Anahid is gathering data for her dissertation research, and has decided to use the internet to reach a large number of potential participants with a minimum of cost. She creates a list of questions and puts it on a website, and then sends the link out to many people in the hopes that they will go to her site. This inexpensive and rather efficient research design is called a(n)______.

Which of the following is an example of an empirical question that could be tested using systematic observation?

Lola is complaining that she has terrible abdominal pains. Several physicians have found nothing wrong with her. One physician gives Lola a prescription for tablets with no real medication in them. “I think that this new medication will be very helpful for your abdominal infection,” the physician tells Lola. Within 24 hours of taking the fake medication, Lola reports that her abdominal pains have disappeared. This is called a ______.

Psychologists often explore questions related to abstract concepts (e.g., satisfaction, happiness, spirituality) when conducting research but those concepts may be hard to quantify. What must be clearly stated at the beginning of the research of such a concept?

Markus is in a study examining the impact of vitamin C on vision. Some participants take 100mg of vitamin C every day while others take a placebo. Markus doesn't know which group they are in, but they are given eye exams measuring their vision each month. What is the dependent variable?

How does a researcher know which methods she should use to test her hypotheses in psychological research?

Based on what you know about dental hygiene and health, which of the following would be the best description of the correlation between variable A (the number of times a day one brushes their teeth) and variable B (the number of cavities one has when they go to the dentist)?

Dr. Crondall is studying who's happier - married or non-married couples. He uses people's current marital status as an independent variable because he can't randomly assign people to a married or single group. What kind of research strategy doesn't employ random assignment?

Which of the following would serve as an appropriate operational definition of depression in a research study about mood disorders?

Dr. Zarate wants his department to put together a proposal for a program of research that will earn excellent grant funding from a variety of sources, including the federal government. He knows that the research he is conducting will take many years and cost upwards of several million dollars. Which type of research is Dr. Zarate probably proposing?

What is traditionally considered to be the “gold standard” in psychology research?

As a researcher, you decide that you are very interested in peoples’ everyday behavior. Therefore, you decide to use an Electronically Activated Recorder, or EAR device, to capture the acoustic diary of participants’ days as they naturally unfold. In this scenario, you are:

Each night before she goes to bed, Youngha’s smartphone prompts her to log into a specific website and to answer several questions about her thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. She does this every day for one month as part of a research study she has volunteered for. Which method is the researcher employing?

Researchers have used several creative methods for studying behaviors and personality characteristics in both direct and unobtrusive methods over the years. Which of the following is not one of those methods?

There have long been criticisms of the science of psychology regarding the difficulty of measuring internal phenomena such as feelings. This is one reason why ______measures are so important: they are more widely accepted by skeptics.

Armando is participating in a one-week study examining the relationship between emotional states and eating behavior. Every time he eats something, he has to pull out a digital notebook and record how he is feeling at that exact moment. What kind of research method is being used in this study?

In a research study, ______ validity addresses the degree to which that study can lead to unambiguous causal inferences.

If you wanted to study a person’s online behavior using their posts and contributions to a social networking website like Facebook, what would be the best way to analyze that activity?

After the terrorist attacks in New York City on September 11, 2001, Cohn, Mehl, and Pennebaker (2004) examined blogs of users of a specific website. Through their use of ______, they determined that their participants expressed more negative emotions and were more cognitively and socially engaged for two weeks. After that period of time, these levels returned to baseline.

To study cheating habits, Dr. Martin creates a study that asks participants to take an exam in a room where there is an open textbook on a desk, while being watched and videotaped. Because this study doesn't mirror everyday life, it would be particularly low in which quality?