Chapter 2 - An Overview of the Scientific Method

Question 1

What are the steps of the scientific method?

Answer 1

1a. Formulate a research question
1b. Consult pre-existing research to formulate an original research question
2. Conduct an empirical study
3. Analyze the data
4. Draw conclusions
5. Publish results

Question 2

What are the 3 common sources of inspiration for developing a research question?

Answer 2

Informal Observations
Practical Problems
Previous Research

Question 3

What are Informal Observations?

Answer 3

Informal observations include direct observations of our own and others’ behavior as well as secondhand observations from non-scientific sources such as newspapers, books, blogs, and so on.

Question 4

What are some advantages of reviewing research literature early in your research process?

Answer 4

It can tell you if a research question has already been answered.
It can help you evaluate the interestingness of a research question.
It can give you ideas for how to conduct your own study.
It can tell you how your study fits into the research literature.

Question 5

What are review articles?

Answer 5

Review articles summarize previously published research on a topic and usually present new ways to organize or explain the results. When a review article is devoted primarily to presenting a new theory, it is often referred to as a theoretical article. When a review article provides a statistical summary of all of the previous results it is referred to as a meta-analysis.

Question 6

What is a double-blind peer review?

Answer 6

A method of peer reviewing research where the researcher does not know the identity of their publisher and the publisher does not know the identity of the researcher.

Question 7

What are scholarly books?

Answer 7

Books written by researchers and practitioners that are typically used by other researchers.

Question 8

What is a monograph?

Answer 8

A book written by a single author or small group of authors which usually provides a coherent presentation of a topic similarly to an extended review article.

Question 9

What the heck are edited volumes?

Answer 9

Edited volumes have an editor or small group of editors who recruit many authors to write separate chapters on different aspects of the same topic.

Think of the Expositors Bible COmmentary

Question 10

What are some academic databases?

Answer 10

Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, and ProQuest for all academic disciplines, ERIC for education, and PubMed for medicine and related fields. The most important for our purposes, however, is PsycINFO, which is produced by the American Psychological Association (APA).

PsycINFO is so comprehensive—covering thousands of professional journals and scholarly books going back more than 100 years—that for most purposes its content is synonymous with the research literature in psychology. Like most such databases, PsycINFO is usually available through your university library.

Question 11

What do you look for when doing research?

Answer 11

You need to be selective.
Focus on sources that help you do these 4 things:
a. Refine your research question
b. Identify appropriate research methods
c. Place your research in the context of previous research
d. Write an effective research report.

Question 12

What is ‘recent’ research?

Answer 12

Relative to the topic, recent could mean within 1-2 years for a topic of high interest or within 10 years for a topic of low interest. Look for research done in the past 5 years.

Question 13

Additionally, what should you look for when conducting research?

Answer 13

Review articles on your topic.

Question 14

How many research articles should be cited in professional research?

Answer 14

More or less than 50.

Question 15

What do you need to do once you have a research idea?

Answer 15

You need to use it to generate one or more empirically testable research questions.

What does this mean?
You need to create questions expressed in terms of a single variable or relationship between variables.

Question 16

In a journal article, where do researchers explain the results of their research and put it into the context of other research?

Answer 16

In the discussion section.

Question 17

How can you generate your own research questions?

Answer 17

If you have some particular behavior or characteristic or event in mind, ask yourself how often and to what degree it happens.
-How frequent does X happen?
-How intense/not intense is X?

Question 18

If your research question has already been answered, what are the 4 questions you can ask to see if there is a relationship between frequency/intensity and another variable?

Answer 18

-What might cause X?
-What are the effects of X?
-What types of people/places/things exhibit X in varying frequencies?
-What situations might increase the frequency of X?

Question 19

What should you seek to do if your research question is answered by science already?

Answer 19

Refine the question.
-Are there other ways to define and measure X?
-Are there types of people that might relate differently to X?
-Are there situations that have a stronger/weaker relationship with X?

Question 20

What are the 2 criteria for evaluating research questions?

Answer 20

Interestingness of question and feasibility of answering it.

Question 21

How do you evaluate the interestingness of a research question?

Answer 21

1. Who would find it interesting? The scientific community should be your answer.
   2a. Is the question in doubt? There has to be some reasonable chance that the answer to the question will be something that we did not already know.
   2b. If you can think of reasons to expect at least two different answers, then the question might be interesting. If you can think of reasons to expect only one answer, then it probably is not
   3a. Will this research fill an existing gap in scientific research?
   4b. Would experts on the field have this question naturally?

Question 22

How would you evaluate the feasibility of a research question?

Answer 22

1. Do you have the time, money, equipment, materials, technical knowledge, skill, and access to research participants to accomplish an experiment?
2. Can you use pre-existing research methods for safety’s sake and continuing previous research?
3. As you look through sample journals, can you evaluate the difficulty of accomplishing experiments that are similar to yours?

Question 23

What is a scientific Theory?

Answer 23

A theory is simply an explanation or interpretation of a set of phenomena. It can be untested, but it can also be extensively tested, well supported, and accepted as an accurate description of the world by the scientific community.

Question 24

What is a hypothesis

Answer 24

It is a specific prediction about a new phenomenon that should be observed if a particular theory is accurate. It is an explanation that relies on just a few key concepts. Hypotheses are often specific predictions about what will happen in a particular study.

Question 25

What is the relationship between hypotheses and theories?

Answer 25

If x theory, then y hypothesis. or If x theory, then y hypothesis?

