Hsc 4010 Midterm Study Guide

* Ethical obligations * Researchers to their colleagues in the scientific community * Analysis of data and the way the results reported * Researcher familiar than anyone else with study’s technical limits and failures * Obligated to make shortcomings known to readers * Must admit qualifications and mistakes * Negative findings should be reported if they are related to the analysis * Predictive validity * Criterion-related validity * Testing the validity of measures * Example: validity of College Board exams is shown in their ability to predict students’ success in college. The validity of a written driver’s test is determined, in this sense, by the relationship between the scores people get on the test and their subsequent driving records. In these examples, college success and driving ability are the criteria. * Several Indicators * Combine several pieces of info, then create a measurement of the variable * Tradition * Offers some clear advantages to human inquiry * Accepting what everybody knows, avoid overwhelming task of starting from scratch * Authority * Can both assist and hinder human inquiry * Trusting authority working within their scope * Tradition & Authority * Provide a starting point for our own inquiry, but they can lead us to start at the wrong point and push us off in the wrong direction. * Idiographic explanations * Causal reasoning * Example: doing poorly on a test because of many factors * Idio – unique, separate, peculiar, or distinct, as in the word idiosyncrasy * Scope of explanation is limited to the single case at hand * Hypothesis * Specified testable expectation about empirical reality that follows from a more general proposition. * Supporting or failing to support a theory by testing it * Voluntary participation in research * Experimental participation must be voluntary * No one should be forced to