PSYCH101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Naturalistic Observation, Scatter Plot, The Control Group

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH101
• Professor: Richard Ennis

Document Summary

Then they : create research design (set of methods that allows hypothesis to be tested) Research design influence how investigators: organize the stimuli used to test the hypothesis, make observations, evaluate the results. Many different types of design but the characteristics that research designs all have in common are: variables, operational definitions, data- observations, information they record about the variable of interest. How many hours per week does the typical university student spend on homework: address the appearance of behavior, duration/frequency, prevalence in population. Ways to gather data using one or more of the following designs: Observing people or animals in their natural settings. They unobtrusively observe and record behavior as it occurs in the subject"s natural environment. Key word is unobtrusively individuals should not know they are being observed. The mere act of observation could change the participants" behavior. Scientists conducting naturalistic observation research is making systematic observations of specific variables according to operational definitions.