Question 26

How do you devise a hypothesis from a theory?

Answer 26

1. Generate research questions.
2. Does an existing scientific theory imply an answer to your question?
3. Ask if there is an unexplored area of a theory that you can explore

Question 27

What is the hypothetico-deductive method?

Answer 27

A cyclical process of theory development, starting with an observational phenomenon, then developing or using a theory to make a specific prediction of what should happen if that theory is correct, testing that prediction, refining the theory in light of the findings, and using that refined theory to develop new hypotheses, and so on.

Question 28

What are the 3 characteristics of a good hypothesis?

Answer 28

1. Must be testable and falsifiable.
2. Must be logical. Hypotheses should be informed by previous theories or observations and logical reasoning.
3. Must be positive. That is, the hypothesis should make a positive statement about the existence of a relationship or effect, rather than a statement that a relationship or effect does not exist.

Question 29

What is a variable

Answer 29

A quantity or quality that varies across people or situations.

Question 30

What is a quantitative variable?

Answer 30

A quantity, such as height, that is typically measured by assigning a number to each individual.

Question 31

What is a categorical variable?

Answer 31

A variable that represents a characteristic of an individual, such as chosen major, and is typically measured by assigning each individual’s response to one of several categories (e.g., Psychology, English, Nursing, Engineering, etc.).

Question 32

What is an operational definition?

Answer 32

A definition of the variable in terms of precisely how it is to be measured

Question 33

What is a population?

Answer 33

A large group of people about whom researchers in psychology are usually interested in drawing conclusions, and from whom the sample is drawn.

Question 34

What is a sample?

Answer 34

A smaller portion of the population the researcher would like to study.

Question 35

What is an extraneous variable?

Answer 35

Any variable other than the dependent and independent variable

Question 36

What are confounds

Answer 36

A specific type of extraneous variable that systematically varies along with the variables under investigation and therefore provides an alternative explanation for the results.

So confounds are bad, they disrupt our ability to make causal conclusions about the nature of the relationship between variables.

Question 37

Non-experimental research DOES NOT mean ______

Answer 37

Non-scientific

Question 38

Laboratory studies have ____ ___ ___

Answer 38

High Internal Validity

Refers to the degree to which we can confidently infer a causal relationship between variables.

Question 39

What is external validity?

Answer 39

Refers to the degree to which we can generalize the findings to other circumstances or settings, like the real-world environment.

Question 40

What is relationship between internal and external validity?

Answer 40

When internal validity is high, external validity tends to be low; and when internal validity is low, external validity tends to be high. So laboratory studies are typically low in external validity, while field studies are typically high in external validity. Since field studies are conducted in the real-world environment it is far more appropriate to generalize the findings to that real-world environment than when the research is conducted in the more artificial sterile laboratory.

Question 41

What are the 2 types of scientific research?

Answer 41

Experimental and Non-experimental research

Question 41

What are descriptive statistics?

Answer 41

Descriptive statistics are used to organize or summarize a set of data.

Question 42

What are inferential statistics?

Answer 42

A research method that allows researchers to draw conclusions or infer about a population based on data from a sample.

Question 43

What is statistical significance?

Answer 43

An effect that is unlikely due to random chance and therefore likely represents a real effect in the population.

More specifically results that have less than a 5% chance of being due to random error are typically considered statistically significant. When an effect is statistically significant it is appropriate to generalize the results from the sample to the population. In contrast, if inferential statistics reveal that there is more than a 5% chance that an effect could be due to chance error alone then the researcher must conclude that their result is not statistically significant

Question 44

What is a Type I error?

Answer 44

A false positive in which the researcher concludes that their results are statistically significant when in reality there is no real effect in the population and the results are due to chance. In other words, rejecting the null hypothesis when it is true.

Question 45

What is a Type II error?

Answer 45

A Type II error is a missed opportunity. It is when a researcher concludes that their results are not statistically significant when in reality there is a real effect in the population and they just missed detecting it. Once again, these Type II errors are more likely to occur when the threshold is set too low (e.g., set at 1% instead of 5%) and/or when the sample was too small.

Question 46

What is required to statistically support a theory?

Answer 46

If the results are statistically significant and consistent with the hypothesis and the theory that was used to generate the hypothesis, then researchers can conclude that the theory is supported. Not only did the theory make an accurate prediction, but there is now a new phenomenon that the theory accounts for.

Question 47

What is required to refute a theory?

Answer 47

If a hypothesis is disconfirmed in a systematic empirical study, then the theory has been weakened. It made an inaccurate prediction, and there is now a new phenomenon that it does not account for.

Question 48

Why do scientists avoid the term ‘prove’ when writing about theories?

Answer 48

Because this may reflect a type I error.
There may also be other plausible theories that imply the same hypothesis, which means that confirming the hypothesis would strengthen those other theories equally. A third reason is that it is always possible that another test of the hypothesis or a test of a new hypothesis derived from the theory will be disconfirmed.

Question 49

If a hypothesis is disconfirmed, what happens?

Answer 49

The theory is usually disconfirmed, but scientists often dont give up on their theories easily because they don’t want to commit a type II error and miss out on a chance.

Question 50

Theories are ____, ____, and ____ based on the results of research.

Answer 50

supported
refuted
modified

Question 51

What are some ways for scientists to report their findings?

Answer 51

-Submit a manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal
-Submit a chapter to an edited book
-Speak at a scientific conference
-Do a poster presentation at a scientific conference