Lecture 3 Flashcards
What are the 4 goals of psychological research?
Description
Prediction
Finding Causes
Explanation
Describe the goal of description.
Describe what the outside world is llike. Often takes the form of prevalence statistics, (ex: how common is bipolar disorder in the population?, or we place people into a particular situation and we describe what happens when people get put into this situation) Descriptions studies are not trying to predict anything they are just describing. A common place where students can get this wrong is they think that description is about describing the methodology of the study. That’s not relevant. Usually only one variable.
Describe the goal of Prediction.
One big difference that can clue you into the fact that we’re working with prediction is there are at least 2 variables. Are adults more or less likely to press an electric shock button than undergrad students. This allows us to make predictions about who is more likely to press the button. Prediction is all about taking from one variable can we make a prediction about what they will do on that other variable. The limitation of prediction is that we cannot have a causal statement. In order to make causal statements we always have to perform and experiment. You are not manipulating anything so you can’t say why something happens because there could be many explanations including other causal connections or confounds.
Describe the goal of finding causes.
When you see this think experiment or manipulating a variable. We need to manipulate variables and see how they impact a downstream variable in order to come up with causal explanations. Ex: could randomly assign half participants to exercise a lot and other half to only exercise once or twice. This would allow you to study the causal relationship between exercise. We need to look at magnitude, for who it exists and what the power is.
Describe the goal of Explanation.
We need to look at the reasons we could explain relationships through. This allows us to look at mediating factors etc. This is the explanation for why the causal linkage occurs. There could be many explanations that work for the same causal connectio nand they ado not need to be mutually exclusive. One reason people may feel less anxiety is because they feel accomplished for excercise (cognition and beliefs) another explanation could be based on hormones that are released during exercise (physiological) both explanations could be true at the same time
Which of the 4 goals of psychological research are the hardest to get?
THE FIRST GOAL AND THE LAST ARE THE MOST CHALLENGING TO GET (description and explanation)
Give an exampel of a good template for finding ideas for our studies.
“I wonder about the relationship between COVID-related isolation and anxiety”
Give an example of a question aimed at the goal of description. What might you look into? What about the goal of Prediction? What about Causes? how could we execute this?
Description: What is the current status of isolation requirements? Anxiety prevalence?
Where are people required to isolate, what are the exact policies? In canada social distancing was 2 meters, in the states it was 6 feet. Does that make a difference for isolation? What is the average or mean level of anxiety in the population?
Prediction:
What is the relationship? Who is most at risk?
- Does there appear to be a relationship between isolation and anxiety, generally?
- Is there a predictable increase in anxiety that tracks where restrictions have been implemented?
can we predict the prevalence of anxiety based on geographic areas that have vs do not have regulations related to covid?
Causes:
Finding Causes:
Does complying with isolation rules cause
increases in anxiety?
“We randomly assigned participants to self- isolate (or not)”
NOTE: This is ethically dubious!
we are now manipulating the variable of how much social isolation do they expereince, and now we can detemrine how that impacts anxiety.
Let’s say we do find that most people assigned to the self isolation condition do experience more anxiety. We could think of possible causes like boredom (more time with own thoughts), over long periods of time people may feel anxious about returning to social interaction. If we test for this explanation we could ask “how anxious are you to return to social interaction.
What is the spectrum that research can fall under?
basic to applied
What is basic research, what is the focus?
Focus: theories of behaviour
Often not immediately useful in everyday life (This is important!)
Theories inspired by real-world psychological functioning (often come from applied researchers )
Are basic researchers and applied researchers entirely independent from each other?
no. There’s a lot of conversation between basic and applied researchers. Apllied researchers often read basic research and basic researchers often look to applied researchers to see which of their theories are making better predictions in the outside world.
What is applied research?
What is the focus?
Applied research:
Focus: maximizing human happiness and psychological functioning (instead of focusing on revising theories, it is focused on using these theories to maximize psychological functioning)
More immediately useful in everyday life
Borrows from theories developed through basic research
What is an idea in research?
Unorganized principles or thoughts about social behavior
What is a theory in research?
Organized set of principles, which state how social behavior operates
theories have to be comprehensive in that a researcher who is going to propose a theory needs to do priot research and see if it can explain what has already been found
What is a hypothesis in research?
Statement of a relationship between two things (a.k.a., ‘variables’) Derived, or taken from, theories
