PS 130 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Informed Consent, Statistical Inference, Descriptive Statistics
Document Summary
Definition: approach used by psychologists to systematically acquire knowledge and understanding about the behavior and other phenomena of interest. Notice behavior that needs to be explained. You also need curiosity, creativity, and insight. Theories- they need to be general and or broad. Hypothesis-something that is more specific- it"s a prediction on what you will find. Operational definitions: the step by step solution to how you will solve the question at hand. Case study: in depth intensive investigation of an individual or small group. A con of this would be that it is very limited and you can"t generalize to the broader population. Participant- participating in the various activities along with the participants and taking notes simultaneously. Archival data: is when you test your hypothesis using preexisting data that was originally collected for other purposes. A good thing about this is it is easy to access large amounts of previously collected data.