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Summary Introduction to Research Methods in the Social and Behavioral Sciences
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Introduction to Research Methods in the Social and Behavioural SciencesChapter 1 Research in the behavioral sciences
People tend to think of psychologists primarily in their roles as mental health
professionals, rather than as researchers. However, psychology is not only a profession that
promotes human welfare through counseling, but also a scientific discipline that studies
behavior and mental processes.
The beginnings of behavioral research
Aristotle is sometimes credited for being the first individual to address systematically
basic questions about the nature of human beings and why they behave as they do. For over
two millennia, however, the approach to answering these questions was entirely speculative.
Explanations were based on everyday observation, creative insight or religious doctrine.
However, many of these explanations of behaviour were completely wrong.
Scientific psychology was born during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
People then began to realize that basic questions about behaviour could be addressed using
many of the same methods that were used in more established sciences, such as biology,
chemistry and physics. Today, the work of a few creative scientists has blossomed into a
very large enterprise, involving hundreds of thousands of researchers around the world who
devote part or all of their working lives to the scientific study of behaviour.
Goals of behavioral research
Theoretical and methodological advances have led to important discoveries that have
not only enhanced our understanding of behaviour but also improved the quality of human
life. Some researchers distinguish between two primary types of research that differ with
respect to the researcher’s primary goal.
Basic research is conducted to understand psychological processes without regard
for whether or not the knowledge is immediately applicable. The primary goal of basic
research is to increase our knowledge.
The goal of applied research is to find solutions for certain problems rather than to
enhance general knowledge about psychological processes. For example, industrial-
organizational psychologists are sometimes asked to investigate social problems such as
racial tension. These applied researchers use scientific approaches to understand and solve
some problem of immediate concern. Other applied researchers conduct evaluation
research, using behavioral research methods to assess the effects of social or institutional
programs on behaviour. Program evaluators are sometimes asked to determine whether a
new program is effective in achieving its intended purpose.
Because applied research often requires an understanding of what people do and
why, basic research provides the foundation on which much applied research rests. In
return, applied research often provides important ideas and new questions for basic
researchers.
Whether behavioral researchers are conducting basic or applied research, they
generally do so with one of three goals in mind: description, prediction or explanation, and
they design their research doing so.
Behavioral science and common sense
Unlike research in the physical and natural sciences, research in the behavioral
sciences often deals with topics that are familiar to most people. Because people have
personal experience with many of the topics of behavioral science, people sometimes
maintain that the findings of behavioral science are mostly common sense. In some
,Introduction to Research Methods in the Social and Behavioural Sciences
instances, this is undoubtedly true. It would be a strange science indeed whose findings
contradicted everything that laypeople believed about behavior, thought and emotion. Even
so, the fact that a large percentage of the population believes something is no proof of its
accuracy. Likewise, behavioral scientists have discredited many widely held beliefs about
behavior.
To look at another side of the issue, common sense can interfere with scientific
progress. Scientists’ own commonsense assumptions about the world can blind them to
alternative ways of thinking about the topics they study. However, scientists have a special
obligation to question their commonsense assumptions and to try to minimize the impact of
those assumptions on their work.
The value of research to the student
The usefulness of research for understanding behavior and improving the quality of
life is rather apparent, but it may be less obvious that a firm grasp of basic research
methodology has benefits for a student such as yourself. After all, most students who take
courses in research methods have no intention of becoming researchers themselves.
A background in research has at least four important benefits:
1. Knowledge about research methods allows people to understand research that is
relevant to their professions. For example, people who become counselors and
therapists are obligated to stay informed about recent research literature that deals
with therapy and related topics.
2. A knowledge of research methodology makes one a more intelligent and effective
‘research consumer’ in everyday life. Without such knowledge, people are
unprepared to spot shoddy studies, questionable statistics and unjustified
conclusions in the research they read or hear about.
3. Research training involves the development of critical thinking. Scientists are a
critical lot, always asking questions, considering alternative explanations, insisting on
hard evidence and critiquing their own and others’ conclusions.
4. Learning about and becoming involved in research helps one become an authority,
not only on research methodology but also on particular topics. In the process of
reading about previous studies, collecting data and interpreting the results,
researchers grow increasingly familiar with their topics.
The scientific approach
Most people have greater difficulty thinking of psychology and other behavioral
sciences as science than regarding chemistry, biology, physics or astronomy as science. In
part, this is because many people misunderstand what science is. Most people appreciate
that scientific knowledge is somehow special, but they judge whether a discipline is scientific
on the basis of the topics it studies. However, whether an area of study is scientific has little
to do with the topics it studies. Rather, science is defined in terms of the approaches used to
study the topic. Specifically, three criteria must be met for an investigation to be considered
scientific: systematic empiricism, public verification and solvability.
Empiricism refers to the practice of relying on observation to draw conclusions about
the world. Scientists insist that conclusions be based on what can be objectively observed
and not on assumptions, hunches, unfounded beliefs, or the products of people’s
imaginations. However, observation alone does not make something science. After all,
everyone draws conclusions about human nature from observing people in everyday life.
,Introduction to Research Methods in the Social and Behavioural Sciences
Scientific observation is systematic. They structure their observations in systematic ways so
that they can use them to draw valid conclusions about the nature of the world.
