Psychological Research

Professor Ober carefully monitors and records the behaviors of children on school playgrounds to track the development of their physical skills. Professor Ober is engaged in:

• experimentation. 
• replication. 
• survey research.
• naturalistic observation. 

Researchers who study single individuals in depth in order to uncover general principles of thinking and behavior are using which research method?

• experimentation 
• correlational study
• naturalistic observation 
• case study

Which research design is focused on gathering information about self-reported perceptions or attitudes through questionnaires?

• survey method 
• correlational study 
• naturalistic observation 
• case study

A confounding variable:

• could influence the results of an experiment because of researcher bias.
• is a variable other than the independent variable that may influence the dependent variable. 
• is an outside influence affecting the results of a naturalistic observation study. 
• is the one factor the researcher changes between the control and experimental groups

Which ethical principle requires that at the end of the study participants be told about the true purpose of the research?

• Institutional Review Board Approval
• Informed Consent
• Confidentiality
• Debriefing

A researcher wants to conduct an experiment to determine if eating a cookie before class each day improves student grades.  He uses two psychology classes for the experiment, providing daily cookies to one and nothing to the other.  At the end of the semester, the researcher compares the final grades of students in the two classes. What is the independent variable for this experiment

• The students in the class that received the cookies
• The presence or absence of the cookies
• The students in the class that didn't receive cookies
• the period of the day that the two classes met

Johnny is part of a study designed to test the ability of a pill to cure the migraines of people who experience chronic migraines. After a few days, Johnny finds that the pill has alleviated his migraines and he experiences far fewer than usual. However, unbeknownst to Johnny, the pill he has been taking is nothing more than a sugar pill. What effect is Johnny most likely under the influence of?

• The Stratified Effect
• The Self-Bias Effect
• The Placebo Effect
• The Psychoanalytic Effect

Dr. Schulte wants to investigate if aggressive behavior in children is increased if they view violent videos.  In this instance, the dependent variable is

• 
  violent videos
• 
  aggressive behavior
• 
  a placebo
• 
  the control condition

Which of the following describes an independent variable within an experiment?

• a measured factor within an experiment that the the researcher cannot change and depends on the independent variab
• variables that are eliminated or removed in order to see the relationship between the independent and dependent variables
• a measured factor within an experiment that the researcher can change
  
• a factor within an experiment that is considered extraneous, it also correlates with the dependent or independent variable
  

Operational definitions are used for which of the following reasons?

• They enable researchers to replicate studies by precisely describing the variables and how they are used.
• They exclude mental processes from being studied, as they are no longer considered part of the scientific study of psychology.
• They determine which test of statistical significance will be used to analyze the results of the experiment
• They determine whether the experiment is better suited for a laboratory or a field setting