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| Originally a Greek school of medicine that stressed the importance of observation, and now generally used to describe any attempt to acquire knowledge by observing objects or events. |
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| A set of rules and techniques for observation that allow researchers to avoid the illusions, mistakes, and erroneous conclusions that simple observation can produce. |
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| A description of an abstract property in terms of a concrete condition that can be measured. |
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| A device that can detect the measurable events to which an operational definition refers. |
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| A device that measures muscle contractions under the surface of a person's skin. |
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| The characteristic of an observation that allows one to draw accurate inferences from it. |
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| The tendency for an operational definition and a property to have a clear conceptual relation. |
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| The tendency for an operational definition to be related to other operational definitions. |
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| The tendency for a measure to produce the same result whenever it is used to measure the same thing. |
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| The tendency for a measure to produce different results when it is used to measure different things. |
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| A method of gathering scientific knowledge by studying a single individual. |
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| The complete collection of participants who might possibly be measured. |
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| The partial collection of people who actually were measured in a study. |
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| A statistical law stating that as sample size increases, the attributes of a sample will more closely reflect the attributes of the population from which it was drawn. |
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| A graphical representation of the measurements of a sample that are arranged by the number of times each measurement was observed. |
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| A frequency distribution in which most measurements are concentrated around the mean and fall toward the tails, and the two sides of the distribution are symmetrical. |
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| Those aspects of an observational setting that cause people to behave as they think an observer wants or expects then to behave. |
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| A method of gathering scientific knowledge by unobtrusively observing people in their natural environments. |
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| Third-Variable Correlation |
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| The fact that two variables may be correlated only because they are both caused by a third variable. |
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| An observational technique that involves matching the average of the participants in the experimental and control groups in order to eliminate the possibility that a third-variable cause changes in the dependent variable. |
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| An observational technique that involves matching each participant in the experimental group with a specific participant in the control group. |
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| A correlation observed between naturally occurring variables. |
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| A technique for establishing the casual relationship between variables. |
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| A characteristic of experimentation in which the researcher artificially creates a pattern of variation in an independent variable in order to determine its causal powers. |
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| The characteristic of an experiment that allows one to draw accurate inferences about the causal relationship between an independent and dependent variable. |
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| A characteristic of an experiment in which the independent and dependent variables are operationally defined in a normal, typical, or realistic way. |
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