PSYC 2130 Chapter 2: 2130 - Chapter Two
Document Summary
A self report (s) of your own behaviour (b) Behavourioid: participants report what they think they would do under various circumstances. A self repot (s) of how many times you suffered with the flu (l) Your parents report (i) of how healthy you were as a child (l) Reliable data: measurements that reflect what you are trying to access and are not affected by anything else. Measurement error: the variation of a number around its true mean due to uncontrolled, essentially random influences. The less there is of this error the more reliable the measurement. Aggregation: the combining together of different measurements, such as by averaging them. When all measurements are averaged, the error almost completely cancels each other out. The more error filled your measurements are, the more of them you need. The truth will be in their somewhere near the average. Validity: the degree to which a measurement actually reflects what one thinks or hopes it does.