Research Methods I Psychology 241

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Research Methods IPsychology 241

• David Allbritton
• dallbrit_at_depaul.edu

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Plan for today

• Introductions
• Syllabus
• Psychology and Science
• Types of Studies
• Homework 1

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Psychology and Science

• Ways of Knowing
• Characteristics of Science
• 2 Goals of Science
• Discovering regularities
• Developing theories

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Ways of Knowing

• Non-empirical
• Authority
• Logic
• Empirical based on experience
• Intuition
• Common sense
• Science
• Test of scientific knowledge

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Characteristics of Science

• Empirical
• Objective what is observed does not depend on
  who does the observing
• Replication
• Self-correcting no final answer
• Progressive
• Parsimonious simpler is better
• Theoretical seeks systematic explanations

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Psychology and Science

• Ways of Knowing
• Characteristics of Science
• 2 Goals of Science
• Discovering regularities
• Developing theories

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Theory

• Explains the lawful relationships that are
  observed
• Observations data
• Regularities in repeated observations laws
• Explanation for the observed laws theory
• Is a set of statements that organizes a large
  body of facts into a single explanatory system
• Contains at least one unobserved concept or
  construct
• Construct abstract term referring to a general
  idea in a theory.

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What makes a theory a good one?

• Falsifiability testable
• Explanatory adequacy explain as much data as
  possible
• Parsimony a simple theory is preferable to a
  complicated one
• Productivity suggests hypotheses to test with
  new data

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The process of Research

• data -gt theory -gt hypothesis -gt data...
• data
• observations to be explained
• theory
• explanation that organizes and predicts data
• hypothesis
• specific testable prediction

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Collecting Data Types of Studies

• Non-experimental Methods (correlational)
• Observational research
• Archival research
• Case studies
• Survey research
• Experiments
• Quasi-Experiments