PSYC 3380 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Regression Discontinuity Design, Simple Random Sample, Convenience Sampling

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3380
• Professor: Jeffrey Spence

Document Summary

We want our results to be generalizable. If it isn"t generalizable, it means the results are meaningless because they are only relevant to that one particular study. Inferences about whether the results of a study will hold over variations in participants, treatments, settings, and measures. Population validity: can you generalize from your sample to the population or to another defined population, think about what population you are trying to draw conclusions about. i. e. human species or undergraduate students at guelph. We can establish external validity through replication (empirical approach: replication: trying to see if you can get the same results in the real world as you did in the lab, afterwards. Methodological steps (built in to study design: probability sampling techniques: designed to help researcher get representative samples, beforehand. Cluster sampling: population is divided into clusters (groups) and entire clusters are randomly selected, simple random sampling with clusters , each cluster is representative of the population.