PSY-2212 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Cerebral Cortex, Internal Validity, Hindbrain

• School: App State
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY-2212
• Professor: Jacqueline Renee Belhumeur

Document Summary

So say you are reading the newspaper and notice three deaths by drowning have been reported this year after the person fell into the pool. Nicolas cage has also been in a lot of movies this year. How conducted: case studies, naturalistic observations, or surveys. E. g. , movie titles, movie lengths, drowning types, drowning locations, drowning demographics. Con: no control of variables; single cases may be misleading. So now you want to take another step toward solving this mystery. You decide to keep track of the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool and the number of films. Basic purpose: to detect naturally occurring relationships; to assess how well one variable predicts another. How conducted: collect data on two or more variables. Pro: good middle ground b/t descriptive & experimental research; generalizable results. No manipulation means other unaccounted-for variables may cause the observed change. Operational definitions become important in correlational (and experimental) research.