PSY 3171 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Proband, Genetic Marker, Twin

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 3171
• Professor: Mark Coates

Document Summary

Independent variable: the aspect manipulated or thought to influence the change in the dependent variable; ex. the influences on their behaviours. Hypothesis: testability: ability of a hypothesis, for example, to be subjected to scientific scrutiny and to be accepted or rejected, a necessary condition for the hypothesis to be useful. Internal and external validity are in this way often inversely related: lack of confounds = good internal validity vs. good generalizability = good external validity. The average client: patient uniformity myth: tendency to consider all members of a category as more similar than they are, ignoring their individual differences; leads researchers to make inaccurate generalizations about disorders and their treatments. Studying individual cases: case study method: research procedure in which a single person or small group is studied in detail. The method does not allow conclusions about cause-and-effect relationships, and findings can be generalized only with great caution.