Exam 4 Experimental Psychology Fall 1999 Name__________________________

MULTIPLE CHOICE (Worth 2 points each)

1. Pete and Shelly are both worrying about their experiments. Pete is concerned with removing all extraneous variables from his experiment whereas Shelly wonders whether she will be able to generalize her results to the entire population. Pete is concerned with _______ and Shelly is concerned with _______.

a. external validity; internal validity

b. internal validity; external validity

c. experimental design; statistical analysis

d. statistical analysis; experimental design

2. You are testing people's attitudes toward people from different cultures. When you have collected half of your data, the Japanese impose severe tariffs on imported American goods. If you are measuring attitudes about Japan, your experiment will suffer which internal validity threat?

a. maturation

b. history

c. testing

d. statistical regression

3. Testing, as a threat to internal validity, is associated with _______ designs.

a. factorial

b. two-groups

c. multiple-groups

d. repeated measures

4. Changing the behavior simply by measuring it refers to:

a. a reactive measure

b. a measured IV

c. a manipulated IV

d. history

5. Measuring the participants before an experiment (with plans to measure them after also) and obtaining scores that are either artificially high or artificially low could lead to problems with:

a. selection

b. mortality

c. instrumentation

d. statistical regression

6. According to Campbell and Stanley, the most adequate control to protect internal validity is:

a. the single-blind experiment

b. randomization

c. the double-blind experiment

d. using correlated groups

7. A friend tells you she was a participant in a psychology experiment and says, "It was crazy! We took a personality test, watched a film, and then took the same test again!" From this description, you could tell that she was in the

a. control group of a posttest-only control group design

b. experimental group of a posttest-only control group design

c. control group of a pretest-posttest control group design

d. experimental group of a pretest-posttest control group design

8. The most important property of any experiment is:

a. external validity

b. internal validity

c. generalizability

d. application to real-life

9. Generally speaking, as internal validity increases, external validity:

a. increases

b. decreases

c. remains the same

d. fluctuates unpredictably

10. A classmate tells you that he wants to run a tightly-controlled experiment in the laboratory, staying away from the trouble of doing an experiment in the real world. What factor seems more important to him?

a. internal validity

b. external validity

c. both internal and external validity

d. neither internal nor external validity

11. "Convenience sampling" is most associated with:

a. college sophomores

b. white rats

c. athletes

d. television viewers

12. All of the following would be appropriate single-case studies EXCEPT

a. teaching a stroke victim how to walk again

b. determining whether an individual is an exception to a rule

c. studying the psychological well-being of an individual with a rare disease

d. studying the learning process of a rat

13. Which of the following is characteristic of a single-case design?

a. baseline measurement

b. repeated measures

c. changing one variable at a time

d. all of the above

e. none of the above

14. Psychology-trained parents want to determine whether their child's behavior is affected by the amount of sugar he eats. In successive weeks, they monitor his behavior with 1) normal diet, 2) low-sugar diet, 3) normal diet, and 4) low-sugar diet. What type of design are they using?

a. A-B-A

b. A-B-B-A

c. A-B-C-D

d. A-B-A-B

15. When we cannot randomly assign our participants to groups, we may be forced to use a _______ design.

a. factorial

b. repeated measures

c. quasi-experimental

d. A-B-A

16. The major difference between quasi-experimental and ex post facto studies involves:

a. manipulation of the IV

b. the presence of interactions

c. the use of randomization in forming groups

d. recording of the DV

17. Joe says, "I was able to show that vitamins cause children to perform better in school through my nonequivalent group design." What is wrong with this statement?

a. you cannot manipulate an IV in this design

b. you cannot measure a DV in this design

c. you cannot make cause-and-effect statements with this design

d. all of the above

18. Which of the following would involve an immersion in "culture?"

a. ethnography

b. educational criticism

c. ecological psychology

d. phenomenology

19. The development of a theory is the ultimate goal of which approach?

a. ethnography

b. clinical perspective

c. grounded theory

d. phenomenological theory

20. The heart of grounded theory is:

a. coding

b. variable manipulation

c. the structured interview

d. the forced-choice questionnaire

21. On the title page, the authors of a journal article are listed:

a. alphabetically

b. according to seniority

c. in order of importance of their contributions

d. none of the above

22. APA format is summarized in

a. the Thesaurus of American Psychological Association Style

b. Strunk & White's Guide to APA Style

c. the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

d. the American Psychiatric Association's Publication Manual

23. Someone in the library asks you if there is a section of a research article that can save you time by allowing you to determine whether you should read the entire article. You tell this person to look at the

a. introduction

b. abstract

c. results

d. references

24. A good introduction:

a. covers all of the background literature

b. should be no more than three published pages

c. always presents the thesis statement in the first paragraph

d. is funnel-shaped

25. Which of the following should be presented in reporting inferential statistics?

a. the test that was used

b. degrees of freedom

c. the test statistic

d. probability level

e. all of the above--they should all be reported

f. none of the above--they can all be seen in the table.

26. Your descriptive statistics may be presented:

a. in the text

b. as a figure

c. as a table

d. any of the above

e. none of the above

27. Figures are better suited than tables to display:

a. interactions

b. standard deviations

c. means

d. all of the above

e. none of the above

28. Your first task in the Discussion section is to:

a. compare your results to previous research

b. briefly recap the results of your research

c. interpret the results of your research

d. indicate avenues for further research

29. Someone who plans to take experimental psychology next year tells you, "I am so glad to get out of English composition where you have to worry so much about how you write. In psychology, I'll just be able to write without all those hassles." What should you say?

a. You will have to follow many writing conventions in APA style also.

b. Good writing is important to psychology also.

c. You might want to find a different course to take.

d. Any of the above would be good responses.

30. What should you say to someone who complains about having to type a title page because the title is repeated on the first text page?

b. the title page also contains the abstract, which is important to potential readers

d. all of the above

SHORT-ANSWER/ESSAY

1. Differentiate between experimental designs, quasi-experimental designs, and ex post facto designs. (worth 9 points)

2. Describe the three types of external validity. (Worth 6 points)

3. Under what conditions would you use a quasi-experimental design. Give at least three reasons.(worth 6 points)

4. a. Give an example of research using the AB design. (worth 3 points)

b. What is the problem with AB designs? (worth 3 points)

c. Describe two reasons why you may be stuck with this design instead of the more preferable ABA design. (worth 4 points)

5. Give a brief description of each qualitative method we discussed in class and name one pro and con of each. (worth 9 points)