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PSY100H1Professor
Michael InzlichtThis preview shows pages 1-3. to view the full 25 pages of the document.
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PSYCH 100 LECTURE 2: Research Methods
•Not a huge date/name guy for the exam-hint
•More interested in whether you understand the concepts
•Need to know wilhelm wundt for instance
•Characteristics of Good Psychological Research:
•When studying human psychology we have to be more careful than studying other things
ethically etc
•STUFF WE NEED for good psychological research...
•1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
•Is a systematic way of organizing and explaining observations
•We need a Hypothesis- which flows from the theory or from an important question
•Theories are never done, we are looking for the exceptions that might not be found until years
down the road
•We might prefer the simpler theory if possible but exceptions are important
2. STANDARDIZED PROCEDURE:
Means-procedure=same for all subjects except where variation introduced to death hypothesis
The differences must not be about how we ran the study
The results are a result of our intentional manipulation
Because of that we go to great lengths to ensure everything is as standard as possible
We want to counter balance
Avoid confounds
•WE don’t rely on any one study as being confirmative, the be all and end all
•We don’t want to rely on any one study as something we would put full faith in
•We need studies to be replicated
•Preferably by other researches or in other parts of the world
•If we don’t, we have to be more critical or skeptical
•Standardize procedure in ways that others can do it in as close to the same way
3. GENERALIZABILITY:
•The sample is representative of population
•Procedure is sensible and relevant to to world outside the lab
•Can’t survey EVERYBODY so we take a representative sample
•Procedure that is sensible and relevant to circumstances outside the lab
•IF you use a biased sample you have to be concerned whether you can generalize your sample
to a larger group
•We also want a procedure that has ecological validity-measuring something that is real
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•How much sense does it make? Is it realistic
•Sensible, relevant outside of lab
•There are things below the level of conscious awareness
•Subliminal perception might have higher rates in a lab than in a store
4. OBJECTIVE MEASUREMENTS:
Reliable (produce consistent results)
•Measures that are valid (that assess the dimensions they purport to assess
•Need test/questionaries that measure what we think they are measuring
•Are we measuring something well defined?
•We want to make sure they are assessing what we believe they are assessing
•PSYCHOMETRICS: --form of statistic--ensuring measurements reliable, valid etc. lets say we
are trying to measure anxiety-how will we measure it?
PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH:
•Naturalistic observation: observe ppl. In their natural setting without altering their setting
•Man hiding in bush with camera filming lions
•As removed as possible
•Have as little influence as possible on the groups
•Great way to come up with ideas for other studies
•BUT we can’t infer causality
•Can be with anyone with anywhere
•Ie: children on the playground forming peer groups, you watch them
•Surveys
•Can be manipulated and used in a great way
•Election surveys- not ALL polling is perfect-there is a margin of error
•Have to be wary of surveys-you can create a survey that biases the answers you get--suggests
the answers in the question
•Who is the source? Who paid for the survey? What are their stakes? We must be skeptical
•Case study:
•A single person
•Person with a rare disease; if they get better do we know that are treatment worked or could
they have gotten naturally better
•You have evidence that people have gotten better
•But through empirical evidence found to be random
•Anecdotal evidence can be very powerful--it helped you or someone you know and it makes it
seem real--those types of conclusion are very dangerous
•The affect is placebo-believing something works is enough to make it work for some people
•Unless we have multiple data to look at and compare we can’t be sure
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•Correlational
•A measure of association between two variables
•Self esteem and grade point average are moderately positively correlated
•Its not a perfect relationship but it can be measured
•-1 or +1 are perfect correlations
•0 = no correlation
•Height and weight very strongly correlated
•Strength of a correlation:
•Perfect=1.0
•Strong 0.6 to 0.8
•Moderately strong 0.3 0.5
•No correlation 0
•Most human behaviour we discuss in moderately strong, more than that is unusual
•Cannot tell us about causation
•We just have to be careful about the data we get and only apply it the way we should
•What does causal mean here?
•Correlational research: establishes whether there is a relationship between two or more variable
•Cannot infer causality
•1. Directionality problem ie: which variable affects which
•2. Potential for a third variable (confound) if it interferes with the relationship and we aren’t
aware of it
•From a correlational study we don’t know if have a a high GPA causes high self esteem OR
vise versa
•In this case there is a third more important variable ie: high IQ-more likely to have high self
esteem and GPA--IQ affects both other these factors than either has with each other
•When we see correlations as if they are causal that’s a huge problem
•Media is very bad at presenting correlation studies as if they are causal
•Good to do an experimental study following a correlation study
•Examples:
•Smoking is correlated with lung cancer
•For a long time you couldn’t say that cigarettes’s CAUSE cancer
•Couldn’t do human experiments because of ethics
•Can’t do things we think will cause harm
•For decades ppl. Said you can’t prove it
•After enough correlational studies and experiments with animals now health canada says
smoking causes cancer
•We say now this is a correlation that is indeed causal
•2. High grades are correlated with successful careers
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