Week 2 - The Scientific Method Flashcards
What is a general model of scientific research in psychology?
The researchers formulate a research question:
- Conduct an empirical study designed to answer the question
- Analyze the resulting data
- Draw conclusions about the answer to the question, and
- Publishes the results so that they become part of the research literature (i.e., all the published research in that field).
Describe Cycle - general model of scientific research in psychology
New research leads to new questions, which lead to new research, and so on.
Research questions can originate outside of this cycle either with informal observations or with practical problems that need to be solved.
What are common sources of research ideas?
Three of the most common sources of inspirationare: 1. informal observations
2. practical problems
3. previous research
**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. For example, you might notice that you always seem to be in the slowest moving line at the grocery store.
**Practical problems **can also inspire research ideas, leading directly to applied research in such domains as law, health, education, and sports. Does taking lecture notes by hand improve students’ exam performance?
**Previous research. **Recall that science is a kind of large-scale collaboration in which many different researchers read and evaluate each other’s work and conduct new studies to build on it. Novice researchers can find inspiration by consulting with a more experienced researcher (e.g., students can consult a faculty member).
What is research literature and why is it important?
The research literature in any field is all the published research in that field. Reviewing the research literature means finding, reading, and summarizing the published research relevant to your topic of interest. In addition to helping you discover new research questions, reviewing the literature early in the research process can help you in several other ways.
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.
Define and describe professional journals
Professional journals are periodicals that publish original research articles.
Most articles in professional journals are one of two basic types: empirical research reports and review articles.
Empirical research reports describe one or more new empirical studies conducted by the authors. They introduce a research question, explain why it is interesting, review previous research, describe their method and results, and draw their conclusions.
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.
Most professional journals in psychology undergo a process of double-blind peer review. Researchers who want to publish their work in the journal submit a manuscript to the editor—who is generally an established researcher too—who in turn sends it to two or three experts on the topic. Each reviewer reads the manuscript, writes a critical but constructive review, and sends the review back to the editor along with recommendations about whether the manuscript should be published or not.
What are scholarly books?
Scholarly books are books written by researchers and practitioners mainly for use by other researchers and practitioners.
A monograph is written by a single author or a small group of authors and usually, gives a coherent presentation of a topic much like an extended review article.
Edited volumes have an editor or a small group of editors who recruit many authors to write separate chapters on different aspects of the same topic.
Literature Search Strategies?
The primary method used to search the research literature involves using one or more electronic databases.
These include 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
Google Scholar
Describe some techniques for turning research ideas into empirical research questions…
Once you have a research idea, you need to use it to generate one or more empirically testable research questions, that is, questions expressed in terms of a single variable or relationship between variables.
One way to do this is to look closely at the discussion section in a recent research article on the topic.
But you may also want to generate your own research questions. How can you do this? First, if you have a particular behavior or psychological characteristic in mind, you can **simply conceptualize it as a variable and ask how frequent or intense it is. **
Eg. - How many words on average do people speak per day?
You could consider turning it into a question about a relationship between that behavior or characteristic and some other variable. One way to do this is to ask yourself the following series of more general questions and write down all the answers you can think of.
What are some possible causes of the behavior or characteristic?
What are some possible effects of the behavior or characteristic?
What types of people might exhibit more or less of the behavior or characteristic?
What types of situations might elicit more or less of the behavior or characteristic?
Are there other ways to define and measure the variables?
Are there types of people for whom the relationship might be stronger or weaker?
Are there situations in which the relationship might be stronger or weaker—including situations with practical importance?
State and define the two key criteria for evaluating a good research question…
- the interestingness of the question
- the feasibility of answering it.
Interestingness - Here we look at three factors that affect the interestingness of a research question: the answer is in doubt, the answer fills a gap in the research literature, and the answer has important practical implications.
Feasibility - A second important criterion for evaluating research questions is the feasibility of successfully answering them. There are many factors that affect feasibility, including time, money, equipment and materials, technical knowledge and skill, and access to research participants.
Distinguish between a theory and a hypothesis
A theory is a coherent explanation or interpretation of one or more phenomena. Although theories can take a variety of forms, one thing they have in common is that they go beyond the phenomena they explain by including variables, structures, processes, functions, or organizing principles that have not been observed directly.
A hypothesis, on the other hand, 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. They are developed by considering existing evidence and using reasoning to infer what will happen in the specific context of interest. Hypotheses are often but not always derived from theories.
If-then relationship - Theories and hypotheses always have this if-then relationship. “If drive theory is correct, then cockroaches should run through a straight runway faster, and a branching runway more slowly, when other cockroaches are present.”
Although hypotheses are usually expressed as statements, they can always be rephrased as questions. “Do cockroaches run through a straight runway faster when other cockroaches are present?”
Thus deriving hypotheses from theories is an excellent way of generating interesting research questions.
Describe the hypothetico-deductive method…
Researchers begin with a set of phenomena and either construct a theory to explain or interpret them or choose an existing theory to work with.
They then make a prediction about some new phenomenon that should be observed if the theory is correct.
Again, this prediction is called a hypothesis.
The researchers then conduct an empirical study to test the hypothesis.
Finally, they reevaluate the theory in light of the new results and revise it if necessary.
This process is usually conceptualized as a cycle because the researchers can then derive a new hypothesis from the revised theory, conduct a new empirical study to test the hypothesis, and so on.
Define characteristics of a Good Hypothesis
- good hypothesis must be testable and falsifiable. We must be able to test the hypothesis using the methods of science and if you’ll recall Popper’s falsifiability criterion, it must be possible to gather evidence that will disconfirm the hypothesis if it is indeed false.
- a good hypothesis must be logical. As described above, hypotheses are more than just a random guess. Hypotheses should be informed by previous theories or observations and logical reasoning. Typically, we begin with a broad and general theory and use deductive reasoning to generate a more specific hypothesis to test based on that theory. Occasionally, however, when there is no theory to inform our hypothesis, we use inductive reasoning which involves using specific observations or research findings to form a more general hypothesis.
- The hypothesis should 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. Our hypotheses should not be worded in a way to suggest that an effect or relationship does not exist.
Define a variable and give an example
A variable is a quantity or quality that varies across people or situations.
For example, the height of the students enrolled in a university course is a variable because it varies from student to student.
The chosen major of the students is also a variable as long as not everyone in the class has declared the same major.
State the two types of variables and give examples
A **quantitative variable **is a quantity, such as height, that is typically measured by assigning a number to each individual.
Other examples of quantitative variables include people’s level of talkativeness, how depressed they are, and the number of siblings they have.
A categorical variable is a quality, such as chosen major, and is typically measured by assigning a category label to each individual (e.g., Psychology, English, Nursing, etc.).
Other examples include people’s nationality, their occupation, and whether they are receiving psychotherapy.
Define ‘operational definition’ and why its important
A definition of the variable in terms of precisely how it is to be measured.
Operationally defining a variable involves taking an abstract construct like depression that cannot be directly observed and transforming it into something that can be directly observed and measured.
For example, depression can be operationally defined as people’s scores on a paper-and-pencil depression scale such as the Beck Depression Inventory the number of depressive symptoms they are experiencing, or whether they have been diagnosed with major depressive disorder.
