PSYCH257 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Sad Movie, Internal Validity, Statistical Hypothesis Testing
Document Summary
Hypothesis - an educated guess about how the independent and dependent variable interact, which must be testable. Example: drinking alcohol immediately before psychology 257 tests is hypothesised to lower one"s performance in the course. You are interested in the effect of the iv on another variable (i. e. , the dv; see next point). Dependent variable (dv)- the outcome measure, and the one you believe is impacted by the independent variable (iv) example: as the amount of alcohol consumed (iv) increases, one"s grades (dv) in the course are expected to decrease. Operationalized variable - to operationalize is to define the variables clearly in measurable terms. Statistically significant result - refers to a finding that is unlikely to have been obtained by chance. In psychology, findings with a probability value of less than 5 % (meaning that if the results were obtained by chance, this particular finding would emerge less than. 5 % of the time) are typically considered statistically significant.
