Methods in Psychological Research. Annabel Ness Evans
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information on how to measure variables, how to control variables, and, in experimental studies, how to manipulate variables. This sounds wonderful, but how do you start to search through all the research to find studies relevant to your topic? In the “good old days,” this required many hours (or days) of wading through heavy indexes of research (just imagine a dozen or more telephone directories). Today, there are a number of computer indexes that require no heavy lifting.
Searching the Literature
When searching for information on anything today, where is the first place people look? Google, of course—it has all the answers, right? Well, it certainly has answers, but many of those may have no basis in scientific evidence. However, within Google is Google Scholar, which does search scientific journals, books, and professional associations’ websites. Certainly, Google Scholar can be a great way to start a literature search; for a more versatile and thorough search of the psychology literature, there are a number of bibliographic databases, including Scopus, ProQuest, ERIC, and PsycINFO. We prefer PsycINFO, an index that is produced by the American Psychological Association and is probably the most widely used bibliographic search engine for English-language journals (http://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/psycinfo/index.aspx).
What is the psychology literature? When we use this term, we are usually referring to original research published in peer-reviewed journals. These journal articles can be easily recognized by their common layout. They begin with an abstract (a short summary) and include an introduction, a method section, a results section, and a discussion. But the literature also includes review articles, books, chapters in books, edited volumes, and chapters in edited volumes. These sources are not usually where original research is published. Rather, they usually provide a summary of a collection of research studies in a particular area. Although these sources can be useful in helping you put the research in context, it is better to read the original research and draw your own conclusions.
Not included in the preceding list are newspapers, magazines (including Psychology Today), and websites. There are two reasons why scientific research is not published in these media: (1) the presence of advertising and (2) the lack of peer review. Let’s talk about advertising. Newspapers and magazines contain a lot of advertising of products and services. Indeed, these publications would not be viable without advertisers. Editors of newspapers and magazines must keep their advertisers happy; therefore, we, as consumers of the information in these publications, cannot be confident that reporting will be unbiased. Now, we are not saying that all newspaper and magazine reports are biased, but they could be. For example, imagine you have conducted a study that shows that drinking Brand X beer can lead to spontaneous, uncontrollable hiccupping. You send your report to a magazine that has Brand X beer as a major advertiser. It’s pretty unlikely that the magazine editor will accept your paper for publication. Yes, your research might be terrific, but the potential damage to the advertiser in terms of sales of the product might lead the editor to reject your study for publication. This is why you will not see advertising in journals. Journal editors, by not permitting advertising, avoid the conflict of interest problem that advertising brings.
The second reason why original scientific research is not usually published in newspapers or magazines is that neither of these sources requires review of the research by expert peers. Some sources that you can search are peer reviewed, and some are not. It is important to understand the peer review process because it is a fundamental safeguard of quality in research. As the name implies, peer review is a process whereby the editor of a journal sends submitted manuscripts out to be reviewed by other researchers in the same field of study. The manuscript is read and critiqued by peers who have expertise in the area. The review is usually blind; this means that the name of the author of the manuscript is removed from the manuscript before the copies are sent to the peer reviewers. Blind review also means that the editor does not reveal the reviewers’ names to the author of the manuscript. Blind review helps guard against any personal conflicts that may be present among researchers and facilitates a fair review of the research. The editor receives the reviews and decides whether the paper should be accepted as submitted, accepted with minor changes, accepted with revisions, or not accepted at all. If the manuscript is accepted but changes are required, the author is given the opportunity to make the changes necessary to satisfy the editor and to address the concerns of the reviewers. If the study has major flaws, it may have to be redone and resubmitted (of course, the researchers can submit the manuscript to another journal and hope for a more positive review).
Peer review helps maintain a high standard of quality in research. Without peer review, shoddy or even fraudulent research might be published that could send other researchers off on a wild-goose chase that could last for years. Keep in mind that books and magazines (e.g., Psychology Today) are usually not peer reviewed.
Note: In our courses, we do not permit the use of Psychology Today as a source. Students often question this because a lot of psychological research is reported in Psychology Today. Along with the advertising and peer review issues, which we discussed previously, there are two other reasons for our decision to not permit this magazine as a source for student papers. One reason is simple—we do not want our students to use secondary sources of any kind. Second, the writers for Psychology Today are not scientists; they may have some academic background in the area, but they are writing for the magazine as reporters. Psychology Today, like any other magazine, needs to sell magazines. Articles written by reporters will not be published unless the editor believes that the report will help sales.
FYI
There are two notable exceptions to the “no ads in journals” rule. Ironically, the two most prestigious scientific journals worldwide are full of advertisements. Science and Nature are peer reviewed, highly respected, and widely circulated.
Table 2.1 summarizes some of the differences between scientific and popular literature.
Table 2.1
When you are ready to use a bibliographic database, your first step is to select the appropriate search terms. Often students will complain that they cannot find anything in the literature on a particular topic, even though a lot of research is there. Usually, the problem is that they have not used the correct terms when doing the search. Using the correct terms is crucial; fortunately, the databases have a thesaurus of keywords to help you.
Imagine that you want to find articles on treating seasonal affective disorder (SAD) with light therapy. You can go directly to the thesaurus in PsycINFO and look for seasonal affective disorder. You will find that the term is used in the database; you will see a brief definition of SAD and the information that the term was introduced in 1991. PsycINFO also provides broader terms that would include SAD and narrower terms that are relevant. One of the narrower terms is phototherapy. That sounds useful.You can select “phototherapy” by clicking on the box, and you can similarly select “seasonal affective disorder.” The default is to connect these two phrases with “or,” but if you want articles that contain both phrases, you should choose the “and” option. When you click “and” and search (DE “Seasonal Affective Disorder”) and (DE “Phototherapy”) you will find 605 publications with those keywords. You might want to limit your search to only peer-reviewed articles in English by clicking “refine search” and selecting “peer-reviewed journals” under “publication type.” Below that is a box for selecting “language,” namely, “English.” If you select this and search again, you will get 498 hits. Wow, that’s too many articles, so you decide to add another variable, sex differences. Now the search results in only 17 hits—that’s a more manageable number. Now you can click on each one and read the abstract of the article.The abstract is a short but comprehensive summary of the article, and based on your perusal of the abstracts, you can