Psych 4450 Exam 1 Scenarios

A clinic blames repeated missed appointments on patient motivation, but a psychologist examines transport, cost, and clinic hours. Which perspective guides this assessment?

Community psychology/ecological perspective: behavior is shaped by interacting contextual systems, not only individual traits.

A city improves residents’ well-being by changing housing access rather than treating each resident separately. What makes this community psychology?

Applied ecological action: changing environments and institutions to promote well-being and prevent problems.

An instructor argues that a child’s behavior depends on both personality and classroom conditions. Which classic formulation supports this?

Lewin’s B = f(P × E): behavior is a function of the person–environment interaction.

A recreation center with few staff gives each volunteer several meaningful roles. Which Barker concept fits?

Undermanned behavior setting: too few participants for available roles, inviting broader involvement.

Two schools have different students each year but maintain similar behavioral routines. Which Barker idea explains this?

Behavior settings: stable environmental patterns organize and sustain characteristic behavior.

A new bus line changes school attendance, job access, and neighborhood commerce. Which Kelly principle?

Interdependence: changing one system component produces effects elsewhere.

A coalition redirects volunteer hours and grant money from one service to another. Which Kelly principle?

Cycling of resources: resources circulate, are allocated, and carry costs and benefits.

A neighborhood modifies its activities after repeated heat waves. Which ecological principle?

Adaptive capacity: the ability to adjust to environmental demands.

A researcher compares a community before and after 20 years of demographic turnover. Which Kelly principle?

Succession: contexts and their members change over time.

A student feels stressed because of ongoing conflict with a parent at home. Which ecological system directly affects them?

Microsystem: immediate settings such as family and home.

A counselor coordinates a student’s teacher and parent to support attendance. Which Bronfenbrenner level?

Mesosystem: connections and interactions between microsystems.

A parent’s employer changes work shifts, indirectly affecting childcare. Which ecological level?

Exosystem: a setting not directly occupied by the child affects the child indirectly.

Cultural expectations about gender shape opportunities across many institutions. Which ecological system?

Macrosystem: broad cultural beliefs and values.

A pandemic permanently changes how students learn across several years. Which ecological system emphasizes historical time?

Chronosystem: major events and changes over time.

A program teaches unemployed people interview skills but leaves hiring rules intact. What intervention order?

First-order intervention: changing individual adaptation within an existing system.

A school rewrites discipline procedures to prevent unequal treatment. What intervention order?

Second-order intervention: altering the system that produces the difficulty.

A campaign shifts society’s underlying belief that some groups deserve fewer rights. What intervention order?

Third-order intervention: changing the culture and values beneath systems.

A vaccination campaign aims to stop a problem before any cases occur. Which Kaplan prevention level?

Primary prevention: preventing the initial occurrence of a problem.

A clinic screens people early and treats the first signs of a condition. Which Kaplan prevention level?

Secondary prevention: early detection and treatment.

A support program reduces disability associated with a longstanding condition. Which Kaplan prevention level?

Tertiary prevention: limiting severity or consequences of an established problem.

A resilience class is available to everyone in the city regardless of risk. Which IOM prevention category?

Universal: targets the general population.

A program offers additional support to youth in neighborhoods with high risk, before symptoms appear. Which IOM category?

Selective: targets a population at elevated risk.

A workshop serves adolescents beginning to display warning signs. Which IOM category?

Indicated: targets people with emerging symptoms.

A caseworker begins by identifying residents’ capabilities rather than listing their deficiencies. Which emphasis?

Strengths/assets perspective: emphasize existing competencies and resources.

A policymaker insists poverty is solely the result of laziness while ignoring unequal opportunities. What error?

Victim blaming: assigning responsibility to individuals while neglecting systemic conditions.

Tenants gain seats on a council and meaningful authority over housing decisions. What principle?

Empowerment: increasing control, efficacy, and influence over decisions affecting their lives.

A city ensures marginalized groups can access resources and participate fairly. What core value?

Social justice: equity, fair opportunity, and reducing marginalization.

Researchers and residents jointly test solutions to a local safety problem. What approach?

Action research: theory-informed inquiry through an active research–community partnership.

A neighborhood health team includes a sociologist, economist, and psychologist for complementary insight. Why?

Interdisciplinary approach: complex problems need multiple perspectives and reduced disciplinary narrowness.

A professor traces community psychology’s emergence to a meeting emphasizing prevention and community settings. Which event?

Swampscott Conference: formative event in community psychology’s development.

Residents realize that together they can successfully petition for safer streets. What form of agency?

Collective agency: belief in a group’s capacity to act and achieve goals.

