PSYC104 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Psychological Science
18 May 2018
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PSYC104 RESEARCH DESIGN READING
Chapter 9 [Independent Groups]
9.2.1 Chapter Outline
- What are Independent Groups?
- Matched Groups: Why is This Design Necessary?
- Determining Statistical Versus Practical Significance
- Making Psychological Science More Transparent
9.3 What are Independent Groups?
- Independent groups design: participants are randomly assigned to groups, and the groups
are non-overlapping in nature. That is, participants can only be assigned to one
group/condition in the experiment
9.3.1 What are Independent and Dependent Variables?
- Independent variable: the variable manipulated by the researcher
- Dependent variable: the variable measured by the researcher
9.4 Matched Groups: Why is this Design Necessary?
- Matched groups: researchers may choose to match their experimental groups on some
additional measure to ensure that their groups do not differ in other important ways other
than exposure to the independent variable
9.5 Determining Statistical Versus Practical Significance
9.5.1 Statistical Significance
- The process of conducting the appropriate statistical tests to decide whether your
hypotheses were supported
- In the two-group experimental design, you are comparing the means across the
experimental and control groups to decide whether they differ from one another by a
significant margin
9.5.2 Practical Significance
- When the group differences translate to real-world impactful differences
9.6 Making Psychological Science More Transparent
9.6.1 The Importance of Replication
- Replication is important in order to ensure that the results found are reliable and accurate
- Exact replication is difficult
- The file-drawer problem surrounds the issue of null findings not being published as there are
so many studies being conducted and journals favour studies with positive outcomes
9.6.2 Researcher Degrees of Freedom
- When researchers report their methodologies in empirical articles, they may not always be
completely transparent about the decisions that they had to make
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Document Summary
Independent groups design: participants are randomly assigned to groups, and the groups are non-overlapping in nature. That is, participants can only be assigned to one group/condition in the experiment. Independent variable: the variable manipulated by the researcher. Dependent variable: the variable measured by the researcher. Matched groups: researchers may choose to match their experimental groups on some additional measure to ensure that their groups do not differ in other important ways other than exposure to the independent variable. The process of conducting the appropriate statistical tests to decide whether your hypotheses were supported. In the two-group experimental design, you are comparing the means across the experimental and control groups to decide whether they differ from one another by a significant margin. When the group differences translate to real-world impactful differences. Replication is important in order to ensure that the results found are reliable and accurate.
