Ethics Expert Answers & Study Resources

ESSAY ITEMS (Starred items appear in the chapter as Discussion Questions) 1.  Identify the four sources of difference that developmental psychologists research as the source of psychological change. 2.  What are the advantages of longitudinal designs and cross-sectional designs? 3.  What is statistical regression and why can it be a problem in longitudinal research? .

8.  Identify four problems associated with asking memory questions in survey research. 9.  Identify the seven major problems associated with survey questions about attitudes. 10.  Why does the research on how many adolescents smoke reflect the difficulty in creating good survey research? .

31.  In Lewis Terman’s 9-decade longitudinal study, there was a high level of attrition a.  right after Terman died and the personal contact between him and participants was lost. b.  when the female participants married and move away with their spouses. c.  among male participants after their college years. d.  as the participants became.

  12.  What are some difficulties that scientists have had in categorizing people by race and in defining race? 13.  What role as the U.S. government had in the determination of races?  Why can this be important in scientific research? 14.  What problems regarding culture and diversity beset research in the social and.

41.  Kellett and Beall (1997) were treating a woman with suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after an automobile accident.  They obtained baseline measurements on frequency of nightmares, intensity of nightmares, and time to recover from a nightmare.  They treated the woman, then obtained measurements of the same variables.  This.

6.  What three factors affect the size of the correlation coefficient? 7.  How do directionality and the third variable problem hamper our assessment of causation? 8.  What is the difference between the Pearson r, the Spearman correlation for ranks, and the phi coefficient?  How are they similar? 9.  When Gutierrez, Osman, Kopper, Barrios,.

21.  One of the difficulties surveying people about rare events is that a.  those events are likely to involve sensitive issues that people are reluctant to discuss. b. a small increase in the rate of false positives leads to a very large, inaccurate estimate when generalized to the population. c.  people have very.

11.  When investigators study changes in different ethnic and racial groups across several decades by using Census information in the United States, a.  there are problems interpreting the data because criteria for inclusion in racial categories have changed several times over the past century. b.  the data are usually highly reliable people.

  ESSAY ITEMS (Starred items appear in the chapter as Discussion Questions) 1.  Why is focused observation necessary for scientific observation but not necessarily for casual observation? 2.  Identify the advantages of conducting on-site observations of children in schools when those children have behavior problems. 3.  Why do psychologists study animal behavior? 4.  Identify the five.

41.  People sometimes take the easy way out by responding “yes” or agreeing with a question.  Such behavior is called a.  impression management. b.  self-deception positivity. c.  optimizing d.  acquiescence. 42.  Research on acquiescence has revealed that a common reason that people engage in it is because a.  they view the surveyor as being of higher.

MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS   1.  Cohen and Gunz (2002) have investigated how people from different cultures remember events in their lives.  These researchers found that a.  people from Asia seldom remembered events from their perspective of their own role in the event. b.  people from Asia remembered events in the first person (“I did.

9.  Why are culture, race, and ethnicity hypothetical constructs?  In what sense are they useful and in what sense are they limited? 10.  Identify two reasons why the concept of race is not useful in understanding behavior? a.  People within a given racial category differ greatly from one another; there is more.

11. In cultures that value relationships, people tend to show _____ in their responses to survey items. a. acquiescence b. satisficing c. optimizing d. nondifferentiation 12. The tendency to give the same rating on a survey to different questions, regardless of the content of the questions, is known as a. acquiescence. b. nondifferentiation. c. satisficing. d. impression management. 13.  A.

  ESSAY ITEMS (Starred questions appear in the text as study questions.) 1.  Why is it often unnecessary to conduct a census to find out about an entire population?  Why would it be impractical? 2.  Even though the U.S. census involves scientific survey methodology, it is still affected by politics.  Explain how politics is.

21.  The idea that, in discussion of culture, behavioral phenomena can be understood only within the culture in which they occur relates to a.  the interpretation paradox. b.  relativism. c.  etics. d.  back translation. 22.  The concept that internal, psychological processes may be universal but that they are expressed differently across cultures is associated with a. .

  ESSAY ITEMS (Starred Questions appear in the text as study questions.) Understanding Different Perspectives 1.  Why do we need to take culture and individual differences into account when we try to understand people’s behaviors? 2.  Why is it so hard to distinguish among the effects of culture, race, and ethnicity in our research? 3.  Describe.

11. Researchers have found that, when randomly sampled over time, 28% of middle and high school students had thoughts of suicide. This long-term study is an example of a a. panel study. b. cohort study. c. cohort-sequential study. d. trend study 12. If you sampled residents of a neighborhood randomly over a period of years.

