Yay. Chapter 2!

Mrs. Perl. I'm not going to lie. I'm looking at these notes I have on statistics and they just don't provide me with any inspiration for a solid blog post. I'm not sure how many exciting things I can say about standard deviation, descriptive statistics, or a central tendency. And what about ethics? There's certainly nothing fun about ethics. So, lets jump around a bit.

First, I never actually mentioned anything about the bio-psycho-social analysis even though we didn't focus on that this week. In my defense, though, it was covered on a test that we DID take this week. Basically, this type of analysis consists of analyzing a situation from the biological, psychological, and social perspectives--not just one. You can't just look at an eating disorder and claim it was only caused due to social pressure. You also must look at psychological aspects or see if it was caused by depression or something that has to do with their biology. You have to look at the big picture.
In Government last year we learned about something called the political schema. This means that everyone has a foundation of information in their head that directs new information and determines how they will process it. For instance, a republican will process all information very differently than a democrat would. It could be the same exact piece of information but their opinions and already acquired knowledge will determine how they will process the new information. What I'm getting to is that in politics, although they talk a lot about seeing the big picture, that doesn't happen much because their political schema just takes over.

Okay, now let's talk chapter 2.
I just want to get one thing out of the way first. When we were talking about placebos I kept thinking about this House episode that I watched. Dr. House is on a plane and someone gets really sick. While this person is experiencing all these weird symptoms, all the other passengers are freaking out. House stands up and starts talking about how dangerous this disease is and how contagious it can be. He then starts listing symptoms of this disease and says that if anyone starts experiencing them to notify him because their lives could be at serious risk. He names symptoms like your hands will begin to shake or you'll get dizzy..stuff like that. Anyway, people all start to freak out and tell him that they're feeling dizzy and that they're hands are shaking. House then tells them that none of those are real symptoms and its all psychological (or caused by anxiety).

Well, chapter 2. How exciting. Correlation does not prove causation. You must be careful of your word choice when creating a survey. A case study studies one person in depth. Experiments do not mimic real life. You must control for all confounding variables. If this blog were an experiment to see how long you could read this for without getting bored if you had a lollipop in your hand. Then I would randomly assign a random sample into a control group and an experimental group. Only the experimental group would get a lollipop. Both groups would have to read this blog. The independent factor would be the lollipop holding while the dependent factor would be how long they were able to read this for without getting bored. You could even operationalize this experiment by asking the participant every paragraph how bored they are on a scale from 1-5.

Well, that's my reflection of the past week of psych studyin'.
Have a lovely holiday.