Reliability, Validity and Variables

• what is an exp?

  an investigation in which a hypothesis is scientifically tested.
• what are extraneous variables?

  variables outside of a researcher's control (may impact the exp's DV).
• what are participant variables?

  any characteristic of a p's background that could affect study's results, even though it's not the focus of an exp.
• what are situational variables?

  factors in the environment that can impact the exp, e.g. time and setting.
• what are experimenter variables?

  characteristics/behaviours of the researcher that might influence p's and study's results.
• what is standardisation?

  giving the instructions/keeping the procedure the same.
• what is randomisation?

  assigning the p's randomly to each condition of the IV.
• what is a confounding variable?

  something that can disturb your results, extraneous variables that are not controlled.
• what is a double-blind design?

  p's don't know they are being observed (controls demand characteristics).
• what is the screw-you effect?

  p's changing behaviour as they know they're being observed, e.g. want to rebel against the experimenter.
• what is reliability?

  the consistency of the findings or results of a study.
• what is validity?

  measures precisely what it aims to measure, meaning data that is collected is accurate and represents truth.
• what is external reliability?

  concerns the extent to which a study measures consistently over time or in diff stuations.

  
  

  e.g. if a study or test yields consistent results when conducted on diff occasions or w/ diff samples, it has high external reliability.
• what is internal reliability?

  the extent that a measuring instrument is consistent within itself.

  
  

  e.g. in a questionnaire, internal reliability would be high if all items designed to measure a particular trait, e.g. anxiety, yield consistent responses across those items.
• what is ecological validity?

  a measure of how test performance predicts behaviours in real-world settings.
• what is population validity?

  whether you can generalise findings from one country to another (ethnocentric) or whether you can generalise findings between genders (androcentric).
• what is temporal vailidity?

  whether we can generalise past findings to today's behaviour.
• what are some strengths of controlling variables in a study?

  • high internal reliability.
  • less extraneous variables.
  • easy to replicate.
• what are some weaknesses of controlling variables in a study?

  • lack of ecological validity.
  • low generalisability.
• what is test-retest reliability?

  the consistency of results when a test or measurement is administered multiple times to the same group of p's.
• what is inter-rater reliability?

  measures the degree to which diff observers or raters agree in their assessments or judgements.
• what is face validity?

  the extent to which a test or measurement appears, on the surface, to measure what it is supposed to measure.
• what is predictive validity?

  how well a test or measure can predict future outcomes or behaviours.
• what is concurrent validity?

  the extent to which a test correlates well w/ an established measure that is administered at the same time.