PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Blind Experiment, Scientific Method, Operational Definition

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jill L Atkinson

Document Summary

Theory: a scientific theory is an idea, or conceptual model, that is designed to explain existing facts and make predictions about new facts: it can be supported, rejected, or modified based on new evidence. Hypothesis: a testable prediction about processes that can be observed and measured: a good hypothesis should be able to be disproved. If the result is not due to chance, it should be found consistently by anyone using the same methods: this is reliability. Steps in the scientific method: formulate hypothesis, design a study, collect the data, analyze the data and obtain results, draw conclusions from the results. There are many phenomena that you cannot see directly: to make these subjective phenomena objective, we must use an operational definition. Operational definition: describes the concept of how it is demonstrated in an observable or measurable way. In scientific one first looks for correlation: correlation is the association between variables.