Concepts to be familiar with and terms to know for the Psychology 460 (F03) midterm. Note that this list involves the book material only; I’ll trust you to deal with your class notes, material from which may also be on the test. For the most part these topics are easily findable in the book by attending to the headers in the book. I won’t ask you for formulas, people’s names, or the social psychology theories they use as examples (e.g., objective self-awareness).

Operationalization

Multiple operationalization

Nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio rules of measurement (p.11)

3 types of directionality in causation (p. 18)

moderator vs. mediator

independent & dependent variable

statistical validity

internal validity

confounds (definition)

random assignment & why its important

why participant loss/mortality can be a problem

external validity

Why Gergen believes social science results can’t generalize (p. 96)

Why college sophomores might be a poor choice as research subjects (pp. 97-98)

The four participant roles (p. 102)

Blind procedures

Robustness, ecological validity, relevance (definitions)

Why a researcher might not care so much about external validity (p. 111)

reliability

random error vs. systematic error

coefficient alpha, p. 41

predictive validity

content validity

construct validity

convergent vs. divergent validity

multritrait-multimethod matrix technique (generally what research method is to generate one, p. 50; there’s an example p. 51)

The list of threats to measurement validity starting p. 53 – mood, social desirability, language difficulty, extreme-response sets, acquiescence. Know how they might hurt validity.

“mixed design” definition (p. 126)

four reasons why one might get a 0 correlation (pp. 131-132)

pretest sensitization (p. 62)

factorial design

two reasons to use a factorial design (p. 65)

interaction & main effect

between subjects vs. within subjects design

counterbalancing

statistical power (p. 77)

manipulation check & why it should be used

block randomization (p. 84)

mundane vs. experimental realism (p. 86)

exact vs. conceptual replication (p. 113)

ways to get random assignment in the field (p. 116ff)