Psychology 2320A/B Lecture Notes - Heritability, Psychopathy, Psychopathology

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2320A/B
• Professor: Prof

Document Summary

Topics for today, jan 15th: research methods in child psychopathology/clinical child psyc, epidemiology, classification etc , research psychopathpsyc. Background: good research tests specific hypotheses based on theory, hypothesis: prediction about relationship between constructs. Construct: a psychological abstraction that must be operationalized for research. Can"t be proven, only supported (or not) by data. Stat significance doesn"t mean findings are important. Research on etiology in psychopathology: background: usually, correlational designs (rather than strictly experimental) are used. Correlational designs: measure two variables and estimate their degree of relationship, typically calculate a correlation coefficient (r), a number between -1 and 1, r = 0 (and around zero): variables are unrelated; r =1 means perfect relationship. Research on etiology cont"d: two broad, basic design distinctions typically seen in psychopathology research. Cross-s vs longitudinal designs: cross-s designs most common, easy to implement. A cross-sectional study is an observational one.