Psychology Chapter 2

a scientific method that describes how people or animals behave in their natural environment

a scientific method in which a researcher describes behavior as it occurs in its natural environment, and does so as a participant of the group being studied

a scientific method involving an in-depth analysis off a single subject

a scientific method that assesses the nature of the relationship between two or more variables that are not controoled by the researcher

a structured set of questions or statements given to a group of people to measure their attitudes, beliefs, values, or behaviors

the statistic, or numberical value, that psychologists use to describe the relationship between two variables

Prediction-you can predict the change in one variable by knowing the value of another variable

Cannot determine the cause of the relationship between two cariables

Cannot rule out the possibility that a third, unmeasured cariable is causing the changes in both variables being studied

A scientific method in which researchers manipulate, or change, a variable to observe the effect on some other variable

the variable that is manipulated in an experiment

The variable that may change in response to the manipulated changes in the independent variable

A procedure ensuring that all research participants have an equal chance of being placed into either the experimental of control conditions

consist of a set of procedures used to gather, analyze, and interpret information in a way that reduces error and leads to dependent conclusions

the process of deciding what to believe and how to act based on a careful evaluation of the evidence

• Be willing to ask questions
• analyze assumptions
• examine the evidence
• be caustious of emotional decisions
• tolerate uncertainty

an organized system of ideas that seeks to explain why two or more events are related

an educated guess, or prediction, about the nature of things based on a theory

a group of subjects who ar selected to participate in a research study

A procedure for selecting a sample of people to study in which everyone in the population has an equal chance of being chosen

Factors in the study that can be measured and that are capable of changing, or varying

A very clear description of how a variable has been measured

The repeating of an earlier study's scientific procedures, using different partcipants in an attempt to duplicate the findings

a branch of mathematics that allows researches to organize, describe, and make meaningful inferences from data they collect

numbers that summarizes and describe data in a practical, efficient manner

a number that describes the central location within a distribution of scores in a sample

arithmetic average of the distribution of scores for a particular variable

middles core in a distribution of scores after you rank the scores from lowest to highest

the score that occures most frequently in a distribution

bell-shaped curve that occurs on a graph when the mean, median, and mode are identical values

a measure of variation that indicates the average difference between the scores in a distribution and their mean

the mathematical methods used to determine whether the data support or do not support the research hypothesis