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Description
Flashcards by Akilah Madry, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by Akilah Madry
over 7 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| why focus on stats? | you cannot understand what physiologists do or ever do it yourself, w/o knowledge of stats. |
| why are stats essential for physchological science ? | psychologists goal is to provide objective answers to questions about human behavior |
| why should we love stats ? | because being able to answer questions objectively is a great thing especially when questions are controversial |
| stats allow us to______and______ data | organize and interpret |
| why must data be organized ? | w/o organization , data are just a meaningless bunch of numbers and can't be used to answer interesting questions |
| calculating averages is a_________ technique | statistical |
| descriptive statistics | describing the behavior of the specific people in a specific sample |
| interpretation | figuring out what data mean, drawing conclusions from data interpretation |
| psychologists care about what the data mean for people in_______ | the population |
| psychologists want to know about ________, but are forced to study _______ because it's impossible to study every single person in a popultion | -populations -samples |
| using __________ _____ to look at the behavior of people in a sample does not , by itself tell us anything about people in the population | descriptive stats |
| inferential statistics | used to figure if a difference in a sample is good evidence that the same difference would exist for people in general |
| inferential statistics | let us infer something about a population based on a sample |
| together _________ and ________ ____ allow us to answer questions about populations by studying samples | descriptive and inferential statistics |
| psychological science requires ______ | creativity |
| turning complex behavior into numerical facts requires a great deal of ______ | creativity |
| variable | a characteristic of a person that can have at least 2 possible values |
| for variables the values are either _______ or ________ | -numbers -categories |
| aa persons particular value is the persons _________ | score |
| numeric values | variables in which values are numbers |
| categorical values | variables in which values are categories |
| its important to recognize the difference between categorical and numeric values because | the kinds of variable you have determines the statistical tools you can use with the variables |
| 3 types of investigation where data come from | 1. observational studies 2.experiements 3.quasi experiments |
| observational studies | -can only show that when people differ on an explanatory variable , they may also differ on a response variable * there may be a third variable that causes the difference in response variables |
| explanatory variable | a variable we think might partially explain behavior ( sometimes called independent variable) |
| response variable | a variable we want to measure ( sometimes called dependent variable) |
| observational studies limitation: | don't provide evidence if causation , they can't reveal whether the explanatory variable caused a difference in the response variable |
| observational studies are often presented in the press and elsewhere as if they provide evidence of _________ | causation |
| experiments | type of investigation that can provide evidence of causation |
| experiment features: | - shared with observational studies but -involve randomly assign sample members to particular values (or diff. conditions) - no worry/ less worry about third variable problem |
| quasi- experiements | -sometimes random assignment of subjects to levels of the explanatory variable is difficult, if not impossible -researchers might compare 2 groups that naturally differ |
| reseachers in quasi experiments think they are observing a marker for a ______________ and then consider that ____________ to be the explanatory variable | third variable |
| in observational studies , the observed variable is considered to be the ____________________ | explanatory variable |
| quasi experiments have all the same features as observational studies and do not have _________ | random assignment |
| different values of an explanatory variable are sometimes called | the different levels of the variable |
| randomness is important in 2 steps of data collection | -selection of study participants -assignment of participants |
| third variable problem | the problem that can make it hard to argue that explanatory variables cause differences in response variables |
| why select participants randomly ? | we want samples to represent the population |
| random selection produces a | representative sample |
| why assign participants to conditions randomly ? | -avoid bias -produces groups that on average are similar to each other - it's vital that groups in an experiment are similar |
| dependent measure = | response variable |
| 2 response variables | -categorical variables -numerical variables |
| what are inferential stats for ? | deciding if a difference that occurs in a sample is good evidence that the same difference would occur in the population |
| why are there so many different inferential statistical tests ? | because investigations can be set up in different ways and you need a specific test for each specific set up |
| different set ups are called | different experimental designs |
| Paired T-Test | - there is 1 and only 1 group of SS -each subject was exposed to 2 and only 2 levels of explanatory variables |
| Two Sample T-Test | - 2 and only 2 groups of subjects -each subject was expose to 1 and only 1 level of the explanatory variable |
| One Way ANOVA (analysis of variance ) | -3 or more groups of subjects -each subject was exposed to 1 and only 1 level of explanatory variable |
| Random sampling | psychologists achieve representative samples |
| random assignment | psychologists create groups of subjects that are similar to each other |
| Chi-square Test | response variable is categoical |
| Factorial ANOVA ( analysis of variance) | 2 (or more) explanatory variables |
| inferential statistical tests are tools for | interpreting data |
| we want to organize data to show the | distributions of a variable |
| variables are shown in | bar graphs= categorical histograms= numeric |
| bar graphs show | the different values the variable can have |
| histograms show | the different distributions of the numeric variable |
| 1 peak in histograms = | unimodal |
| 2 (or more peaks ) in histograms = | -bimodal (2) -multimodal (>2) |
| idealized depiction | bell curve/ bell shape |
| midpoint= | between lowest value and highest value in a sample |
| If frequencies skew to the left= | negatively skewed |
| if frequencies skew to the right= | positively skewed |
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