Self Report Measures in Psychology

Self-Report Measures and Surveys

• Self-report measures assess personal characteristics like personality and mental health.
• Surveys collect information on behaviors, thoughts, and attitudes, often requiring random samples for generalizability.
• Non-random selection can yield biased results and misrepresent broader populations.

Random Selection

• Ensures that each individual in a population has an equal chance of being selected.
• Example: Research on education in Louisiana should represent all demographics.

Self-Report Advantages and Disadvantages

• Pros include ease of administration and direct access to internal thoughts.
• Cons involve potential inaccuracies, especially among narcissists, and risks of dishonesty or socially desirable responding.

Rating Data

• Rating others can reduce self-report biases but can introduce new biases like the halo effect, where one positive trait influences evaluations of others.

Case Study Designs

• Case studies focus on individual subjects over time, useful for studying rare phenomena but may be anecdotal and misleading.

Correlational Designs

• Examines relationships between variables, without establishing cause and effect.
• Correlations can be positive, negative, or zero and are typically depicted in scatterplots.
• Illusory correlations occur when perceived relationships do not exist, such as crime rates and lunar phases.

Experimental Design

• Experiments manipulate an independent variable to observe effects on a dependent variable.
• Random assignment is crucial for reliable results; confounds can introduce biases.
• Placebo and nocebo effects illustrate the power of expectation on outcomes.

Pitfalls of Experimental Design

• Experimenter expectancy effect can bias results; double-blind designs can mitigate this effect.
• Demand characteristics can lead participants to guess the purpose of a study, potentially skewing results.

Evaluating Psychological Research

• Peer review process identifies research flaws.
• Consider confounding variables, placebos, and the distinction between correlation and causation.

Modern Ethical Guidelines

• Research must pass an Institutional Review Board (IRB) review, ensure informed consent, justify deception, and provide debriefing to participants.

Historical Ethical Issues

• The Tuskegee Study (1932-1972) exemplified ethical violations, where participants were not informed or treated for syphilis, leading to severe health consequences.

Animal Research

• Governed by Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) protocols; a small percentage of psychological research involves animals, primarily rodents and birds.

Statistics: Descriptive Statistics

• Key measures include central tendency: mean, median, and mode, which describe data clustering behavior in a dataset.