PSYC 2030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Anhedonia, Statistical Inference, Level Of Measurement

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2030
• Professor: Michael Pettit

Document Summary

Goal to explain how measurement in psychology faces challenges of validity and reliability because direct observation is usually impossible. Outline: 1) definition of population versus sample, 2) types of measures, 3) scales of measurement, 4) reliability, 5) validity, 6) review of null hypothesis significance testing. What is the difference between a population and a sample : the population = the entirety of the group about which you want to make a claim. Depending on your research question, what counts as a population can vary considerably: the sample = the group that is investigated in a particular study. It is a (representative) subset of the population. Apa journals relies on american-based samples: yet americans comprise less than 5% of the world"s population, how might people in the rest of the world differ from the typical, historically, psychology"s samples have been weird (henrich, heine,