A resident gains confidence that they personally can organize a meeting. Which form of agency?

Individual agency: recognizing one’s own ability to accomplish tasks.

An agency stops framing a neighborhood as defective and instead catalogs skills, leaders, and mutual aid. What lens?

Strengths and competency focus rather than a weakness/deficiency model.

A community researcher assumes one cultural label describes everyone within that group. What principle is neglected?

Diversity within groups: communities are not monolithic.

A case manager considers age, disability, faith, race, class, language, and gender together. Which framework?

ADDRESSING model: systematically attending to multiple dimensions of diversity.

A low-income immigrant woman describes exclusion based on combined gender, class, and origin experiences. What concept?

Intersectionality: overlapping social positions can shape experience and disadvantage.

A committee invites renters, business owners, youth, and elders before defining the local problem. Which change rule?

Engage diverse perspectives: include stakeholders to understand problem and context.

A nonprofit stops treating missed appointments as personal failures and examines transport and clinic policy. Which change rule?

Think systemically: look beneath symptoms for underlying causes.

Small early wins make residents willing to tackle a more difficult housing campaign. Which transformative-change rule?

Create conditions that encourage change: readiness grows through achievable successes.

An intervention has a strong theory but staff never deliver it consistently. Which rule is especially relevant?

Pay attention to effective implementation, not only program design.

After feedback shows a workshop misses immigrant families, organizers modify it. Which rule?

Learn and adapt in response to problems and opportunities.

A coalition sees that improvements benefit only affluent neighborhoods and revises its approach. Which rule?

Keep social justice in mind: identify and address inequalities.

Activists ask whether a plan addresses the causes of homelessness or just immediate symptoms. Which social change principle?

Determine the nature of change: does it reach the source of the problem?

A team maps which officials control funding before launching a campaign. Which social-change principle?

Identify the holders of power and influence.

Tenant groups recruit schools and health clinics to support affordable housing. Which principle?

Build coalitions with others sharing concerns.

Organizers choose a series of manageable victories rather than demand instant transformation. Which principle?

Be patient: small wins can lead toward larger outcomes.

A group monitors policy adoption and actual outcomes after campaigning. Which principle of social change?

Measure successes: assess what has been accomplished.

A European-oriented psychology team emphasizes structural causes rather than locating all problems in individuals. Which perspective?

Critical psychology: examine external, structural sources of problems.

A team recognizes that people may internalize messages portraying their group as inferior. Which perspective?

Liberation psychology: oppression may be external and internalized.

Educators help residents identify oppressive narratives and see alternatives to them. Which liberation practice?

Consciousness raising/education to recognize and challenge oppression.

Researchers challenge assumptions that colonial cultures are inherently superior. What orientation?

Decolonial perspective: reverse colonial patterns and hierarchies.

Community leaders insist that Indigenous peoples’ autonomy be respected before external control begins. What orientation?

Anticolonial approach: resist colonizing domination and honor Indigenous communities.

Residents mobilize around unequal treatment in policing and courts. Which 21st-century movement in the slides?

Black Lives Matter: highlights racial injustice in the legal system.

Protesters mobilize around financial inequality and institutional power. Which movement noted in the slides?

Occupy Wall Street: focused attention on the financial system.

A crisis exposes unequal health access and disrupts daily community life worldwide. Which major context in slides?

The worldwide pandemic: foregrounds health systems and community context.

A coalition wants evidence that its new tutoring program helps rather than relying on anecdotes. Why conduct research?

To evaluate program effectiveness using systematic empirical evidence.

A researcher bases a claim on observations of real behavior rather than intuition. Which principle?

Empiricism: knowledge grounded in observation and experience.

An investigator creates a broad explanation of how neighborhood ties affect stress. What is being constructed?

Theory: organized ideas intended to explain observed phenomena.

A scientist draws a conceptual blueprint of how housing insecurity affects mental health. What is it?

Model: a representation of processes or relationships.

An academic community shares assumptions about which questions and methods are legitimate. What is this?

Paradigm: shared guiding beliefs in a research community.

A claim says a therapy succeeds regardless of what data ever show. Which scientific requirement does it fail?

Falsifiability: a claim must permit a possible disconfirming test.

Repeated results force researchers to fundamentally revise their framework of a problem. What is this shift?

Scientific revolution/paradigm shift: major change in accepted explanations.

A survey gives widely different results when stable respondents take it a day apart. What property is weak?

Reliability: consistency or dependability of measurement.

A study of a school program cannot rule out that a simultaneous policy caused the gains. What is threatened?

Internal validity: confidence that the studied factor accounts for the result.

Results from one affluent campus may not apply to rural communities. What is threatened?

