PSY 2810 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Convergent Validity, Descriptive Statistics, Operational Definition
4 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
We often have repeated observations of our measure. Repeated observations help us to avoid idiosyncratic effects and confounds. Having multiple observations can reduce variability for irrelevant factors. Can help with convergent validity: when you add items it helps with exhaustively. A measure that seems unitary is often made up of many different observations: an example would be a level of depression is scaled based on many other observations/factors that make up the one definition of depression. Repeated observations make data hard to interpret. We typically have many participants in each condition: we try to balance the type of people in each condition, helps us to overcome individual variability. Helps us to improve external validity (aka how we can generalize it to a broader sample of people) Statistics allows us to make sense of complex data. Descriptive statistics describe the data in a way that is more digestible. We can measure frequencies, averages, and variability.
