Applied Psychology Research Methods
Textbook Exam Questions
Course Introduction
Applied Psychology Research Methods explores the key principles and techniques essential for designing, conducting, and analyzing research within the field of applied psychology. The course covers quantitative and qualitative methodologies, experimental and non-experimental designs, data collection strategies, psychometric assessment, ethical considerations, and statistical analysis. Emphasis is placed on the practical application of research skills to address real-world psychological issues in diverse settings such as workplace, health, education, and community. Students will learn to critically evaluate psychological research, develop sound research proposals, and present findings effectively, preparing them for further study or professional roles requiring evidence-based practice.
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Research Methods in Psychology Evaluating a World of Information 3rd Edition by
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Beth Morling
Chapter 1: Psychology Is a Way of Thinking
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Q1) Dr. Smitherman insists that all his research assistants know how to be producers of research. All of the following relate to this requirement EXCEPT:
A)He wants to make sure they understand how to write in APA style.
B)He wants to make sure they understand why anonymity is important.
C)He wants to make sure they understand how to interpret study results and graphs.
D)He wants to make sure they have previously been participants in research studies.
Answer: D
Q2) How can you ensure that a popular media article accurately reflects the original research of a scientific study?
A)Find and read the original scientific article
B)Determine whether the results fit within the theories you learned in your psychology classes
C)Check that the popular media article includes the statistical significance of the results
D)Research the credentials of the author of the popular media article
Answer: A
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Chapter 2: Sources of Information: Why Research Is Best
and How to Find It
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Q1) When reading an empirical journal article "with a purpose," which two questions should you ask yourself as you read? To this end, which section should you read first in order to quickly answer these questions?
Answer: The two questions are "What is the argument?" and "What is the evidence to support the argument?" The abstract should be read first in order to quickly answer these questions.
Q2) Different factors that could account for significant results are called .
A)hypotheses
B)biases
C)predictions
D)confounds
Answer: D
Q3) Yasmine believes that attractive people make more money because among her four friends who work at a local restaurant, the most attractive of the four makes the most in tips. A study by Judge, Hurst, and Simon (2009) found that attractive people make more money than unattractive people. Provide two reasons why Yasmine should be more convinced about the relationship between attractiveness and income by the Judge, Hurst, and Simon paper than by her personal experience. Answer: Controlled studies have comparison groups and can avoid confounds.
Page 4
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Chapter 3: Three Claims, Four Validities: Interrogation Tools
for Consumers of Research
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Q1) Jenny reads the following headline on an online article: "If You're Sexist, People Will Think You're Racist, and Vice Versa." (This headline is based on a study conducted by Sanchez and colleagues, 2017.) This study found that members of stigmatized groups are threatened by prejudice directed at other stigmatized groups. Their results showed that White women can be threatened by racism, and men of color threatened by sexism, and that these perceptions made participants expect unfair treatment.
Which of the following questions assesses the construct validity of this study?
A)Would this research generalize to children?
B)Did the researchers establish temporal precedence?
C)How did the researchers measure expectations of unfair treatment?
D)How big was the effect of perceived discrimination?
Answer: C
Q2) Stefan wants to make a causal claim in his dissertation. Which of the following is necessary?
A)He must make a frequency claim first.
B)He must manipulate all of his variables.
C)He must measure all of his variables.
D)He must conduct an experiment.
Answer: D
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Chapter 4: Ethical Guidelines for Psychology Research
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Q1) Which of the following ethical violations proposed by the Belmont Report was NOT committed in the Tuskegee Study?
A)Participants were harmed.
B)Participants were not treated respectfully.
C)Participants were not given monetary payments for their time.
D)Participants were from a disadvantaged social group.
Q2) From an ethical standpoint, in what way is researching prisoners with tuberculosis similar to researching children with ADHD?
A)Neither group of participants can provide informed consent.
B)Researchers must ensure anonymity when dealing with both types of participants.
C)Both groups of participants have less autonomy than other types of participants.
D)Researchers do not have to have written informed consent with these groups of participants.
Q3) Under what conditions is debriefing necessary? What should be included in a debriefing?
Q4) Explain why the Belmont principle of respect for persons requires participants to provide informed consent.
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Chapter 5: Identifying Good Measurement
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Q1) Your friend Dominic is complaining about having to take the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), a test that is required to go to graduate school and is similar to the ACT and SAT. He complains, "Tests like the GRE don't really measure how well people actually do in graduate school." Dominic is questioning the of the test.
