PSY100Y5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Sampling Bias, Operational Definition, Confounding

• School: UTM
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY100Y5
• Professor: Dax Urbszat

Document Summary

Outline: the scientific approach to behaviour, goals of the scientific enterprise, steps in a scientific investigation, advantages of the scientific approach, experimental research: o. Goals in a scientific enterprise: measurement and description - you must develop techniques to measure behaviour clearly and precisely, understanding and prediction - hypothesis. A hypothesis is a tentative statement about the relationship between two or more variables. Variables are any measurable conditions, events, characteristics, or behaviours that are controlled or observed in a study: application and control - a theory is a system of interrelated ideas used to explain a set of observations. Also variables should be controlled and t ry to leave no room for catalysts thwarting results. Steps in a scientific investigation: formulate a testable hypothesis - scientific hypotheses must be formulated precisely, and the variables under study must be clearly defined. Researchers achieve these clear formulations by providing operational definitions of the relevant variables.