Psych 218 Introduction to Behavioral Research Methods

1
Psych 218Introduction to Behavioral Research
Methods

• Week 1 Lecture 2

2
Outline of Todays Lecture

• Last lecture we discussed
• Epistemology (ways of knowing)
• Introduction to the scientific method
• Today we will discuss
• Contrasting the scientific method with knowledge
  from authority
• The nature of scientific explanation
• The research process

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How do Belief-based and Scientific Explanations
Differ?

• Belief-based
• Based on faith rather than observation
• Often cannot be empirically disconfirmed (tested)
• Are absolute (dogmatic) no other explanation is
  considered
• Discard or reinterpret any disconfirming evidence
  in an ad hoc and unparsimonious manner
• Can be offered to explain just about any subject

• Science
• Based on a logical organization of a broad
  pattern of systematic observations
• Make precise testable predictions that can be
  empirically disconfirmed
• Are tentative, assumed to be flawed or incomplete
• Disconfirming evidence results in rejection or
  substantial reformulation
• explain only phenomena that can be tested by
  objective observation

4
The Nature of Scientific Explanation

• Features of scientific explanations
• Rational
• Empirical
• Testable
• Parsimonious
• General
• Tentative
• Rigorously Evaluated
• Are there soft and hard sciences?
• Where is psychologys place in science?

5
When Scientific Explanations Fail

• Faulty Inference Yerkes IQ test of WWI recruits
• Pseudoexplanations
• the homunculus problem
• Circularity and Tautology
• depth of processing
• pop-out
• repressed memories
• Importance of independent measures of behaviors
  and concepts

6
The Research Process

• Developing a Research Idea and Hypothesis
• Choose a research design
• Choosing Participants
• Decide on what to observe and appropriate measure
• Conduct the study
• Analyze the results
• Report the results
• Starting the whole process over again

7
Generating Research Ideas and Questions

• Sources of Research Ideas
• Observation (systematic and unsystematic)
• Theories
• Practical Problems
• Developing Good Research Questions
• Idea must be translated into a specific set of
  predictions about the relations between
  observable, precisely-defined variablesoperationa
  l definitions
• To justify the resources expended in answering
  the question, it should be important

8
Scientific Theories

• What is a theory?
• A system of assumptions, accepted principles,
  and rules of procedure devised to analyze,
  predict, or otherwise explain the nature or
  behavior of a specified set of phenomena
  (Websters dictionary)
• A partially verified statement of a scientific
  relationship that cannot be directly observed
  (Martin, 1985)
• A statement of a set of interrelated
  propositions (and corollaries to those
  propositions) that attempt to specify the
  relationship between a variable (or set of
  variables) and some behavior (Bordens and Abbot)