Practice questions

Key decisions about research design should be taken before the research question is formulated.

What is the name for a literature review that makes use of existing studies to answer a research question?

Which epistemological approach uses the methodology and methods most suitable for addressing a research question rooted in a real-life context?

A __________ is a subset of the population who participate in a study.

Post-positivism strives to discover absolute truth through objectively measuring and describing the world as it exists.

Top-down approaches to research gather data to test a prediction.

_____________ is an epistemological approach to the generation of knowledge that takes reality to be constructed by human beings, rather than being something fixed or separate from them.

______________ reasoning combines both bottom-up and top-down approaches by both generating and testing theories.

What term describes a tool for generating knowledge?

Which approach refers to the reduction of complex phenomena to simpler, often numerical, components?

In quantitative research, the research design is flexible and can be adapted as the research progresses.

In qualitative research, generalization to a larger population is not the aim.

Which qualitative methodological strategy is used to study cultural practices of people, societies, and cultures?

A(n) __________ case study is undertaken when a case is used to shed light on a phenomenon or issue rather than the case being of interest in and of itself.

__________ design is a quantitative methodological strategy, which does not involve manipulating variables, used to describe and measure people and phenomena.

Which form of validity means that findings from measures used in one quantitative study reflect or predict the findings from equivalent but different measures in another study?

A __________ design is a strategy used in multistrategy methodology in which two stages of research – one qualitative and one quantitative – are conducted one after the other.

What type of research is a cyclical process undertaken by a practitioner-researcher in order to address a specific area of their practice?

Which sampling approach involves identifying one appropriate participant and then asking them to recommend another participant, and so on?

The emic perspective captures the researcher’s perspective on the world.

In Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience, participants administered electric shocks to other people.

When did the US government apologize for funding a study testing the effects of penicillin on prisoners in Guatemala who were deliberately infected with syphilis?

The _________________ Code (1949) sets out the principles of voluntary, informed consent, the avoidance of harm, and the benefit of the research to society.

What does deontology, one of the major theories underlying the guiding principles of today’s codes of ethical research, refer to?

Internet-mediated research has no ethical implications.

Select the three principles set out in the Belmont Report (1979).

Which of these categories are not typically considered vulnerable populations?

There are circumstances in which it is acceptable for participants not to give fully informed consent.

Which philosophical theory advocates maximizing happiness and individual welfare, and underpins modern research ethics?

All researchers should apply for approval from a research ethics committee when conducting any research involving people as participants.

Participant observation is always qualitative.

Which of these features is not typical of participant observation?

Concurrent or retrospective reports made while or immediately after carrying out each stage of a task are known as _________________ (Ericsson and Simon, 1993).

Research on learning cultures and the conservatory conducted by Perkins (2013a) involved the administration of questionnaires.

Which of these characteristics is typical of semistructured observation?

Dividing video-recordings into segments of a particular duration and coding each of the behaviours observed in a selected proportion of segments is called ________________ sampling.

What is the first thing you must do before collecting observational data?

Observations can be said to have intra-observer reliability if the same person observes the same data on two occasions, obtaining the same results.

What term describes a tool for generating knowledge?

When drawing up a coding scheme in which behaviors are operationally defined, what should your chosen categories be?

Documentary data constitute a subset of documentation.

Which of these categories is not considered documentation?

Researchers must address reliability and ___________ when generating documents for research purposes.

Archival research involving the study of pre-existing documentation is more appropriate to musicology or performance history than music education, psychology, or performance science.

What materials would you be most likely to analyze using keyword-in-context (KWIC) methods?

LIWC stands for _______________ Inquiry Word Count.

How were recordings attributed to the pianist Joyce Hatto correctly identified as having been made by other pianists?

Event-contingent protocols are time-based designs.

When participants (or their guardians) provide amendments to or comments on their data this is known as _______________.

What does ESM stand for in the context of documentary research?

A focus group interview is so called because it focuses on one area of investigation.

What type of interview would be most appropriate when the interviewer wishes to allow a participant to tell a story in their own words, influenced as little as possible by predetermined questions?

An interview schedule is a document outlining the timeline for an interview study.

__________ interviews make use of a flexible interview schedule that allows for a degree of pre-planning and a degree of spontaneity while carrying out the interview.

A structured interview is an interview in which the interviewer follows a fixed schedule in which the order and wording of the __________ has/have been decided in advance.

What type of interview questions aim to elicit further detail and richness on a particular topic?

In a qualitative interview study, most of the questions should be open questions.

__________ allows the interviewer to test the overall design of the interview schedule, develop their interviewing skills, and to test the proposed interview format.

As a rule of thumb, the interviewer should talk more than the participant.

What kind of interview questions are based on assumptions and/or encourage participants to answer in a certain way, and should be avoided in interview studies?

Surveys are an example of a quasi-experimental design.

Where cross-sectional surveys collect data at a particular point in time, _____________ surveys capture data from participants on more than one occasion.

__________ studies often collect data from a very large and specific group of people over an extended people of time.

Whether a student received a fail, pass, or distinction on an examination is an example of __________ data.

This question is asking you for a(n) __________ response.

Dummy coding is used to process continuous data.

A scale from 1 = 'slow' to 10 = 'fast' is an example of a __________ scale.