External validity: generalizability to other people or settings.

A sample consists almost entirely of volunteers from one elite college, although the target is all residents. What issue?

Biased/unrepresentative sample: participants do not reflect the target population.

Control participants receive advice from intervention participants during the study. What threat is occurring?

Diffusion of treatment: treatment exposure spills into the comparison group.

Participants with the greatest stress disproportionately leave before follow-up. What threat?

Experimental mortality/attrition: differential dropout may distort results.

A team predicts that greater neighborhood connectedness will accompany lower stress. What is that prediction?

Hypothesis: a testable expected relationship or outcome.

Investigators decide who to recruit, what to measure, and when to collect data. What are they creating?

Research design: systematic plan for testing a hypothesis.

Researchers observe a relationship between housing costs and anxiety without changing either variable. What design?

Correlational research: measures natural associations without manipulation.

A paper reports r = -0.80 for support and loneliness. What does this describe?

A strong negative correlation: greater support tends to accompany less loneliness, not proof of causation.

A paper reports r = +0.05 between two variables. How should its linear association be described?

Very weak or near-zero linear correlation.

A researcher claims that because neighborhood poverty correlates with anxiety, poverty has been proven to cause anxiety. Error?

Correlation does not establish causation; alternative explanations may exist.

Investigators randomly assign participants to gratitude writing or neutral writing and measure mood. Design?

Experiment: the independent variable is manipulated and outcomes compared across assigned groups.

In a program trial, one group takes a workshop and another does not. What is the workshop condition?

Independent variable: manipulated condition or exposure.

In a trial, investigators compare later self-reported mood scores. What are those scores?

Dependent variable: measured outcome.

Participants have equal chances of being allocated to either study condition. What procedure?

Random assignment: allocates participants to experimental conditions.

A team randomly selects names from the town register before inviting participants. What procedure?

Random sampling: selects participants from the population; distinct from random assignment.

Two preexisting classrooms receive different curricula, without random allocation. What research design?

Quasi-experimental design: compares interventions without random assignment.

A survey samples whomever happens to be in a campus lounge. What sampling method?

Convenience sampling: selection based on availability.

Investigators recruit specified numbers across several age brackets. What approach?

Stratified sampling: organize sampling across defined population strata.

Researchers select participants specifically for particular experiences with homelessness. What approach?

Purposive sampling: recruits people for relevant characteristics or experiences.

Interviews reveal detailed meanings behind residents’ experiences but involve relatively few participants. What approach?

Qualitative research: rich context and meanings, often limited statistical generalizability.

A team combines surveys with in-depth interviews on barriers to clinic attendance. What approach?

Mixed methods: integrates quantitative and qualitative data.

Residents choose the questions, help select methods, and determine how results will be used. What approach?

Community-based participatory action research: shared community–researcher power and action.

Researchers impose a prewritten agenda without asking residents what matters. What CBPAR principle is missing?

Partnership and community participation in defining the research problem.

A team maps which residents exchange help to locate isolated households. Which research tool?

Network analysis: study patterns of relationships and connections.

A city measures how often asthma occurs across neighborhoods and who is at greatest risk. Which approach?

Epidemiology: distribution and determinants of health-related conditions in populations.

Before opening a youth center, the team surveys whether the neighborhood wants or needs it. What assessment?

Needs assessment: identifies unmet needs and whether a program would be useful.

Supervisors check whether weekly sessions occur as the program manual describes. Which evaluation?

Process evaluation: whether implementation follows the plan.

Evaluators determine whether a literacy program improves actual reading scores. Which evaluation?

Outcome evaluation: whether the program achieves intended results.

A well-designed study is opposed by residents who distrust outside researchers. What broader consideration matters?

Community acceptance and the politics/context of scientific research.

Participants sign a form after being told risks, procedures, and voluntary rights. Which ethics principle?

Informed consent: understandable information and voluntary agreement.

A participant leaves a project without penalty after consenting. Which ethical right?

Right to withdraw voluntarily from research.

A researcher replaces names with codes but retains an identifying key securely. Which protection?

Confidentiality: identifiable information is protected; not necessarily full anonymity.

An investigator collects data with no identifiers connecting responses to people. Which protection?

Anonymity: responses cannot be linked to participants by identity.

A review board weighs possible harm against anticipated value before recruitment. What ethical oversight?

Institutional review and risk–benefit assessment.

A questionnaire is translated literally but misses important local meanings. What validity concern?

Cultural/ecological validity: methods and interpretations should fit the community context.

A student loses their wallet and feels immediate alarm. What is the triggering event called?

Stressor: an event or condition that elicits a stress process.