Public verification indicates that research must be conducted in such a way that the
findings of one researcher can be observed, replicated and verified by others. There are two
reasons for this. First, the requirement of public verification ensures that the phenomena
scientists study are real and observable and not one person’s fabrications. Second, public
verification makes science self-correcting. The requirement of public verification increases
the likelihood that errors and incorrect conclusions will be detected and corrected.
Science must only deal with solvable problems. This criterion means that many
questions fall outside the realm of scientific investigation. For example, the question ‘are
there angels?’ is not scientific. This does not necessarily imply that angels do not exist or
that the question is not important. It simply means that this question is beyond the scope of
scientific investigation.
The scientist’s two jobs: detecting and explaining phenomena
Scientists are in the business of doing two distinct things. First, they are in the
business of discovering and documenting new phenomena, patterns, and relationships. The
scientist’s second job is to develop and evaluate explanations of the phenomena they see.
Once they identify phenomena to be explained and have collected sufficient information
about them, they develop theories to explain the patterns they observe and then conduct
research to test those theories.
A theory is a set of propositions that attempts to explain the relationships among a
set of concepts. Occasionally, people used the word theory in everyday language to refer to
hunches or unsubstantiated ideas. This use of the word theory is very misleading. Scientific
theories are not wild guesses or unsupported hunches. On the contrary, theories are
accepted as valid only to the extent that they are supported by empirical findings. Even
though ideas for theories can come from anywhere, a good theory must meet several
criteria. A good theory in psychology
- proposes causal relationships;
- is coherent in the sense of being clear, straightforward, logical and consistent;
- is parsimonious, using as few concepts and processes as possible to explain the
target phenomenon;
- generates testable hypotheses that are able to be disconfirmed through research;
- stimulates other researchers to conduct research to test the theory;
- solves an existing theoretical question.
Closely related to theories are models. Whereas a theory specifies both how and why
concepts are related, a model describes only how they are related.
Research hypotheses
On the whole, scientists are a skeptical bunch, and they are not inclined to accept
theories and models that have not been supported by empirical research. Thus, a great deal
of their time is spent in testing theories and models to determine their usefulness in
explaining and predicting behaviour.
People can usually find reasons for almost anything after it happens. The ease with
which we can retrospectively explain even opposite occurrences leads scientists to be
skeptical of post hoc explanations: explanations that are made after the fact.
, Introduction to Research Methods in the Social and Behavioural Sciences
More informative is the degree to which a theory can successfully predict what will
happen. To provide a convincing test of a theory, researchers make specific research
hypotheses a priori, so before collecting data.
The process of testing theories is a indirect one. Theories themselves are not tested
directly. The propositions in a theory are usually too broad and complex to be tested directly
in a particular study. Rather, when researchers set about to test a theory, they do so
indirectly by testing one or more hypotheses that are derived from the theory.
Deriving hypotheses from a theory involves deduction, a process of reasoning from a
general proposition (the theory) to specific implications of that proposition (the hypotheses).
You can think of a hypothesis as an if-then statement.
Often, scientists arrive at hypotheses through induction: abstracting a hypothesis
from a collection of facts. Hypotheses that are based on previously observed patterns of
results are sometimes called empirical generalizations. Having seen that certain variables
repeatedly relate to certain other variables in a particular way, we can hypothesize that such
patterns will occur in the future.
Whether derived deductively from a theory or inductively from observed facts,
hypotheses must be formulated precisely in order to be testable. They specifically must be
stated in such a way that leaves them open to the possibility of being falsified by the data
that we collect. Falsification is the characteristic that distinguishes science from other ways
of seeking knowledge, such as philosophical argument or personal experience.
The amount of support for a theory or hypothesis depends not only on the number of
times it has been supported by research, but also on the stringency of the tests it has
survived. The findings of tightly conceptualized and well-designed studies are simply more
convincing than the findings of poorly conceptualized and weakly designed ones. In addition,
the greater the variety of the methods and measures that are used to test a theory in various
experiments, the more confidence we can have in their accumulated findings. Thus,
researchers often aim for methodological pluralism: using many different methods and
designs as they test theories.
Rather than simply testing whether the predictions of a particular theory are or are
not supported, researchers often design studies to test simultaneously the opposing
predictions of two theories. This head-to-head approach to research is sometimes called the
strategy of strong inference because the findings allow researchers to draw stronger
conclusions about the relative merits of competing theories than do studies that test a single
theory.
Conceptual and operational definitions
For a hypothesis to be falsifiable, the terms used in the hypothesis must be clearly
defined. If the terms used in research are not defined precisely, we may be unable to
determine whether the hypothesis is supported. Researchers use two kinds of definitions in
their work. On one hand, they use conceptual definitions, which is more or less like the
definition we may find in a dictionary. For example, hunger means having a desire for food.
A second way of defining a concept is by an operational definition, which defines a concept
by specifying precisely how the concept is measured or induced in a particular study. For
example, hunger is being deprived of food for 12 hours. An operational definition converts an
abstract conceptual definition into concrete, situation-specific terms. Operational definitions
are essential so that researchers can replicate one another’s studies.
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