Lecture 1- The Scientific Method Flashcards
What are rules?
Principles of good design to set up for data collection
What are tools?
Summarizing and describing data that you’ve collected
What are theories?
The math (statistics) behind the rules and tools
What out of rules, tools and theories are research methods and thus the focus of this paper?
Rules + Tools
What is the scientific method?
It’s a way to approach questions that is systematic and consists of certain assumptions, goals and procedures. Basically it can be followed to reach valid conclusions.
What is psychology defined is and how is this different to philosophy?
Psychology is the scientific study of behaviour and mental processes.
Philosophy is also a study of the mind but not from a scientific standpoint.
In other words psychology utilizes scientific method while philosophy does not.
What did Wilhelm Wundt do in terms of the history of psychology? What time period was this in?
Set up a system for studying the mind in a structured way. This is labelled structuralism and is where mental events can be broken down into their components.
1879
What did William James do in terms of the history of psychology? What time period was this in?
He was interested in systematizing and standardizing research methods in psychology to make results more consistent + applicable to a wide variety of situations.
1890
What are the four goals of science? How is this applied to psychology?
DESCRIBE= what happened (the behaviour + when it occurred)
EXPLANATION= why it happened (the cause of the behavior)
PREDICTION= what will happen next (what behavior will happen next, in order to predict you need to be able to explain it)
CONTROL= how to make it happen (manipulate the behavior, can be controversial)
List the four approaches to understanding…
Authority approach
Analogy approach
Rule approach
Empirical approach
What is the authority approach to understanding? What are the advantages and downfalls?
It means you take advice from others and trust that your sources are accurate.
Advantage is that you save time by using existing knowledge
A disadvantage is that you can’t just blindly follow others, there is fake information out there so you need to be able to judge for yourself what sounds accurate
What is the analogy approach to understanding? What are the advantages and downfalls?
Means you draw similarities between a new event and a familiar understandable event.
An advantage is because you are applying existing information you don’t have to start from ground zero.
A disadvantage is that everything is open to interpretation and their question/ research is different even if similar so you can’t get confused when drawing comparisons.
What is the rule approach to understanding? What are the advantages and downfalls?
Is when you establish laws/ rules that apply to lots of different situations.
This saves time as don’t have to do things on a case by case basis.
The problem is rules are not specific and therefore they will obscure some aspects of your problem/ question and might skip over key details.
What is the empirical approach to understanding? What are some advantages and downfalls?
Involves testing your idea through experiments or observations (actual events)
In psychology what method of understanding is most used?
The rule approach in combination with observation
