Week 7, Quasi-experimental
and evaluation designs.
Lecture notes
- Studying naturally occurring events
- Measurement studies of behavior “in the field”
- Interviews or surveys
- Direct observation of behavior
- Retrospective designs
- Using existing (“archival”) data
- Measurement studies of behavior “in the field”
- Evaluate existing groups or program
- Single shot survey or measure
- Non-equivalent groups; comparing groups that are:
- Not randomly assigned
- Self-selected
- No blind
- Pre-existing
Lecture notes are here.
Readings
Continue
chapter 8. Read about a Consumer
Reports survey
used to evaluate
psychotherapy, and a very interesting field study of naturally
occring changes in baboon
culture. Finally, click the image for a short piece from Slate
Magazine on
using patterns of correlations to determine if having children direclty
causes mothers to earn less over their life times.
Discussion group Assignment
Rewrite your paper topic and have your journal article abstracts.
Take your discussion from last week or any direct feedback you have gotten and rewrite your paper topic. Try to make your current topic more clear or specific rather than starting from scratch, but feel free to change completely if you decide to.
Again, look at the paper assignment to see what your term paper will consist of. To get comfortable reading journal articles go to Guide to Psychology Articles.
You must have two references to published, peer-reviewed journal articles in your paper. Bring copies of the abstracts only, not the complete paper, to discussion group this week.
Phenomenon: What is the larger question? What are you interested in explaining?
Theory: How does it work? What causes what? Why or how does it happen?
Be clearer about your Hypothetical Constructs and how they relate to one another. Now that you got some basic thoughts down from last week, try to hone these into more specific concepts. Frame these in “cause and effect” -type language to address how or why your phenomenon works.
Remember - your Introductory text book is a great place to find overviews of (and references to) general psychological theories.
Hypothesis: What is your specific prediction?
Make a prediction about specific variables that can be operationally defined, and that reflect the hypothetical constructs underlying your theory. The most common problem students have at this point is not being specific or concrete enough in their hypothesis.
- The variables must be concrete enough that you can describe specific operations that you will use to create or measure each variable
- It must clearly express the larger hypothetical constructs you are studying.
You can be proposing either a true experiment – where you control the Independent Variable and you randomly assign people to experimental v. control groups – or a quasi-experiment where you do not control the IV or you use existing groups.
We will return to these questions for your assignment in Week 8, where you will begin a first draft of your term paper.
