Research Methods in psychology

Introduction to Psychology
Naveed Siddiqui
PhD. M.B.E. PgDip Information Technology
Founder & CEO – Naveed Media Academy
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THE FIVE STEPS OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD
The scientific method is a way to accomplish the goals of psychology
as discussed earlier: description, explanation, prediction, and control.
The first step in any investigation is to have a question to investigate,
right? So the first step in the scientific method is:
Perceiving the Question:
You notice something interesting happening in your
surroundings for which you would like to have an explanation.
This step is derived from the goal of description: What is
happening here?

An example might be that you’ve
noticed that your children seem to get a
little more aggressive with each other
after watching a particularly violent
children’s cartoon program on Saturday
morning. You wonder if the violence in
the cartoon could be creating the
aggressive behavior in your children
Once you have a question, you want an answer. The
next logical step is to form a tentative answer or
explanation for the behavior you have seen. This
tentative explanation is known as a hypothesis.
tentative: something that is not
fully worked out or completed as
yet.

Forming a Hypothesis: Based on your initial observations of what’s going
on in your surroundings, you form an educated guess about the explanation
for your observations, putting it into the form of a statement that can be tested
in some way.
Hypothesis
Children who watch violent
cartoons will become more
aggressive.
Forming a hypothesis
based on observations is
related to the goals of
description and
explanation.

Testing the Hypothesis:
The method you use to test your hypothesis will depend on exactly what kind of
answer you think you might get. You could make more detailed observations or
do a survey in which you ask questions of a large number of people, or you
might design an experiment in which you would deliberately change one thing to
see if it causes changes in the behavior you are observing.
In the example, the best method would probably be
an experiment in which you select a group of children,
show half of them a cartoon with violence and half of
them a cartoon with no violence, and then find some
way of measuring aggressive behavior in the two
groups.
Testing the hypothesis is
all about the goal of
getting an explanation
for behavior.

Drawing Conclusions:
Once you know the results of your hypothesis
testing, you will find that either your hypothesis was supported—which
means that your experiment worked, and that your measurements
supported your initial observations—or that they weren’t supported, which
means that you need to go back to square one and think of another
possible explanation for what you have observed.
Could it be that Saturday mornings make
children a little more aggressive? Or Saturday
breakfasts?
Drawing conclusions can be related
to the goal of prediction
If your hypothesis is
supported, you can make
educated guesses about
future, similar scenarios.

Report Your Results:
You have come to some conclusion about your investigation’s success or failure,
and you want to let other researchers know what you have found.
final step in
any scientific
investigation
is reporting
the results.
This allows to predict behavior based on your findings and to use
the results of those findings to modify or control behavior, the last
goal in psychology

Research Methods In Psychology
 In psychology, researchers try to find the answers to empirical questions.
 There are questions that can be scientifically or empirically studied and those that
cannot.
“What is the meaning of life?”
is not a question that can be
studied using the scientific or
empirical method.
“Has life ever existed on
Mars?” is a question that
scientists are trying to answer
through measurements,
experimentation, soil samples,
and other methods.

Descriptive Methods
Naturalistic Observation Sometimes all a researcher needs to know is what is
happening to a group of animals or people. The best way to look at the behavior of
animals or people is to watch them behave in their normal environment. That’s
why animal researchers go to where the animals live and watch them eat, play,
mate, and sleep in their own natural surroundings. With people, researchers might
want to observe them in their workplaces, homes, or on playgrounds.
if someone wanted to know how
adolescents behave with members
of the opposite sex in a social
setting, that researcher might go to
the mall on a weekend night.

It allows researchers to get
a realistic picture of how behavior occurs because they are
actually watching that behavior
in its natural setting.
behavior is natural and there are no demand
characteristics, as the participant is unaware of being
observed
Disadvantages
Extraneous variables - can't control variables that may
affect behaviour
Observer bias - observers' expectations may affect what
they focus on and record.
Ethics - you should only conduct observations where
people expect to be observed by strangers. This limits the
situations where you can do a naturalistic observation.

