AP Psych Unit #1 Quiz Review

Julie is interested in developing a test to measure achievement levels of middle school students. Which of the following domains of psychology is most applicable to Julie’s interest?

• Personality

• Counseling

• Biological

• Industrial-organizational

• Psychometric

Dr. Sampson follows the structuralist school of thought. Her techniques would most likely include

• presenting a participant with an ambiguous stimuli, such as a picture of an older woman looking over the shoulder of a younger woman, and then asking the participant to make up a story about what is going on in the picture

• asking a participant to describe whatever thoughts come to mind, without censorship

• presenting a participant with an object, such as a can of soda, and having the subject report his or her perceptions or experience of the can

• encouraging a client to reevaluate distorted or unhelpful thoughts and work on coping strategies

• rewarding a student with a sticker for every day that the student does not talk in class and with an extra ten minutes of recess after the student accumulates ten stickers

Samantha experienced a traumatic brain injury and afterward began to exhibit bizarre symptoms that no one had ever documented before. The best research method to study Samantha would be

• an experiment

• a correlational study

• a case study

• a survey

• naturalistic observation

What is the primary advantage of conducting a survey rather than using other types of research methods?

• Surveys can gather information from a diverse representation of and a large number of people.

• Surveys can demonstrate cause and effect.

• Surveys can provide an in-depth analysis of a unique individual or group.

• Surveys collect more descriptive data than other research methods do.

• Surveys allow the researcher to control the variables in a study.

The advantage of an experiment is that it allows a researcher to

• infer cause and affect

• test a large number of people

• see how people behave in their natural environment

• gain an in-depth knowledge of a person or small group of people

• find the relationship between two variables

Dr. Wilson, who teaches engineering classes, is interested in learning about how lack of sleep affects performance. What would be the best way to ensure that her findings are generalizable to all the students at her university?

• Randomly assigning half the students in one of her classes she teaches at into a condition where they are told to sleep four hours a night and other half a condition in which they are told to sleep eight hours a night.

• Surveying every tenth student listed in the university directory about their sleep habits

• Surveying all students in the classes she teaches.

• Studying 40 students over time, from their freshman year through their senior year, to see differences as the students mature.

• Asking friends who teach at other universities to collect and share data on their students.

Mr. Gregg wants to help his second-grade students improve their reading skills. He tests the students with 20 reading comprehension questions at the beginning of the year. Every week throughout the year he gives the students 30 minutes of reading comprehension tips. He tests the students at the end of the year with 20 reading comprehension questions that are similar in difficulty to those on the original test. He finds that the students’ reading comprehension has increased and concludes that his tips worked. Which of the following describes the most significant problem with Mr. Gregg’s study?

• Mr. Gregg should have had someone else test the children in case he was showing experimenter bias.

• Mr. Gregg should have tested his students every month so he could more accurately track their progress.

• It was unethical of Mr. Gregg to test the children without their parents’ consent.

• Mr. Gregg should have used the same test to ensure reliability.

• Mr. Gregg failed to account for changes in the students’ maturity.

The benefit of using inferential statistics is that it allows a researcher to

• describe the data

• find the measures of central tendency

• find the spread of the data

• make generalizations about a population

• visualize the raw data

Deception can be used in research when

• it is appropriate for what is being studied

• participants are debriefed before the experiment

• the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee approves it

• it is more expensive to use other methods

• the subjects in the experiment are college students

Which of the following is true of the American Psychological Association?

• It addresses a number of ethical guidelines for the practice of psychology.

• It determines whether studies that are going to be conducted at an institution are ethical.

• It regulates animal welfare in research.

• It regulates laws about psychological issues.

• It is home to one of the largest medical research centers.