PSYC 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2.2: Confounding, Random Assignment, The Control Group

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1000
• Professor: Benjamin Giguere

Document Summary

Psychologists always begin their research with a research question, an often make a prediction about the outcome they expect-the hypothesis. Psychologists then create a research design, a set of methods that allows a hypothesis to be tested. Research designs influence how investigators organize the stimuli used to test the hypothesis, make observations and evaluate the results. Variables; a property of an object, organism, event or something else that can take on different variables. Operational definitions; the details that define the variables for the purposes of a specific study. Data; when scientists collect observations about the variables of interest, the information they record is called data. Descriptive research answers the question of what a phenomenon is; it describes its characteristics. Once these observations have been performed and the data examined, they can be used to inform more sophisticated future studies that ask why and how that phenomenon occurs.