Unit 1: Scientific MethodAnswers to the Review Questions

1. Random – every subject has an equal chance of being in the sample. Stratified-each subgroup is represented in the sample. Necessary to ensure the sample is representative of the whole group under study.

2. She only got 4% returned. This is too small a group to represent the whole. Maybe only those women who were unhappy bothered to take the time to do the survey.

5. Correlation

6. If both sets of data increase or decrease together, it is positive. If one increases as the other decreases, it is negative.

7. The closer the number (the correlation coefficient) is to 1.0, the stronger the relationship, because 1.0 is a perfect correlational relationship.

8. They don’t prove that one thing causes the other.

Ex. Students who eat breakfast, get better grades. This doesn’t necessarily mean that eating breakfast causes the good grades. Maybe it’s because organized students have time to eat and time to study so they do better.

9. A prediction about the relationship of two or more things.

10. IV is the one the researcher controls.

DV is the one that will change depending on the IV (the one the researcher wants to measure). The control group is treated exactly the same as the experimental group except they don’t get the IV.

11. Hyp: Watching violent TV programs will make children more violent.

IV: the violent TV show. DV: the amount of violent acts the children commit. Control group is a part of my randomly selected sample that will

be treated exactly the same as the experimental group except they won’t see the violent show, so they will watch a non-violent show.

The control group is necessary so that if the children in the exp group do show more acts of violence, I will know that it is a result of the type of TV that they watched and not something else (b/c nothing else was different).

12. Single blind- the subject doesn’t know if they are receiving the experimental treatment, but the researcher does know. Double blind- neither subject nor researcher knows.

13. There is a change in the subject, but the change is not a result of the experimental treatment b/c they didn’t receive it. They received a placebo which resembles the treatment but has no medical effects.

14. To see if people would administer a potentially fatal shock to another person if an authority figure told them to. He told them it was to test the effects of punishment on learning. The subject thought they were giving electric shocks to a learner who pretended to be in pain. He found 65% of people would. (%88 college age)

15. A horse. His trainer thought he had taught him to do math. The horse was actually conditioned to respond to subtle changes in the trainer’s body and demeanour. Self-fufilling prophecy b/c the trainer did something (unintentionally) that influenced the outcome.

16. B/c it means the results are not due to chance.

17. A bell curve

18. Mean is 14.29, median is 10, mode is 5, range is 25.

19. Mode is easy to eyeball, and median as well.

20. The average distance of every score to the mean.

21. Graphs, lists, averages

22. Getting the parent’s consent, debriefing afterwards and sharing the results of the study, maintaining confidentiality, not harming the children psychologically so the violence would have to be suitable for kids.

23. If the statement is just the facts it is objective, if it contains a conclusion or guess about what is occurring then it makes an inference.

• 24. False

• 25. Validity – If the experiment measures what it sets out to measure.

• Reliability – If the results can be trusted. If repeated by someone else, they will get the same results.

• 26. Ask who subjects were and how selected• Seeing isn’t always believing• Correlation doesn’t equal causation• Question data obtained without the scientific

method• Remember the power of the placebo• Until results repeated, keep an open mind• Be ready to be proven wrong

• 28. Case study – Leonard (used other methods like experiments and interviews.

• Observation (of Lucy and others catching things, the man who watched the non-tracking TV).

• Experiments (throwing the ball, painting the floor, playing music, giving the drug L-Dopa, the ouija board, the EEG).

• Interviews (the old doctor, Leonard’s mom, Leonard, the chemist who invented L-Dopa)