PSYCO104 Lecture 2: PSYCO 104 Lecture 2: Topic 2: Psychological Methods

• School: University of Alberta
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCO104
• Professor: Geoff Hollis

Document Summary

Measures must have 3 things to be effective: reliability: the measure must produce the same measurement when it is used to measure the same thing, validity: a measure must be conceptually related to the property of study, power: the ability of a measure to detect the conditions specified in the operational definition. Naturalistic observation is severely limited: an experimenter cannot do anything to alert a person that they are being observed, thus, can"t study many things, such as things people rarely do, also can require long periods of observation to get a single measure of a desired behavior. Three of the most common are: mode: the value of the most frequency observed measurement, mean: the average value of all measurements, median: the value that is in the middle of the distribution; e. g. , greater than or equal to half the measurements, and less than or equal to half the measurements.