31.  In observational research, using a small number of long observation times rather multiple, short intervals is called a.  cluster sampling. b.  one/zero sampling. c.  time-point sampling. d.  time-interval sampling. 32.  In naturalistic observation, the practice of dichotomous recording whether a behavior occurs or not constitutes a.  cluster sampling. b.  one/zero sampling. c.  continuous real-time sampling. d.  time-interval sampling 33. .

  9.  Researchers cannot observe behaviors of interest continuously because it would be too costly.  As a result, they create blocks of time to study the behaviors and hope that the behavior in those blocks presents an accurate picture of what happens during non-observation times.  Researchers have investigated optimal ways of.

12.  Why would there be ethical issues of risk associated with a researcher becoming part of a group without telling group members that they were being studied? 13.  Jacob, Tennenbaum, Seilhamer, Bargiel, and Sharon (1994) studied two types of families, distress and nondistressed.  The researchers tape recorded interactions among family members. .

12.  Describe the way applied and theoretical research is oriented in the experimental analysis of behavior. 13.  Why would synesthesia be best studied in a single-case approach?  Also, why would a group study be inappropriate if a researcher actually had access to a large number of synesthetes? 14.  Why would an ABA.

17.  Why would the flu not be a good malady for studying in a N of 1 Randomized Clinical Trial methodology?  Why would a group design be better? 18.  What are the advantages of single-case research? 19.  Why can you argue that single-case designs are both strong and weak in external validity? 20.   .

14.  What threats to internal validity are reduced when you switch from a one group pretest-posttest to a static comparison group design?  What potential threat is introduced? 15.  What are the advantages of the interrupted time-series design and the replicated time-series design over other quasi-experimental designs? 16.  How do the interrupted time-series.

18.  Chen (2008) has identified four major issues associated with testing people from different cultures. They are (a) translation, (b) construct invariance, (c) response styles, and (d) social desirability. How do each of these issues relate to such research? 19.  How do stereotypes affect behaviors? 20.  Many psychologists now believe that the.

8.  In the Bond, Carlin, Thomas, Rubin and Patton (2001) study on bullying in schools and depression, why could attrition have influenced their results? 9.  Why would the reasons for attrition rates be different for children and for adults? 10.  What steps did Wutzke, Congirave, Kogler, Saunders, and Hall (2000) take in.

10.  What are the four threats to internal validity that are associated with participants? 11.  What are the three threats to internal validity associated with measurement? 12.  How did Goldenberg et al. (1999) combine experimental and quasi-experimental designs in their research, generating the conclusion that neurotic people relate sex and death? 13.  Describe.

5.  Why is your sampling frame important with respect to your ability to generalize your results beyond your sample? 6.  Why do open-ended questions provide more information to survey researchers than closed-ended questions?  What drawbacks are associated with open-ended questions? 7.  When you ask people how often they have engaged in a.

21.  A study that relies on participants’ memories of what already happened is called a a.  longitudinal study. b.  cohort study. c.  retrospective study. d.  panel study. 22.  If you asked research participants now how they responded to a traumatic event in the past, you would need to use a a.  longitudinal design. b.  cohort design. c.  cross-sectional.

31.  When people show certain patterns in responding to survey questions, like tending to give low ratings regardless of question content, they are showing a.  satisficing. b.  optimizing. c.  response bias. d.  impression management. 32.  When respondents give the same or nearly the same value in a rating task regardless of the question, they are.

51. One of potential problems in encouraging survey respondents to optimize their answers is that a. after optimizing for several answers, respondents get into the habit of acquiescing. b. people may try to provide more detail than they can give accurately, so they introduce errors into their answers. c. people often confuse optimizing.

31.  According to psychologist Stanley Sue (1999) cultural research is sometimes limited because a.  it is difficult for researchers to distinguish between etics and emics. b.  many investigators may have difficulty finding participants from different cultural groups. c.  using students of different cultural groups has been shown to lead to invalid results. d.  the.

  ESSAY ITEMS (Starred questions appear in the text as study questions.) 1.  What is the difference between a relationship study and a prediction study?  Which one is likely to be more preliminary?  Why? 2.  Using scientific arguments, explain why we should not rely on SAT scores alone in making decisions about college admissions. 3. .

11.  If a psychologist developed a test to estimate the extent to which a person would experience post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after experiencing a stressful situation, the score on that test would constitute a a.  confirmatory variable. b.  measured variable. c.  predictor variable. d.  criterion variable. 12.  A researcher might decide to compute correlations.

21.  There is a direct correlation between how long you study for a test and how many correct you achieve.  If you changed your measurement to see if there is an association between how long you study and how many errors you make on that test, your analysis would reveal a. .