Existing questionnaires can be adapted for use in different contexts.

A disproportionate amount of research in psychology and the social sciences has been conducted on __________ samples.

Online surveying platforms often have tools that let you employ survey __________, allowing different participants to receive different questions and/or questions in a different order.

Two variables that randomly correlate with one another, but have no relationship, are an example of (a) __________.

The best tool for isolating causal relationships is a __________ experiment.

The independent variable is the outcome of the experiment, and the dependent variable is the factor that you change.

A quasi-experiment can be run using a random or a non-random sample.

RCT stands for Randomized __________ Trial.

When a participant's behavior changes because they are being observed, this is known as _____________.

A mixed-design experiment can combine elements of a true experiment, quasi-experiment, and repeated-measures experiment in a single study.

A ______________ experiment examines the experiences of one specific participant.

In a double-blinded experiment, neither the participants or the researchers...

The experimental protocol documents the outcomes of the study and how it unfolded.

__________ is the process of recognizing and reporting the role of the researcher.

Transcription of audio data should always be verbatim.

In qualitative analysis, what is the term for a word or short phrase that captures the meaning of a segment of data?

In thematic analysis, coding should always be bottom-up.

In interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), where should the themes be noted?

Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is typically conducted with smaller samples than those used in thematic analysis.

Qualitative __________ is a qualitative analytical strategy that focuses on producing an overall narrative or holistic account of a set of data.

Grounded theory seeks __________ through the constant comparison between data and themes until new data do not change the developing theory.

Which approach to analysis focuses on language and use of language, which are seen as ways of understanding social functioning?

Content analysis of qualitative data can result in frequency counts.

A parameter describes a feature of a population.

In which approach to missing data do you leave out the participants who had not provided their marks out of only the analyses examining the missing value?

The value (or values) that appears the most often within a dataset is known as the __________.

The mean can be used to describe ordinal data.

In most measures of the fit of the data to a model, higher values indicate less fit.

Subtracting the mean of the dataset from each data point, then adding the values together, results in which value?

What is the most common measure of fit reported alongside means in social science research?

What is the median value of 3, 3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 7, 11, 11, and 13?

What kind of data visualisation displays the relationship between two continuous variables on its x- and y-axes?

Which type of data visualisation cannot be used to describe nominal data?

Means, medians, and standard deviations are examples of inferential statistics.

The p value describes the likelihood of finding an effect as large as, or larger than, what was observed assuming that...

The probability of a Type I error is represented by the __________ value.

Most research in the social sciences uses a threshold of p < .05 to determine statistical significance.

The statistical power of a test can be increased by using a Bonferroni correction.

A __________ analysis can be used to determine how large a sample would be required to identify a significant effect with a known effect size.

Which value is not a component of a power analysis?

The parametric assumption of homogeneity of ___________ assumes a similar distribution of data in each sample being compared.

A distribution of data that is taller and narrower than a normal distribution is known as what?

Which data transformation are you carrying out when you divide 1 by each value?

A(n) __________ t-test would be used to examine a difference between the mean performance scores of flautists and trumpeters.

How many distinct groups would a 6x2x2 factorial ANOVA compare?

The Wilcoxon signed-rank test is the nonparametric equivalent of the paired-samples t-test.

Which standard contrast would you use to compare the mean outcome for each individual group (except the first) with the mean of outcomes for all of the groups?

Box's test is used to test the assumption of sphericity when conducting an ANOVA.

A __________ ANOVA would be used to compare means in an experiment combining repeated-measures and between-groups comparisons.

ANCOVA stands for analysis of __________.

Friedman's MANOVA is the nonparametric equivalent of a one-way MANOVA.

Both the Tukey and Scheffé tests should be run alongside any ANOVA with more than two groups.

Which test would be most appropriate to run to examine differences between the mean self-efficacy scores between five groups of guitarists while controlling for years of study (measured as a continuous variable)?

A Pearson correlation coefficient can only meaningfully describe linear relationships between variables.

When one variable tends to show higher values that correspond to lower values in a second variable, this is known as a __________.

__________ tau is a nonparametric alternative to the Pearson correlation coefficient that is particularly useful when many scores have tied ranks.

In a regression analysis, predictor variables can be nominal so long as they have more than two groups.

Unstandardized beta measures the extent to which a regression model predicts that the outcome variable will change if the predictor variable increases by one standard deviation.

Where the chi-square test can examine relationships between two categorical variables, __________ analysis can examine relationships between more than two variables.

Cronbach's alpha is a test of ________.

EFA stands for __________ Factor Analysis.

Which test determines the degree to which a third variable accounts for the relationship between two other variables?

There is always one single correct quantitative analytical approach to any given research question and dataset.

When writing research reports, abstracts should always be drafted first.

Which of these features is not characteristic of good writing?

Report titles should be as short and informative as possible.

Acknowledgements go at the end of dissertations and theses.

What should not be included in the Method section of a report of quantitative research?

When you report qualitative research, justify your underpinning __________ (nature of knowledge sought) and choice of methodological approach.

What would you not include in your (General) Discussion?

The peer review process is typically double-blinded, whereby reviewers are not told who the authors are, and vice versa.

When drafting a script for a spoken presentation you should allow __________ words per minute of speech.

Which of these software packages can be used to manage references?