Psychology 2410A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Design Of Experiments, Habituation, Random Assignment

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2410A/B
• Professor: Adam Cohen

Document Summary

Modern scientific research has advanced in the understanding of fundamental questions about child development because of the successful application of the scientific method to the study of child development. 4 basic steps: choosing question to be answered, formulating hypothesis regarding the question, developing a method for testing the hypothesis, using data yielded by the method to draw a conclusion regarding the hypothesis. What distinguishes scientific research from non-scientific approaches is the third step, methods used to test hypotheses. Measure must be directly related to hypothesis and reliable and valid. Reliable degree to which independent measurements of a given behaviour are consistent interrater reliability: amount of agreement in the observations of different raters who witness the same behaviour. 1: attained when raters" observations are in cose agreement test-retest reliability: degree of similarity of a child"s performance on two or more occasions administered under same conditions, in similar ways.