Exercise Psychology: Psychological Measurement & Artifacts

Flashcards covering key concepts from a lecture on psychological measurement, constructs, construct validity, and experimental artifacts in exercise psychology.

Psychological Construct

A variable of interest that cannot be directly measured, such as thoughts, feelings, perceptions, judgments, or personality traits.

Latent Constructs

Unobservable psychological constructs that can only be measured indirectly by inference.

Psychometrics

The process of measuring latent constructs by inference, examining logical patterns of associations between behaviors, physiological responses, and social/environmental contexts.

Construct Validity

The reliance on specific types of validity (content, factorial, concurrent, criterion, logical, convergent/discriminant) to provide confidence in inferences when measuring psychological constructs.

Content Validity

Ensures that items making up a test are representative of all possible relevant items to the construct, avoiding omissions of relevant features and inclusion of irrelevant ones.

Factorial Validity

Uses correlations between responses to items to identify sets of questions that likely assess a common underlying construct, based on the logic that strongly correlated items measure the same construct.

Concurrent Validity

Measures should agree with other established measures that assess the same construct.

Criterion Validity

Measures should be strongly correlated to the 'gold standard' of measurement (the criterion) for the construct of interest.

Logical Validity

Scores on a scale change as expected in response to events or stimuli believed to impact the construct of interest.

Convergent/Discriminant Validity

Scores should be strongly related to behaviors, contexts, and biological responses theorized to be related to the construct, and unrelated to those which are not.

Experimental Artifacts

Phenomena affecting research dealing with psychological variables that can produce bias in responding and error in observation.

Halo Effect

A cognitive bias in which certain characteristics are ascribed to people based on other known characteristics (e.g., assuming attractive people are smarter).

Participant Expectations

Participant responses may be biased by their own expectations about the outcomes being assessed, similar to the placebo effect for self-reported outcomes.

Experimental Demand

Participants may pick up on subtle clues about the experimental hypothesis and strive to confirm or sabotage the purpose of the study.

Rosenthal Effect (Pygmalion Effect)

As we perceive others' expectations about us, we strive to confirm them. Blinding researchers to group assignment is important to mitigate this.

Hawthorne Effect

The tendency for participants to improve simply due to the attention associated with being in the study.

Socially Desirable Responding (Motivated Response Distortion)

The tendency for people to respond in a way that reflects them in a positive light, consistent with social norms or expectations.