
A data type that exists on an arbitrary numerical scale where the exact numerical value has no meaning other than to rank a set of data points or represent a category in a hierarchical manner. Differences between data points may not be consistent.
What is ordinal data?
Research method similar to an experimental design except that it makes use of naturally occurring groups rather than randomly assigning participants to groups.
A type of research design that observes the same participants on many occasions over a long period of time.
What is a longitudinal study?
A parametric statistical test used to test for a significant difference between two conditions of a repeated measures design with interval/ratio data. (Parametric meaning assumptions of normality have been met).
What is a dependent (paired) t-test?
Consideration for the quality of a study and its results given the extent to which measures of the dependent variable vary across time (from one use to another) and between different researchers. Examples include test-retest and inter-rater.
What is external reliability?
Accepting null hypothesis when you should have rejected it; not finding a statistically significant effect when a true effect does actually exist.
What is a Type 2 error?