PSYC 1020H Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Abusive Power And Control, Dependent And Independent Variables, Sampling Bias
3 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
The Research Enterprise In Psychology
The Scientific Approach to Behaviour
● The scientific approach assumes that there are laws of behaviour that can be
discovered through empirical research. The goals of the science of psychology
include:
○ The measurement and description of behaviour
○ The understanding and prediction of behaviour
○ The application of this knowledge to the task of controlling behaviour
● A scientific investigation follows a systematic pattern that includes five steps
○ Formulate a testable hypothesis
○ Select the research method and design the study
○ Collect the data
○ Analyze the data and draw conclusions
○ Report the findings
● The two major advantages of the scientific approach are its clarity in
communication and its relative intolerance of error.
● By integrating apparently unrelated facts into a coherent whole, theories permit
psychologists to make the leap from the description of behaviour to
understanding behaviour.
Looking For Causes: Experimental Research
● Experimental research involves the manipulation of an independent variable to
ascertain its effect on a dependent variable. This research is usually done by
comparing experimental and control groups, which must be alike in regard to
important extraneous variables.
● Experimental designs may vary. For example, sometimes as experimental group
serves as its own control group. And many experiments have more than one
independent variable or more than one dependent variable. Some of these
variations were seen in the Featured study, in which more than one independent
variable was used.
● An experiment is a powerful research method that permits conclusions about
cause-and-effect relationships between variables. However, the experimental
Document Summary
The scientific approach assumes that there are laws of behaviour that can be discovered through empirical research. The goals of the science of psychology include: The application of this knowledge to the task of controlling behaviour. A scientific investigation follows a systematic pattern that includes five steps. Select the research method and design the study. The two major advantages of the scientific approach are its clarity in communication and its relative intolerance of error. By integrating apparently unrelated facts into a coherent whole, theories permit psychologists to make the leap from the description of behaviour to understanding behaviour. Experimental research involves the manipulation of an independent variable to ascertain its effect on a dependent variable. This research is usually done by comparing experimental and control groups, which must be alike in regard to important extraneous variables. For example, sometimes as experimental group serves as its own control group.
