PSY 605 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Institute For Operations Research And The Management Sciences, Dependent And Independent Variables, Longitudinal Study
30 May 2018
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• Types of Health Psychology Research
We have a lot of different types of research
• Two different terms:
• Correlational studies (aka Observational studies) this is when we aren't doing an
experiment, we just look at How is X associated with Y - for ex. If we find that the more cigs
you smoke the higher your Blood pressure is - we're not doing an exp in this case but lets
say we look at a 1000 smokers from Toronto and we take a look at the smokers and we see
how much they smoke and we measure their blood pressure and we find out that the
higher their blood pressure the more cigs they smoke - does this that smoking cause high
blood pressure? We can't know that from this tsuyd as there could be other factors
involved so these are known as observational studies/correlational studies - we're
observing people, we're not intervening, not doing any treatment
• These studies can either be cross-sectional studies where it's just in one point int time
where we take a 1000 smokers and have them ans a questionnaire from march 1st to june
1st
• There are also:
Longitudinal studies (Prospective designs) where you follow up with people over time
and you can see trends over time
Ex. cholesterol is associated with age - how do we know with a cross sectional study?
Maybe older people have cholesterol more because of a poor diet or lack of exercise
so in a longitudinal study we follow people over time and if you see that over time
regardless of how much they exercise, as they get older their cholesterol still goes up
- now the data is strong than that from a cross sectional study
o Follow people across time
o Can see trends over time (e.g., cholesterol and age)
Retrospective studies (case-control studies) in this type of study we want to see:
o See if a variable was is related to health by looking at past records (e.g., how
long people lived with high or low cholesterol) we could look at peopl
prospectively that is, start a study with them now and follow up for 30 years but
there are also retrospective studies where we could look at past medical
records ex. Records of everyone at Toronto heart center and see how much
they lived and how much cholesterol they had associated with age so it's the
sae tpe of thig as orrelatioal as e do’t do eperiets o the ut e
either do it prospectively or retrospectively
• Types of Health Psychology Research
• Experimental Designs (e.g., Randomized controlled trials)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
We have a lot of different types of research: two different terms, correlational studies (aka observational studies) this is when we aren"t doing an experiment, we just look at how is x associated with y - for ex. Longitudinal studies (prospective designs) where you follow up with people over time and you can see trends over time. Now the data is strong than that from a cross sectional study: follow people across time, can see trends over time (e. g. , cholesterol and age) Manipulate an independent variable to examine its effects on the dependent variable. Participants randomly assigned to a group: control group (e. g. , placebo, treatment-as-usual, experimental group (e. g. , treatment, intervention) The independent variable sees the effects on dependent variables: what"s the outcome variable; major variable of interest: the dependent variable: something that would be effected by the independent variable ex.
