PSYC 1010 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: The Control Group, Naturalistic Observation, Field Experiment

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1010
• Professor: Jennifer Steeves

Document Summary

Themes that emerge can be identified by interviewing clients and studying videos or transcripts of psychotherapy sessions. Quantitative methods which are designed primarily to examine cause-and-effect relationships where variables may be defined ahead of time and where the data are numerical. Quantitative researchers make empirical observations of the work and report these observations as narratives. Three sets of interrelated goals: measurement and description: science"s commitment to observation requires that an investigator figure out a way to measure the phenomenon under study. For example, if you were interested in the effects of different situations on emotion, you would first develop some means of measuring emotions. Thus, the first goal of psychology is to develop measurement techniques that make it possible to describe behaviour clearly and precisely: understanding and prediction: a higher level goal of science is understanding. Scientists believe that they understand events when they can explain the reasons for the occurrence of the events.