Reading the Literature & The Science of Psychology Psych 231: Research Methods in Psychology

Reading the Literature &

The Science of Psychology

Psych 231: Research Methods in Psychology

Announcements OOPS! Error on the library exercise in PIP packet (3) Should be:

Using PsycInfo, find an article by Simone Nguyen & Gregory Murphy that was published in 2003. (NOT 1997)

Download (full text available at library) and read the article for lab THIS week (German and Barrett, 2005)

Reading a research article What's the goal of a research article? The reader to:

Know about the research Understand what was done Be convinced by the research (hopefully)

Standardization of research report format APA style Organization and content reflects the logical thinking in scientific investigation

Standardization helps with clarity

Read with a critical eye

The anatomy of a research article

The basic parts of a research article: Title and authors - gives you a general idea of the topic and specifically who did it

Abstract - short summary of the article States the issue, the methods, major variables of interst, the findings, and the conclusions

(in 120 words or less) First contact

Shows up in PsycInfo Gets skimmed before reading the article


Introduction - gives you the background that you need What are the issues What is/are the theory(ies) What does the past research say What the rationale for doing this research

What are the specific hypotheses Reading checklist

1) What is the author's goal?2) What are the hypotheses?3) If you had designed the experiment, how would YOU have done it?


Method - tells the reader exactly what was done Enough detail that the reader could actually replicate the study.

Subsections: Participants - who were the data collected from Apparatus/ Materials - what was used to conduct the study Procedure - how the study was conducted, what the participants did

Reading checklist1 a) Is your method better than theirs? b) Does the authors method actually test the hypotheses? c) What are the independent, dependent, and control variables?

2) Based on what the authors did, what results do YOU expect?


Results - gives a summary of the results and the statistical tests Reading checklist

1) Did the author get unexpected results? 2 a) How does the author interpret the results?

b) How would YOU interpret the results? c) What implications would YOU draw from these results?


Discussion - the interpretation and implications of the results Reading checklist

1 a) Does YOUR interpretation or the authors' interpretation best represent the data?

b) Do you or the author draw the most sensible implications and conclusions?

References - full citations of all work cited

Appendices - additional supplementary supporting material

Psychology as a science What is science?

What are the goals of science?

Psychology as a science Psychology’s goals are similar to the goals of the physical sciences (e.g., physics and chemistry) Psychologists are concerned with the behavior of people (and animals) rather than the physical world.

How is psychology different from the physical sciences? Human (and animal) behavior is typically much more variable than most physical systems. • Statistical control• Methodological control

Goals of psychology Description of behavior

Describe events, what changes what might affect change, what might be related to what, etc.

Prediction of behavior Given X what will likely happen

Control of behavior For the purpose of interventions (e.g.,

how do we prevent violence in schools)

Goals of psychology (cont.)

Causes of behavior Sometimes predictions aren’t enough, want to know how the X and the outcome are related

Explanation of behavior A complete theory of the how’s and why’s

Properties of a good theory

Properties of a good theory Organizes, Explains, & Accounts for the data If there are data relevant to your theory, that your theory can’t account for, then your theory is wrong• either adapt the theory to account for the new data

• develop a new theory that incorporates the new data

Properties of a good theory Organizes, Explains, & Accounts for the data

Testable/Falsifiable – can’t prove a theory, can only reject it“No amount of experimentation can

ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”

Omnipotent Theory Beware theories that are so powerful/ general/ flexible that they can account for everything. These are not testable Karl Popper claimed that Freudian theory isn’t

falsifiable• If display behavior that clearly has sexual or aggressive motivation, then it is taken as proof of the presence of the Id

• If such behavior isn’t displayed, then you have a “reaction formation” against it. So the Id is there, you just can’t see evidence of it.

So, as stated, the theory is too powerful and can’t be tested and so it isn’t useful


Testable/Falsifiable Generalizable – not too restrictive

The theory should be broad enough to be of use, the more data that it can account for the better

The line between generalizability and falsifiability is a fuzzy one.


Testable/Falsifiable Generalizable Parsimony (Occam’s razor)

for two or more theories that can account for the same data, the simplest theory is the favored one

“Everything should be made as simple

as possible, but not any simpler.”


Testable/Falsifiable Generalizable Parsimony Makes predictions, generates new knowledge a good theory will account for the data, but also make predictions about things that the theory wasn’t explicitly designed to account for


Testable/Falsifiable Generalizable Parsimony Makes predictions, generates new knowledge

Precision makes quantifiable predictions

Using theories in research Induction – reasoning from the data to the general theory So in complete practice this approach probably needs a new theory (or an adapted one) for every new data set

Deduction – reasoning from a general theory to the data Here the theory (if it is a “good” one) is sometimes viewed as more critical than the data.

It also will guide the choice of what experiments get done

The chicken or the egg?

Typically good research programs use both

Theory

Data

Induction Deduction

“Theory driven research”

“Data driven research”

Research Approaches

Basic (pure) research - tries to answer fundamental questions about the nature of behavior e.g., McBride & Dosher (1999). Forgetting rates are

comparable in conscious and automatic memory: A process-dissociation study.

Applied research – Theory sometimes takes a backseat. This is research designed to solve a particular problem e.g., Jin (2001). Advertising and the news: Does

advertising campaign information in news stories improve the memory of subsequent advertisements?

Research Approaches Think of this is as a continuum rather as two separate categories.

Basic research Applied research

• Often applied work may bring up some interesting basic theoretical questions, and basic theory often informs applied work.

Next Week Basic Methodologies

Making observations and conducting experiments

Read Chapters 6 and 7

Documents

Reading the Literature & The Science of Psychology Psych 231: Research Methods in Psychology