A)discriminant validity
B)content validity
C)convergent validity
D)criterion validity
Q2) In looking at a scatterplot of interrater reliability, why would a researcher want to see all the dots close to the line of agreement?
A)Because it indicates a positive relationship
B)Because it indicates that the researcher's two research assistants/raters are making similar measurements
C)Because it indicates that the researcher's measurement is valid
D)Because it indicates that the researcher's measurement will also have high test-retest reliability
Q3) Explain why the textbook argues, "In fact, operationalizations are one place where creativity comes into the research process."
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Chapter 6: Surveys and Observations: Describing What
People Do
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Q1) Which of the following is true of question wording?
A)It has no effect on the results of a survey/poll.
B)No research has scientifically demonstrated that question wording affects the answers participants give.
C)Differences in how questions are worded always lead to different results.
D)Researchers may alter the wording of a question to determine if it does have an effect on the results.
Q2) Explain why each of the following poses problems to a measure's validity: response sets (acquiescence, nay-saying, and fence sitting), socially desirable responding (faking good or faking bad), and inability to report.
Q3) State three ways that a researcher could reduce reactivity in a study and why each one is effective.
Q4) Which of the following is a poll likely to measure?
A)A person's attitude toward their doctor
B)A person's feelings about people diagnosed with cancer
C)A person's thoughts about whether they prefer Advil or Tylenol
D)A person's opinions about a healthcare law
Q5) Explain how a masked or blind design deals with both observer bias and observer effects.
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Chapter 7: Sampling: Estimating the Frequency of
Behaviors and Beliefs
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Q1) Dr. Dowling is a clinical psychologist who is interested in the link between mental illness and criminal activity. She gets IRB permission to study patients at all five inpatient/residential mental health facilities in her state. There are 4,307 patients currently living in these facilities. She asks patients whether they have ever been arrested for a crime and whether they have ever been convicted of a crime. She collects a sample size of 1,369. She finds that 27% (+/ 3%) report having been arrested for a crime but that only 13% (+/ 3%) have been convicted of a crime. Choose a representative sampling technique and a biased sampling technique. Explain how Dr. Dowling would implement each of these sampling techniques.
Q2) Which of the following may lead to a biased sample?
A)Using people who accept compensation (e.g., money) to participate
B)Using people who agree to participate
C)Using people who are readily available to the researcher
D)Using people who have participated in other research studies
Q3) What is the difference between random sampling and random assignment?
Q4) Explain why a researcher may wish to choose snowballing sampling over a representative sampling technique.
Q5) Explain why bigger samples are not always better samples.
Page 9
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Chapter 8: Bivariate Correlational Research
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Q1) Why are curvilinear relationships hard to detect with correlation coefficients (r)?
A)Curvilinear relationships require a large amount of scores.
B)r always looks for the best straight line to fit the data.
C)r always assumes a zero association.
D)r always assumes a negative relationship.
Q2) For a third variable to be plausible as the explanation in an established association, which of the following must also be true?
A)The third variable must be related to both of the measured variables in the original association.
B)The third variable must be measured on the same scale as the original measured variables.
C)The third variable must be a categorical variable.
D)The third variable must have a positive relationship with the two measured variables in the original association.
Q3) Why is the size of a sample not as important to external validity as the way a sample was collected?
Q4) What does it mean that an association is "spurious"? What can cause spurious associations?
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Chapter 9: Multivariate Correlational Research
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Q1) A researcher has examined a variety of correlational studies that point to a causal relationship between two variables. All of the studies have found a positive relationship between the two variables, but for ethical reasons, no experiments have been conducted. Using an approach of pattern and parsimony, the researcher may begin to make a causal claim by doing which of the following?
A)Running another correlational study but with more people
B)Specifying a mechanism or explanation for the causal relationship
C)Examining the dates of the studies to look for temporal precedence
D)Replicating all of the original studies
Q2) Name two consequences of journalists reporting on single studies rather than reporting on patterns of data.
Q3) In understanding "controlling for" a third variable, which of the following is a similar concept?
A)Creating a longitudinal study
B)Identifying subgroups
C)Creating an operational definition
D)Conducting a replication
Q4) How do multiple regression designs help rule out third variables?
