Unit 2 Review -Research Methods

What must a researcher do to fulfill the ethical principle of informed consent?

• Keep information about participants confidential
• Allow participants to choose whether to take part
• Provide participants with a pre-experimental explanation of the study
• Protect participants from potential harm

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

Which descriptive statistic would a researcher use to describe how close a student's SAT score is to a school's average SAT score?

• Correlation coefficient
• mean
• median
• Standard Deviation

Which method of study should a psychology researcher use if she is interested in testing whether a specific reward in a classroom situation cause students to behave better?

• Case Study
• Experiment
• Survey
• Naturalistic Observation

When a distribution of scores is skewed, which of the following is the most representative measure of central tendency?

• Inference
• Standard Deviation
• Mean
• Median

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

Which of the following represents naturalistic observation?

• Researchers watch and record how elementary school children interact on the playground
• Researchers bring participants into a laboratory to see how they respond to a puzzle with no solution
• A principal looks at the relationships between the number of students absence and their grades
• Two grandparents sit in the front row to watch their grandson's first piano recital

"Monday Morning Quarterback" rarely act surprised about the outcome of the weekend football games.  This tendency to believe they knew how the game would turn out is best explained by which psychological principle?

• Overconfidence
• Hindsight Bias
• Intuition
• Illusory Correlation

A journalism student is writing an article about her school's cell phone policy, and she'd like to interview a random sample of students. Which of the following is the best example of a random sample?

• The writer arrives at school early and interviews the first five students who come through the main entrance
• The writer pulls names of five students from a hat that contains all students names.  She interviews the selected five students
• The writer asks her teacher if she can distribute a brief survey to the students in her AP Psych class
• The writer asks the principle for the names of 10 students who have had their cell phone confiscated for a day for violating the policy and interviews those 10 students

Which of the following is a positive correlation?

• As study time decreases, students achieve lower grades
• As levels of self-esteem decline, levels of depression increase
• Gas mileage decreases as vehicle weight increases
• People who exercise regularly are less likely to be obese