Laboratory Observation
 Sometimes observing behavior in animals or people is just not practical in a natural
setting.
 For example, a researcher might want to observe the reactions of infants to a mirror
image of themselves, and to record the reactions with a camera mounted behind a
one-way mirror.
 In a laboratory observation, the researcher would bring the infant to the equipment,
controlling the number of infants and their ages, as well as everything else that goes
on in the laboratory.
 Laboratory settings have the disadvantage of being an artificial situation that might
result in artificial behavior—both animals and people often react differently in the
laboratory than they would in the real world.
 The main advantage of this method is the degree of control that it gives to the
observer.

Case Studies
 Another descriptive technique is called the case study, in which one individual is
studied in great detail.
 In a case study, researchers try to learn everything they can about that individual.
 The advantage of the case study is the tremendous amount of detail it provides.
 Case studies are also good ways to study things that are rare, such as dissociative
identity disorder.
 The disadvantage of the case study is that researchers can’t really apply the results to
other similar people.
 Another weakness of this method is that case studies are a form of detailed
observation and are vulnerable to bias on the part of the person conducting the case
study, just as observer bias can occur in naturalistic or laboratory observation.

Survey
 In the survey method, researchers will ask a series of questions about the topic they
are studying.
 Surveys can be conducted in person in the form of interviews or on the telephone, the
Internet, or with a questionnaire.
 The questions used in interviews or on the telephone can vary, but usually the
questions in a survey are all the same for everyone answering the survey.
 In this way, researchers can ask lots of questions and survey literally hundreds of
people.
 That is the big advantage of surveys, aside from their ability to get at private
information. Researchers can get a tremendous amount of data on a very large group
of people.

 researchers have to be very careful about the group of people they survey.
 People aren’t always going to give researchers accurate answers.
 There is a chance that participants give answers that are socially desirable.
 Some people deliberately give the answer they think is more socially correct rather than their true
opinion, so that no one gets offended, in a process called courtesy bias.
 It is difficult to find a wording that will be understood in exactly the same way by all those who read
the question.
 Questions can be worded in a way that the desired answer becomes obvious (often resulting in
courtesy bias–type answers).

The methods discussed so far only provide
descriptions of behavior. There are really
only two methods that allow researchers to
know more than just a description of what
has happened: correlations and
experiments.

Correlations: finding Relationships
 A correlation is a measure of the relationship between two or more variables.
 A variable is anything that can change or vary—scores on a test, temperature in a
room, gender, and so on.
 For example, researchers might be curious to know whether or not cigarette smoking
is connected to life expectancy—the number of years a person can be expected to
live.
 Obviously, the scientists can’t hang around people who smoke and wait to see when
those people die.
 The only way to find out if smoking behavior and life expectancy are related to each
other is to use the medical records of people who have already died.
 Researchers would look for two facts from each record: the number of cigarettes the
person smoked per day and the age of the person at death.

 Now the researcher has two sets of numbers for each person in the study that go into
a mathematical formula, to produce a number called the correlation coefficient.
 The correlation coefficient represents two things: the direction of the relationship and
its strength.

 The strength of the relationship between the variables will be determined by the actual number
itself. That number will always range between +1.00 and −1.00.
 If the relationship is a strong one, the number will be closer to +1.00 or to −1.00.
 A correlation of +.89 for example, would be a very strong positive correlation.
 A correlation of −.89 would be equally strong but negative.
 the closer the number is to zero, the weaker the relationship becomes.
 The biggest error that people make concerning correlation is to assume that it means one
variable is the cause of the other.
 Remember that correlation does not prove causation.

Experiment
In an experiment, researchers deliberately
manipulate (change in some purposeful way)
the variable they think is causing some
behavior while holding all the other variables
that might interfere with the experiment’s
results constant and unchanging.
The only method that
will allow researchers
to determine the cause
of a behavior is the
experiment.

Ethics of Psychological Research
There are quite a few ethical concerns when dealing with human subjects in an experiment or other
type of study. Here is a list of some of the most common ethical guidelines:
 Rights and well-being of participants must be weighed against the study’s value to science.
 Participants must be allowed to make an informed decision about participation.
 Deception must be justified.
 Participants may withdraw from the study at any time.
 Participants must be protected from risks or told explicitly of risks.
 Investigators must debrief participants, telling the true nature of the study and expectations of
results.
 Data must remain confidential.
 If for any reason a study results in undesirable consequences for the participant, the researcher is
responsible for detecting and removing, or correcting, these consequences.

Research Methods in psychology

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