PSYC 1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Sampling Bias, Participant Observation, The Control Group

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1010
• Professor: Rebecca Jubis

Document Summary

Lecture notes: sept 14 research methods/strategies in psychology (continued from last week"s lecture of different methods psychologists use ) Disadvantage: no way to know if takers are honest. Example: you want to know canadian teenagers" opinions on legalizing marijuana. It is impossible to get every canadian teenagers" opinion so you take a smaller sample. In order to generalize from the sample to the population, the sample must be representative of the population. Representative: sample is, in essence, a mini version of the population you"re interested in. Opposite of a representative sample is a biased sample or unrepresentative sample. One way of getting a representative sample is to use random sampling. Random sampling: each person in the population has an equal chance of being chosen for the sample. Used when you want to describe/measure people"s (or animal"s) behaviour in their natural setting. Disadvantages: lack of control, cannot infer cause and effect. Using participant observation (i. e. , being part of the group)