Theory
explanation of relationships among variables
hypothesis
specific prediction about a pattern you expect to see in your data
What characteristics does a good hypothesis display?
follows logically from a theory, but is much more specific and concrete and involves a comparison
...
Theory - ANSWER- explanation of relationships among variables
hypothesis - ANSWER- specific prediction about a pattern you expect to see in
your data
What characteristics does a good hypothesis display? - ANSWER- follows
logically from a theory, but is much more specific and concrete and involves a
comparison
what three things do we need to establish before we can make a claim that one
variable causes another? - ANSWER- A & B must be related (covariation)
A must happen before B in time (temporal precedence)
Must be able to rule out plausible alternative explanations for the relationship
between A & B
what two characteristics define a true experiment? - ANSWER- at least one
variable is manipulated and participants are randomly assigned to a value of that
variable
true experimental research - ANSWER- makes claims about cause and effect
correlation research - ANSWER- shows interest in variables that we can't
manipulate or randomly assign (studies variables as they naturally occur)
what is the main advantage of experimental research - ANSWER- good at ruling
out alternative explanations and. are useful when we need to make claims about
cause & effect
,population - ANSWER- group of people you want to be able to make conclusions
about
sample - ANSWER- group of people who actually participated in your study
relationship between population and sample - ANSWER- statistics tell us how
reasonable it is to make inferences about. the whole population based on the data
we have from our sample
grouping variable - ANSWER- independent variable - behavior or characteristic
believed to influence some other behavior or characteristic, manipulated by
researchers
nominal/categorical variables - ANSWER- consists of a set of categories that have
different names, but do not make any quantitative distinctions - no logical order
to them (ex. major, ethnicity, favorite ice cream flavor)
ordinal variables - ANSWER- consists of a set of categories that are organized in
an ordered sequence (some are "more than" or "less than")
interval variables - ANSWER- consists of ordered categories that are all intervals
of exactly the same size (ex. temperature)
ratio variables - ANSWER- interval variable with the additional feature of an
absolute zero point (ex. Kelvin temperature, counts of things)
, Likert-type scale - ANSWER- respondents choose the score (e.g. 1 to 5) which
best represents the degree to which they agree with a given statement - behaves
like interval scales
interval and ratio data - ANSWER- allows us to use basic math and opens up a lot
more options for statistical analysis - parametric
nominal and ordinal data - ANSWER- are non-parametric
summation notation - ANSWER- add up large numbers of values - summation
sign says "take all those values and add up"
order of operations - ANSWER- parentheses, exponents, multiply and divide,
summation, addition/subtraction
frequency distribution - ANSWER- an arrangement of data that indicates how
often a particular score or observation occurs
how do you read a frequency distribution? - ANSWER- take a set of values and
count the number of times each value appears
proportion or relative frequency - ANSWER- divide the number of observations
that got the score you are interested in by the total number of observations you
have
bar graph - ANSWER- best way to display frequency distributions for nominal or
ordinal data - height of the bar represents the frequency
histograms - ANSWER- specific type of bar graph that works best for interval or
ratio data - bar represents the frequency of values in each bin
pirate plot - ANSWER- combines the information you would get from a histogram
with some descriptive statistics
what information does a pirate plot provide? - ANSWER- raw data directly
(points), middle of the data (usually the mean), density or spread of the data,
confidence interval around the mean
frequency polygon - ANSWER- A line figure used to present data from a
frequency distribution
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