Understanding Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology

Helen Gavin

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781473903470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Understanding and applying research methods and statistics in psychology is one of the corner stones of study at undergraduate level. To enable all undergraduate psychology students to carry out their own investigations the textbook covers basic and advanced qualitative and quantitative methods and follows a sequential structure starting from first principles to more advanced techniques.

Accompanied by a companion website, the textbook:

- Grounds all techniques to psychological theory relating each topic under discussion to well established pieces of research

- Can be used by the student at beginning and more advanced undergraduate level - therefore a `one-stop? shop

- Includes a creative and practical selection of heuristic devices that cement knowledge of the techniques and skills covered in the textbook

PART I

FIRST EXPLORATIONS

This first part of the book will introduce us to the reasons why research is carried out in psychology and the ways in which it is done. We will start to understand the range and scope of psychological research, together with the considerations we must take into account, both as ethical researchers and as participants in research. We will also learn some basic vocabulary used in the technical language of research.

CHAPTER 1

THE RANGE OF RESEARCH

Contents

Studying the invisible

Introspection

The experimental approach

Falsifiability

Demand characteristics

Control in experimentation

Research without experimentation

Psychometrics

Direct observation

Self-reports

Surveys

Evaluation

Analysis of psychological data

Summary

The Range of Research

The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others. (John Locke)

Learning Objectives

• To examine the range of research methods available to researchers in psychology.
• To understand some of the methods and the ways in which they might be utilised in psychology.

KEY TERMS

• Causality
• Conditions
• Demand characteristics
• Evaluation
• Experimentation
• Falsifiability
• Introspection
• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research
• Self-report
• Surveys

You have chosen to study psychology, which means that you are entering an area of exciting knowledge and research concerning the way we interact with the world. The term ‘psychology’ was probably first used by Goclenius, a German philosopher, who wrote about various philosophical positions in 1590 in a book called Problematum logicorum. But, consider the fact that, in the same year, he wrote about the best way to put witches to the test, and it might be thought that he was not writing about anything particularly scientific! The word itself comes from the Greek for ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ (psyche), so psychology was originally termed to describe the study of the soul. However, in modern use, psychology is, for many people, a science, albeit a special kind of science, one of the most interesting sciences there is. This book will allow us to step into the world of research in psychology and understand the concepts by which we attempt to discover the hidden world of the mind.

Psychology deals with people (and other creatures), examining the behaviour, mind and internal world of each of us. It is the study of thoughts, feelings and actions, and is concerned with some of the most complex questions we know how to ask. It concerns many different variables, difficult to predict and measure, and for this reason it is divided into many different areas. However, overarching these divisions, and relating them together, is the concept of psychological research and the methods by which the research is carried out.

Science progresses slowly, and in a rigorous and methodical manner. It therefore requires some rigorous and methodical techniques by which progress can be made and measured. Much of science, including psychology, uses experimentation as its basic technique. However, psychology is also viewed as a social science and, as such, psychologists have at their disposal other techniques not usually available to natural scientists such as biologists and chemists. This book aims to explain the various techniques open to us. Let us begin by examining what these methods are.

STUDYING THE INVISIBLE

Much of science is concerned with processes and events that we cannot directly observe. For example, no one has seen subatomic particles moving in random paths, but predictions about the behaviour of atoms, based on the model, do work, providing support for the theory. This is the problem that psychology has: how to study what is going on in the mind when this activity is invisible to us. For example, we cannot see memory working; we can only observe the effect of its success or failure. So, psychology can be thought of as having a theoretical basis. However, this issue is made more challenging by the fact that, when we try to explore the workings of our minds, we are using the very processes under investigation. This makes the observation problematic in scientific terms, as a certain amount of detachment or objectivity might be lost, and the act of thinking about the contents of one’s mind might change those contents. What is needed is a way of systematically examining behaviour without biasing the outcome. Hence, psychology also needs to be empirical.

Therefore, psychology is a blending of two approaches, theory and observation, and needs a rigorous way of combining them. Several methods have been developed to attempt this, each relying on applying meticulous techniques of observation and interpretation. These methods include introspection and experimentation, surveys and attitude scaling, observation and interviewing, and several more that we will examine. The sections below describe some of the research techniques and approaches used in psychology.

