PSY 3173 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Polygraph, Personality Test, Random Assignment
10 May 2018
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Department
Course
Professor
Research in Forensic Psychology
● Important that the research is worth studying because its so expensive and difficult to
conduct
● Hypotheses: what you want to test, ex. Are police officers better eyewitnesses based on
their training
● Manipulation: independent: manipulated, depended
○ Estimator (independent): present at the time of the crime and cannot be
changed, ex. Robbery: you have no control on the age of the witnesses, the
lighting, the witnesses intoxication level (we can manipulate these things)
○ System (independent): can be manipulated to increase or decrease effectiveness
of a procedure (how do you proceed to do a lignup, does it increase memory if
we do a specific lignup…)
Research Methods and Design
● Archival research: studying existing data to try to test data, qualitative (recordings of
police interviews, notes from psychologist who treated convicts or eyewitnesses)
○ Advantage: go through a lot of information, multiple court case. Good to see if a
research question is worth studying and getting initial information.
○ Disadvantage: no control over how information was collected, it could be
unreliable. You don’t generate new data. You may not have enough to study new
data.
Lab research
● random assignment increases validity, control, new data
Field research
● Try to generate fictitious crime
● You can control variable depending on the setting
● Make it try to seem more natural
● May use a confederate to make fictitious crime
● Recreate a crime and have a fake police officer interview the eyewitness
Research Designs:
● Case studies: qualitative, can get a lot of information, ex. Serial killers.
● Correlational: does one affect the other
● Experimental: clear independant and dependant and come up with causal
● Longitudinal: ex. Defective treatment, new programs or procedures put in place by police
● Meta-analysis: try to find a relation between several variables
Ethics in Forensic Psychology Research
● Risk vs. Benefits ratio (ethics board)
● Risk: emotional stress, social harm (ridicule, treated as inferior)
● Minimal risk: risk that may be experienced by anyone on a daily basis in a similar
situation
● There are ways to reduce the risk
● Ex. being a witness of seeing someone get their purse stolen (minimal risk)
Informed consent:
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● Participants need to be told the purpose of the study and they need to give their consent
explicitly, they must have a good understanding of what is asked of them, the study must
be explained in the level of language that they will understand
● Mental health issues consent if they cannot give consent for themselves: If someone
else gives content for them but they need to give their assent (ex. If they are screaming,
crying, that is not consent)
● Try to reduce perception of coercion so they don’t feel forced to do something
● If at the end they don’t want to participate you need to discard their data
● Respect privacy of the people
Deception:
You can’t get the consent beforehand: informed consent is a lie and then debrief after to let
them know what the study was really about. If they don’t want you to use their data you must
discard. Only acceptable if sharing the purpose of the experiment before would affect the result.
There must be minimal risk. You may never use deception to convince a participant to
participate in a study (ex. Telling a mental patient that they can leave the hospital in acertain
amount of time if they participate). They cannot be a victim of a fictitious crime but they can be
the witness.
Clinical Assessment Techniques used in Research
● Self-report: what individuals think or feel, the participants are better at knowing this
● Interview (a lot in case studies)
○ Free narrative: participant respond to open-ended question and is not interrupted
by interviewer
○ Structured: pre-set questions and all participants are asked the same questions,
the idea is that they are pre-determined
● Standardized tests: must be developed in such a way that they can be administered to a
large population
● Projective tests (e.g., Rorschach Test, TAT, etc.): the justice system have a strong
relationship with the medical profession. So these tests are usually administered by
psychiatrist or other trained profession to analyze the tests. Usually composed of
ambiguous images, the goal is to analyze the unconscious
● Behavioural observation: watch people in a natural settings to see how they behave and
watch interactions (ex. Mental hospital)
● Psychophysiological tests (eg. polygraph): you can measure blood pressure for anxiety,
measures changes in the person nervous system
What is Police Psychology?
● Police psychology is the research and application of psychological knowledge and
clinical skills to law enforcement and public safety
● Often hired as just consultants
● Up until 1990s there were very few police precincts that had a psychologist on site
● Most departement now in larger cities have psychologists on staff
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Important that the research is worth studying because its so expensive and difficult to conduct. Hypotheses: what you want to test, ex. Are police officers better eyewitnesses based on their training. Estimator (independent): present at the time of the crime and cannot be changed, ex. Robbery: you have no control on the age of the witnesses, the lighting, the witnesses intoxication level (we can manipulate these things) System (independent): can be manipulated to increase or decrease effectiveness of a procedure (how do you proceed to do a lignup, does it increase memory if we do a specific lignup ) Archival research: studying existing data to try to test data, qualitative (recordings of police interviews, notes from psychologist who treated convicts or eyewitnesses) Advantage: go through a lot of information, multiple court case. Good to see if a research question is worth studying and getting initial information. Disadvantage: no control over how information was collected, it could be unreliable.
