Intro Pyschology: 2, Research in Psychology
Terms
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- One strategy for applying critical thinking to a particular case is to ask five questions. What are they?
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1. What am I being asked to believe or accept?
2. What evidence is available to support the assertion?
3. Are there alternative ways of interpreting the evidence?
4. What additional evidence would help to evaluate the alternatives?
5. What conclusions are most reasonable? - hypothesis
- a specific, testable proposition about the subject of interest
- operational definitions
- statements describing the exact operations or methods used in a research project
- variables (in research)
- specific factors or characteristics that are manipulated and measured in research
- According to Bernstein et al., what is "critical thinking"?
- The process of assessing claims, and making judgments, on the basis of well-supported evidence.
- confirmation bias
- the tendency for a researcher to look only for evidence that supports or confirms a hypothesis. (one should look for both confirming _and_ disconfirming evidence)
- reliability (in research)
- the degree to which evidence is repeatable
- validity (in research)
- the degree to which evidence accurately assesses the topic being studied
- theory
- an integrated set of statements designed to account for, predict, and even suggest ways of controlling certain phenomena. a theory is a tentative explanation which must be subjected to scientific evaluation and critical thinking.
- "Like other scientists, psychologists strive to achieve four main goals in their research:"
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1. to *describe* a phenomenon
2. to *make predictions* about " "
3. to introduce enough *control* in their research to allow them to
4. *explain* the phenomenon with some degree of confidence
So: the 4 goals are to
DESCRIBE, PREDICT, CONTROL, and EXPLAIN
a phenomenon. - psychologists tend to use ____, ____, and ___ to describe and predict behavior and mental processes.
- maturalistic observation, case studies, and surveys
- Psychologist use ____ to introduce the control necessary to rule out alternative explanations for the evidence they collect and thus ghelp establish CAUSE-EFFECT RELATIONSHIPS.
- experiments
- cause-effect relationships
- relationships in which one variable can be shown to have caused changed in another
- naturalistic observation
- the process of watching without interfering as a phenomenon occurs in the natural environment