PSYC 3730H Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Longitudinal Study, Social Desirability Bias, Physical Attractiveness
11 Apr 2016
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Document Summary
Basic understanding of the methods used by researchers is especially valuable for consumers of relationship science. There is a lot of persona opinion rather than scientific fact competing for your attention. Relationship science can affect us personally in ways most other sciences do not. Some studies seek to describe events as they naturally occur. And other studies strive to establish the casual connection between events that determine which causes have what consequences. A thoughtful consumer judges an investigation with regard to its intended purpose. Representative sample: a group of people who resemble the entire population of interest. Because representative samples are expensive, convenience samples are used more often. Is this a big problem for relationship science: danger that convenience samples will differ in important ways from other samples that are more representative. Caution is warranted (but by the way, other investigations involving more than 20,000 people from every major region of the world have since gotten very seminal results)
