PSY 12000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Operational Definition, Internal Validity, Scientific Method
1 Sep 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Objectives: understanding the process of the scientific method, define study design, types of variables, define operational. Technique that generates an empirical answer to a question. Theories- explain and predict observed events a. 1a. Hypotheses- specific predictions derived from theories a. 1a. Ex. putting on black will cause people to become more aggressive. Describing behavior- natural observations, case studies, surveys. Explaining behavior- casual correlation between two variables. Correlational approach- looks for relationships between two variables (non-experimental) a. 1b. a. 1c. Positive correlation: as one goes up, the other goes up as well. Negative correlation: as one goes up, the other goes down. Randomly assigned to each condition (equally distributed) Every participant needs to be tested truthfully = efficient results. Double-blind study- neither the participants and the researcher know who are the independent variables and dependent variables. Natural setting (no random assignments, not feasible) a. 1c. Can adapt different approaches to answer the same question for the experiment.