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Chapter 10: Introduction to Simple Experiments
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Q1) Generally, what is the main priority for experimental studies?
A)Construct validity
B)External validity
C)Internal validity
D)Statistical validity
Q2) Explain the difference between full counterbalancing and partial counterbalancing. Why would a researcher choose partial counterbalancing over full counterbalancing?
Q3) All of the following are advantages of within-groups designs EXCEPT:
A)Participants in the treatment/control groups will be equivalent.
B)It is less time-consuming for the participants.
C)It gives researchers more power to find differences between conditions.
D)They require fewer participants.
Q4) Name three disadvantages of within-groups designs.
Q5) Practice effects and carryover effects are examples of effects.
A)order
B)scientific
C)between-person
D)causal
Q6) Name three advantages of within-groups designs.
Page 12
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Chapter 11: More on Experiments: Confounding and Obscuring Variables
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Q1) Ceiling effects can affect:
A)certain groups more than others.
B)independent variables only.
C)dependent variables only.
D)both independent and dependent variables.
Q2) Armand conducts a study for his research method class. He is curious as to whether watching romantic movies makes people more committed to their romantic relationship. He collects a sample of men in dating relationships and divides them into two groups. One group watches a 5-minute clip of a movie in which the main characters are having a romantic first date. The second group watches a 5-minute clip from the same movie in which the main characters break up. After the participants watch the movie clip, they are then asked to write a sentence about their relationship. Armand counts the number of uses of the words we and us as a measure of commitment. After conducting the study, he finds that there is not a statistically significant difference between his two groups. Armand's professor suggests that the null effect may be due to insufficient between-group variance. Describe two ways that Armand's study may have had poor between-group variance.
Q3) Explain how within-group variance can obscure between-group differences.
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Chapter 12: Experiments With More Than One Independent
Variable
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Q1) A "difference in the difference between the differences" would indicate which of the following?
A)A crossover interaction
B)Multiple main effects
C)A three-way interaction
D)A within-groups factorial design
Q2) Imagine that you read the following passage in a popular magazine. Should you conclude that the original article found evidence of an interaction? Why is or isn't there evidence of an interaction?
"One study had participants watch a crime show. Half the participants watched a documentary of a murder that took place in rural Virginia, while the other half watched a movie adaptation of the same murder. The effect of viewing a crime show on people's fear of being a victim of crime depends on the participants' sex, with women in general being more fearful regardless of which show they saw, whereas men reported more fear after watching the documentary."
Q3) Explain why researchers care about interactions more than main effects.
Q4) Provide two reasons a researcher would want to conduct a factorial study.
Q5) State the three types of factorial designs.
Page 14
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Chapter 13: Quasi-Experiments and Small-N Designs
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Q1) Explain how interrogating the statistical validity of a small-N design is different from interrogating the statistical validity in a large-N design.
Q2) Explain why quasi-experiments and correlational studies can be seen as similar but why quasi-experiments are superior.
Q3) Lara is conducting a study for her research methods class. She is curious if participating in a collegiate study-abroad program causes people to become more accepting of other cultures. Provide an example of an independent-groups quasi-experimental design and an example of a within-groups quasi-experimental design using Lara's research question.
Q4) Explain why quasi-experiments offer a trade-off between internal validity and external validity.
Q5) Which of the following is an independent-groups quasi-experimental design?
A)Interrupted time-series design
B)Nonequivalent control group design
C)Nonequivalent groups interrupted time-series design
D)Stable-baseline design
Q6) Provide a reason a researcher might want to conduct a small-N design. Provide a reason why a researcher might want to avoid conducting a small-N design.
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Chapter 14: Replication, Generalization, and the Real World
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Q1) Some studies may not replicate because the original study used questionable scientific practices. Which of the following is a way open science practices attempt to deal with this problem?
A)Using larger sample sizes
B)Requiring scientists to make their data and materials available for review
C)Conducting direct replications
D)Encouraging preregistration
Q2) Which of the following can direct replication studies change?
A)The dependent variable
B)The study procedures
C)The participants
D)The independent variable
Q3) Responsible journalists do which of the following as it pertains to discussing replicability?
A)They report only on studies that have been directly replicated.
B)They report findings only from meta-analyses.
C)They provide readers with a sense of the entire literature as well as recent studies.
D)They provide readers with statistical values from each study.
Q4) What is preregistration? Why is it important in the scientific process?
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