click below
click below
Normal Size Small Size show me how
PSYC 3016 Ch 2
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| research | Exploration of the unknown; finding out something that nobody knew before one discovered it. |
| Funder's Second Law | There are no perfect indicators of personality; there are only clues, and clues are always ambiguous. |
| S data | Self-judgments, or ratings that people provide of their own personality attributes or behavior. |
| face validity | The degree to which an assessment instrument, such as a questionnaire, on its face appears to measure what it is intended to measure. For example, a face-valid measure of sociability might ask about attendance at parties. |
| self-verification | The process by which people try to bring others to treat them in a manner that confirms their self-conceptions. |
| I data | Informants’ data, or judgments made by knowledgeable informants about general attributes of an individual’s personality. |
| judgements | Data that derive, in the final analysis, from someone using his or her common sense and observations to rate personality or behavior. |
| expectancy effect | The tendency for someone to become the kind of person others expect him or her to be; also known as a self-fulfilling prophecy and behavioral confirmation. |
| behavioral confirmation | The self-fulfilling prophecy tendency for a person to become the kind of person others expect him or her to be; also called the expectancy effect. |
| L data | Life data, or more-or-less easily verifiable, concrete, real-life outcomes, which are of possible psychological significance. |
| B data | Behavioral data, or direct observations of another’s behavior that are translated directly or nearly directly into numerical form. B data can be gathered in natural or contrived (experimental) settings. |
| reliability | In measurement, the tendency of an instrument to provide the same comparative information on repeated occasions. |
| measurement error | The variation of a number around its true mean due to uncontrolled, essentially random influences; also called error variance. |
| state | A temporary psychological event, such as an emotion, thought, or perception. |
| trait | A relatively stable and long-lasting attribute of personality. |
| aggregation | The combining together of different measurements, such as by averaging them. |
| Spearman-Brown formula | In psychometrics, a mathematical formula that predicts the degree to which the reliability of a test can be improved by adding more items |
| psychometrics | The technology of psychological measurement. |
| validity | The degree to which a measurement actually reflects what it is intended to measure. |
| construct | An idea about a psychological attribute that goes beyond what might be assessed through any particular method of assessment. |
| construct validation | The strategy of establishing the validity of a measure by comparing it with a wide range of other measures. |
| generalizability | The degree to which a measurement can be found under diverse circumstances, such as time, context, participant population, and so on. In modern psychometrics, this term includes both reliability and validity. |
| research design | Plan for gathering data. Three types: case, experimental, and correlational. |
| case method | Studying a particular phenomenon or individual in depth both to understand the particular case and to discover general lessons or scientific laws. |
| experimental method | A research technique that establishes the causal relationship between an independent variable (x) and dependent variable (y) by randomly assigning participants to experimental groups |
| correlational method | A research technique that establishes the relationship (not necessarily causal) between two variables, traditionally denoted x and y, by measuring both variables in a sample of participants. |
| scatter plot | A diagram that shows the relationship between two variables by displaying points on a two-dimensional plot. |
| correlation coefficient | A number between –1 and +1 that reflects the degree to which one variable, traditionally called y, is a linear function of another, traditionally called x. |
| negative correlation | as x goes up, y goes down |
| positive correlation | x goes up, so does y |
| zero correlation | x and y are unrelated |