research methods

• what is meant by behavioural categories in operational design?

  when a target behaviour is broken up into components that are observable and measurable - operationalisation
• what is meant by event sampling in observational design?

  a target behaviour or event is first established then the researcher records this event every time it occurs
• what is time sampling in observational design?

  a target individual or group is first established then the researcher records their behaviour in a fixed time frame
• what is the likert scale ?

  self report design

  where the respondents indicates their agreement with a statement using a range from strongly agree to strongly disagree
• what is meant by co-variables in correlations?

  the variables that are investigated within a correlation for example height and weight
• what are co-variables not reflected as?

  not reflected as the independent and dependent variables
• what is meta-analysis?

  the process of combining the findings from a number of studies on a particular topic
• what's an example of a study that used meta-analysis

  Ijzendoorn and Kronnenberg
• what are the three measures of central tendency?

  mean, mode, median
• mean


  the average

  calculated by adding up all the values in a set of data and dividing it by the number of values
• mode

  most frequently occurring number
• median

  the central value in a set of data when the values are arranged from lowest to highest
• range

  taking the lowest value from the highest value and usually adding 1
• standard deviation

  a single value that tells us how far scores deviate from the mean
• what does it mean if there is a large standard deviation?

  the larger the standard deviation the greater the dispersion within a set of data
• what does it mean if there is a low standard deviation?


  a low standard deviation shows that the data is clustered around the mean.

  all participants responded in similar ways
• Bar chart

  the bars don't touch

  each variable is represented by the height of the bars
• Histogram

  bars are touching

  the height and area of the bars show the frequency
• content analysis


  indirect study of behaviours by examining communications that people produce eg. film and TV
• what is coding in content analysis?

  a stage of content analysis

  process of labelling and organizing qualitative data to identify different themes and the relationships between them
• what is meant by thematic analysis in content analysis?

  form of content analysis

  produces qualitative data

  the process is to identify themes in research that are reoccurring
• inter-observer reliability

  the extent to which the observers agree in observations of behaviour

  example of this is a pilot study
• how can reliability be measured

  measured using a correlation analysis

  the correlation coefficient should exceed +.80 for reliability
• what is the empirical method?

  scientific approaches that are based on the gathering of evidence through direct observation
• what is a paradigm?

  a set of shared assumptions and agreed methods within a scientific discipline
• what is meant by hypothesis testing ?

  a theory should produce statements which can be tested

  only in this way can a theory be falsified
• what is meant by falsifiability?

  the capacity for some proposition, statement or hypothesis to be proven wrong
• what is a paradigm shift?

  major change in how people think and get things done that replaces a prior paradigm
• temporal validity

  whether findings from a study hold true overtime
• mundane realism

  measure of external validity or the extent to which findings can be generalised to the real world
• ecological validity

  the extent to which findings can be generalised from one setting to other settings
• test - retest

  the same test is administered to the same person on different occasions and results get compared
• what is the use of statistical testing?

  determine whether we can accept or reject the null hypothesis
• what is the significance level?

  the point at which the researcher can accept the alternative hypothesis