INTROSPECTION

The first attempts to explore the contents of the mind were made by a technique called introspection. This means reflecting on one’s own sensations and thoughts. Wundt established what came to be recognised as the first experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879. He trained students and colleagues to pay careful attention to what was going on in their minds and bodies, and to report on their observations objectively. These observers recorded their response to stimuli rather than the characteristics of the stimuli themselves, and attempted to avoid ascribing meaning to them. This research was the first to attempt to make some scientific sense from human experience in this way, and the project went on for about 50 years. Wundt concluded that, although some very interesting and useful observations were recorded, higher psychological processes were not really available to such techniques. A modern version of introspective methods is used alongside other data collection techniques, particularly in areas such as cognitive science, studying problem solving and knowledge representation. Examples of such methods are verbal protocols, self-ratings and focused diary keeping, and are called self-reports. When we wish to find out how an individual is accessing his or her own thoughts, asking the individual to verbalise is often a good technique to use alongside, for example, observation, and measurement of performance. This can give an individual insight that might be unavailable to other types of analysis. However, we cannot report on things of which we are unaware or not conscious and, indeed, reporting on one’s own consciousness might become confusing. In addition, the very act of contemplating what you are doing might change the way in which you do it. To demonstrate this problem, try this test. Think about, and say out loud, the steps you take to open a can of beans. Now recall what you had for breakfast. Next, actually open a can of beans, saying out loud what you are doing. What differences are there between the reporting and the doing? This demonstrates the techniques, and one of its difficulties: the difference between imagination and reality. Alternatively, imagine being in a restaurant with several friends and working out how much of the bill each friend must pay. How much more difficult would it be if you had to tell someone else what you were doing as you were doing it? It requires a lot of practice to carry on this internal conversation with yourself, and it is likely that it will still affect the processes being considered.

Another problem is trying to do something that is outside of one’s own experience. J.B. Watson, for example, completely rejected introspection after being asked to imagine himself as a rat in a maze and report on the rat’s subjective experience. This is a difficult task unless you are very imaginative or have a lot of training in this introspective projection. Many researchers have challenged the validity of material derived from introspective techniques such as verbal protocols. According to Nisbett and Wilson (1977), the idea that we can access higher mental processes is ill-informed at best, and possibly bogus. The best we are achieving is a guess to explain our behaviour, not reporting on internal processes, and this could be done just as well by an external observer. This is supported by examples in which the verbal protocol has failed, because of either inability to report, or inaccuracies in the resulting data. However, these tend to be studies of processes that are more concerned with reactions and unreflective responses, and not problem solving, and there is more evidence that they are appropriate forms of data collection with tasks that require contemplation, rather than reactive responses or flashes of insight. Ahlum-Heath and Di Vesta (1986) showed that verbalising the cognitive strategies used when problem solving can aid the transfer of the strategy to similar problems. This suggests that the problem solver is becoming more aware of the strategy used and the internal state reached, which may be having an effect on the performance, but it is a positive one.

The self-report method has proved effective and supportable in such developments as work on the General Problem Solver or GPS (Newell & Simon, 1972). The GPS project was carried out in the theoretical framework of information processing and attempted to specify human behaviour as a collection of operations and rules that could be incorporated into a description of how humans solve problems, in order to produce a computer program that performed in the same way. Using verbal protocols, Newell and Simon and associates developed computer simulations and compared the action of the simulation with human behaviour in a given task. Ericsson and Simon (1984) describe such work as the GPS project as a defence of introspective methods used in this way, as the resulting model performs in such a way as to correspond to human behaviour, and they also showed that performance need not be affected by the need to verbalise. However, even they agree that GPS did not totally meet its original objective. GPS was intended to be a general problem solver, but it could only be applied to problems that could be specified in great detail, such as proving theorems in logic or geometry, word puzzles and chess. The conclusion is that the verbal report must be used in fitting circumstances, such as reporting on short-term memory contents, rather than material that may be affected by stored memories. In modern psychology, introspective methods have been developed in order to examine areas that lend themselves to revealing processes that involve the most accessible contents of the mind, such as problem solving. The data derived from introspective techniques tends to be rich and qualitative in nature, and the analysis of this is described in a later chapter.

Therefore, despite the fact that it is a useful method, and possibly a good starting point for self-observation and problem-solving strategy improvement, there are still major problems with the technique and with material derived from introspection. However, Wundt, and all the advocates of introspective methods, would stress that the techniques of applying objectivity and replication were important for studying such processes. This has been an important issue in psychology; principles such as these led to rigorous scientific elements being regarded as indispensable to psychological science and to be applied no matter what the method used to gather data about psychological behaviour. Using such ideological principles (but not introspection), Ebbinghaus tested himself and his memory by learning lists of nonsense words, and quantified his performance in terms of the amount he could remember, how much he forgot and how much this might vary when he altered the amount of material and the time between learning and recall. These are, perhaps, the first true experiments in the area of memory.

Experimentation, with its elements of control and inference, is one of the most useful a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I First Explorations
• Part II Beginning Quantitative Research
• Part III Complex Quantitative Designs
• Part IV Beginning Qualitative Research
• Part V Complex Qualitative Research
• Part VI Communication Of Research
• Appendix A Choosing a Statistical Test
• Appendix B SPSS Output for Data and Analysis Discussed in Chapter 6
• Glossary
• References
• Index