31.  A synonym for bivariate correlations is a.  test of association. b.  path analysis. c.  zero order correlation. d.  scatter diagram. 32.  When you try to predict the value of an outcome variable from several variables, you are likely to be using a.  multiple regression. b.  the Pearson product-moment correlation. c.  the analysis of variance. d.  heterogeneous subgroups. 33.  Psychologists.

5.  What crucial decisions are associated with sampling in observational research? 6.    What are the advantages of using video recording for observational research?  Why are there still going to be uncertainties in what you record? 7.  Differentiate among continuous real time measurement, time-point sampling, and time-interval sampling. 8.  Why might a researcher decide.

41.  When experimentalists develop a cover story to keep participants from figuring out the purpose of an experiment and changing their behaviors as a result, the experimenters are responding to what observational researchers call a.  observational drift. b.  subject reactivity. c.  observer bias. d.  behavioral drift. 42.  Observational researchers Jacob et al. (1994) have suggested.

MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS   Double-starred items appear as Review Questions in the chapter 1.  Data collection that involves every member of the population of interest is called a a.  sampling frame. b.  survey. c.  census. d.  targeted survey. 2.  Psychologists typically do not use a census in their research because a.  a census often leads to telescoping of responses. b. .

MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS   1.  The approach to research in which investigators record behavior exactly as it occurs, attempting to avoid interpretation, is called a.  subject reactivity. b.  observational research. c.  anthropomorphic research. d.  quasi-experimental. 2.  The study of the behavior of human and nonhuman animals in the natural environment, without any manipulation of variables, is called a. .

5.  How does a panel study differ from a trend study?  What are the advantages of each? 6.  Describe the trend study approach in the state of Vermont about suicide ideation among high school students.  What did the researchers find? 7.  Provide one example of a study you might do that would.

MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS   1. It is difficult to identify environmental causes of change over time in longitudinal studies because a. it is virtually impossible to identify all possible causes of change. b. longitudinal research tends to be experimental rather than descriptive. c. genetic factors cause almost all change over time. d. the interplay of genes.

  18.  Describe the time-series design and the results in the Cable TV smoking cessation research.  How did the researchers gauge its effectiveness? 19.  Describe the replicated interrupted time-series design that assessed the effectiveness of New York’s bottle return law.  Why can we use it to form a tentative causal link between.

11.  How can researchers maximize the likelihood of getting good answers to sensitive questions? 12.  Identify two ways respondents positive images so that they look good as they respond to survey questions. 13.  Identify four reasons that difficult questions can lead to satisficing? 14.  Identify six ways you minimize the likelihood that satisficing.

41.  If a person is completing a psychological inventory, but continues to misinterpret questions and respond in ways the psychologist isn’t prepared for, there will be an issue of a.  the interpretation paradox. b.  hypothetical constructs. c.  relativism. d.  construct validity. 42.  In order to make sure that test questions have the same meaning in.

MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS   1.  Research that involves identifying relationships among variables but not causation is known as a.  correlational research. b.  experimental research. c.  descriptive research. d.  case study research. 2.  When Guthrie, Ash, and Bendaudi (1995) investigated whether students’ grades and their tendency to be morning or evening people are associated, these investigators conducted a.  a.

  15.  Although it is difficult to define culture and ethnicity and to spot reliable differences in behavior across them, why should we study them and their relation to behavior? 16.  Why is content validity a critical concept to consider in conducting research on tests administered by mental health workers when working.

61.  Using social workers to find out about behaviors of people who use their services relies on a.  probability sampling. b.  snowball sampling. c.  targeted sampling. d.  key informant sampling. 62.  When researchers try to contact members of hidden populations by finding out where such people congregate, the sampling technique they are using is a.  key.

5.  Distinguish among absolutism, relativism, and universalism in explanations of behaviors.  How are most psychologists likely to regard each of these three positions? 6.  Describe how the definitions of race as used over the years in the United States reveal cultural viewpoints rather than fixed biological characteristics. 7.  Describe how culture can.

21.  If a researcher monitored how long a person kept smiling or laughing after seeing a person slip on a banana peel, the data collection would involve a.  time-point sampling. b.  time-interval sampling. c.  continuous real-time sampling. d.  cluster sampling. 22.  When a researcher randomly selects a set of times and observes whether a behavior.

11.  One limitation to naturalistic observation is that a.  investigators need to manipulate a large number of variables to get a good understanding of the behaviors of interest. b.  investigators cannot always tell which factor in the environment is causing behaviors to occur. c.  the research environment is usually too simplified for researchers.