Читать книгу The Handy Psychology Answer Book - Lisa J. Cohen - Страница 239

Psychology is the study of human behavior and as we all know, human behavior can be very complicated. Therefore it is often desirable to study many variables at once and to examine how the different variables relate to each other. Analyses that look at many variables at once are called multivariate analyses. Imagine you want to determine whether gym class improves academic performance in grade school children. You test a large sample of middle school children but you also want to account for many other factors that might impact a child’s academic performance, such as parental education, parental marital status, diet, sibling order, family income, teacher, school, child age, etc. A multivariate analysis would allow you to test the effect of each of these variables, while covarying for the effect of all other variables at the same time.

What does it mean when a study is generalizable?

If the results of a study can be applied to a larger population, we say the study is generalizable. Another term for generalizability is external validity.