SHORT ANSWER

For each question, offer a brief response (1-2 sentences) that balances the goals of being concise while also fully answering the question.

A. Please describe in your own words what the difference is between an independent and a dependent variable.

B. Write a directional hypothesis for the following research question: “Is there a relationship between the time a parent spends playing with a child and the child’s self-esteem?”

C. Is good scientific research “value-free?” Briefly defend your answer.

D. Be creative and think of a possible experiment that might suffer from all of the following sources of bias at the same time: regression, instrumentation (instrument decay), & implementation.

E. How are the roles hypotheses play different in quantitative vs. qualitative research?

F.

SHORT ESSAY

For each question, write a brief essay (1 paragraph) that fully answers the question.

A. Compare the advantages and disadvantages of survey research vs. experimental research, including for which situations a researcher would prefer to use one over the other.

B. Compare and contrast the 3 major types of validity we have discussed: measurement validity, external validity, and internal validity. Imagine and briefly describe a research study that would have poor validity in all 3 respects.

C. Describe some characteristics of a good quantitative research study. Tell us what these characteristics mean and why they are important—also, feel free to add considerations that we have discussed in the context of specific research designs.

D. You have identified a research question that seems both interesting and important. You go to Google Scholar to identify prior research that will inform your work – and even by using the fewest possible search terms, you still find that more than 300 research articles have been published on this topic in the past decade. What would you do to identify the subset of studies that is most important to your work? Please justify your strategy.

LONGER ESSAY

Imagine that you are a young researcher in counseling, in your first year in a professional setting, and have just been given a small grant to perform your first real research study.

What you are most interested in is predicting suicide among local adolescents, with the hope that those identified as highest risk can be encouraged to seek counseling and/or psychiatric treatment. In your preliminary review of the literature, you find evidence pointing to three powerful factors related to suicide in different populations: childhood physical and emotional abuse, lack of a peer support system, and externalizing behaviors such as cutting and vandalism.

Given all of this, you wonder which of these factors is most related to suicidality among local San Bernardino County youth showing clinical signs of depression. Because you are an expert in the field, you know that only a large, long-term study could predict differences in actual suicide rates (as suicide is extremely rare even among an at-risk population). However, the Rorschach Suicidality Index is generally regarded as the best available predictor of the likelihood of future suicide.

Please design a research study to identify the factors most closely associated with suicidality among the population of depressed San Bernardino County adolescents.

First select the type of research method that would be most appropriate to your research question.

Describe your sample (including its composition, how you might contact them, obtaining consent, & division into subgroups (if any)), procedures (what your participants will do and how you will assess them), and analytic plan (statistics?). Finally, talk about what ethical issues you would consider in designing and conducting your study, and how you might address these issues.

Please use essay style for your answer (paragraphs and complete sentences).

NO REFERENCES NEEDED