PSY 3171 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Confounding, Statistical Significance, Internal Validity

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 3171
• Professor: Jodi Martin

Document Summary

You start with an educated guess, called a hypothesis, about what you expect to find. Internal validity is the extent to which we can be confident that the independent variable is causing the dependent variable to change. External validity refers to how well the results relate to things outside your study: how well your findings describe similar individuals outside the laboratory. Three strategies to ensure internal validity: control group. People are similar to the experimental group in every way except that members of the experimental group are exposed to the independent variable and those in the control group are not: randomization. Process of assigning people to different research groups in such a way that each person has an equal chance of being place in any group: analogue models. Create in the controlled conditions of the laboratory aspects that are comparable to the phenomenon under study. The extent to which results apply to everyone with a particular disorder.