research that is applicable in every day life

Ex: research that tries to find out the best way to quit smoking

research that answers psychological questions but has no real-world application

Ex: research on how people form attitudes

• Variable in an experiment that is purposely manipulated.
• is believed to affect dependent variable
• usually follows the word "if" in an "if; then" hypothesis.

• Variable that is measured
• in psychology- usually a behavior
• affected by change in IV
• follows "then" in an "if; then" hypothesis.

• explanation of how to measure variables
• guidelines for carrying out experiment

anyone or anything that could be in sample/group your are trying to study

• Ex: If you are doing research on high school study habits.  Your population is high school students.

every membe of population has an equal chance of being selected

• Best way to random sample: computer generated lists

Ensure sample represents population in some criteria

• Ex: Population: North Forsyth Students

            Stratified Sampling: ensuring racial diversity

                                        mimicks NF 

• Shows cause and effect
• lab: experiment done in lab setting
• field: experiment conducted in world

• any variable not accounted for that may impact experiment results
• Participant: confounding variables related to particpant (ie: IQ, sleep patterns, etc.)
• Situation: confounding variables related to situation (ie: location, size of room, volume)

• neither experimenter nor participant knows who is in experimental or control group
• reduces experimenter bias

• participant does not know if they are in experimental or control group

• Positive correlation
• upward sloping
• independent variable positively impact dependent variable
• ex: the # of hours studied positively correlates with your grade

• Negative correlation
• downward sloping
• IV negatively affects DV
• ex: # of beers drank negatively correlates with grade

• watching people in natural habitat/note taking
•  ex: Jane Goodall living with gorillas to notate daily living

• detailed research into a participants life
• very detailed but hard to generalize to larger population

• attempt to mark center of data/frequency
• Mean: average
• Median: score in the middle
• Mode: score that appears most often

• pieces of data that may skew the mean
• positive skew: a few high scores among low scores
• negative skew: a few low scores among high scores

• Symetric: average data
• Right-skewed: positively skewed
• Left-skewed: neagatively skewed

• attempt to describe the diversity of the distribution
• Range: distance between highest & lowest
• Standard deviation: distance of a score from the mean

• way to compare scores from different distribution sets/measured in standard deviations
• Ex: Ashley scored a 115 on the IQ test.  Mean is 100.  Standard deviation is 15.  Her z-score is +1.0.  (She was 1 standard deviation higher than the mean)

• Normal Curve: bell shaped curve where 68% of scores fall within 1 standard deviation of mean.

• measure of relationship b/w 2 variables
• ranges from +1.0 to -1.0
• 0.0 means there's no relationship

r= +0.57

What is this correlation coefficient written out?

• way to plot points of data to observe correlation
• IV on x-axis
• DV on y-axis

• deciding whether or not findings can be applied to population as whole

• shows the significance of the results
• lower p value means results are significant (good)
• higher p value means results have no significance (bad)
• Cut-off 0.05 p value (means less than 5% chance results are by chance)

After study, participants should be told purpose of the study and ways to find out about results

experiment results were not due to chance