Methods in Psychological Research. Annabel Ness Evans
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Descriptive Versus Explanatory Research
Descriptive research involves describing a population of measurements. Usually, inferences are made from a representative sample to a population, except in the case of censuses, in which entire populations are measured. This is the type of research we see in the media from polling agencies, and the primary interest is in describing how the population thinks. Descriptive research has applications in business, where it is used to understand the consumer, and in social services, where you need to understand the needs of your community.
The focus of explanatory research is to answer “why” questions. For example, you may find that there are more women than men in your psychology program. That finding alone is a description, but you may want to know why there are more women than men. In explanatory research, you are interested in explaining why there is a gender difference. You are trying to account for the difference. The simplest explanation would be that there are just more women in the university. You could test this by comparing the gender ratio in psychology with the gender ratio in other disciplines. In this case, you are investigating a relationship between gender and university discipline. Finding a difference may lead to an explanation of why there are more women than men in your psychology program.
Often research may contain aspects that are both descriptive and explanatory. For example, researchers studying drug use in schools may want to describe the prevalence of drug use and also try to account for why some students take drugs and others do not.
Quantitative Versus Qualitative Research
In essence, quantitative research in psychology measures differences in the amount of behavior. What causes people to become more or less aggressive? What factors increase or decrease interpersonal attraction? Does a particular treatment reduce symptoms of depression? Do children diagnosed with autism engage in less play behavior than children not diagnosed with autism? In other words, we are measuring the quantity of a behavior, often because we wonder what causes the behavior to increase or decrease in quantity.
Qualitative research in psychology, on the other hand, describes differences in the kind or quality of behavior. What does aggressive behavior look like compared with nonaggressive behavior? What is the nature of interpersonal attraction? What do depressed people think or say about themselves? What kinds of play behavior are typical of children diagnosed with autism? It is the nature or quality of the behavior that interests the qualitative researcher.
Quantitative research always involves numbers that reflect the amount of behavior.Qualitative research often involves narrative descriptions of what behavior looks like. A tally of how many self-harm behaviors Susie exhibits in a day would be quantitative data. A description of the nature of those self-harm behaviors would be qualitative data.
Basic Versus Applied Research
The distinction between basic or pure research and applied research is best made by examining the motives of the researchers. In basic research, the researcher may have no application in mind but is interested in answering a question simply to satisfy his or her curiosity. In applied research, the researcher is looking at applying the knowledge to somehow benefit humankind.
Basic or pure research may seem esoteric and may leave people scratching their heads, wondering why this type of research should be funded. Particularly in times of fiscal restraint, should governments be funding research that is only going to increase our understanding of something but has no application in daily life? The answer, of course, is yes! Applied research typically involves the application of basic principles discovered by basic researchers. Without basic research, there is nothing to apply; both are important.
An example of applied research that is becoming more and more common is program evaluation. As the name implies, program evaluation involves the application of various research approaches to measure the effectiveness of a program. Not implied in the name is the importance of objective evaluation in the development of a program and its integration as an ongoing part of the program. This applied research is usually a requirement of any program supported by the government or developed by industry and is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 12.
Cross-Sectional Versus Longitudinal Research
Most research in psychology that looks at age differences is cross-sectional. A cross section of different ages is studied at one point in time. The goal is usually to understand developmental or maturational differences between the ages. A potential problem with this research is that there may be other variables that are confounded with age. This problem has been called the cohort effect because a cohort of same-aged individuals will share variables related to their history. Differences between age groups, then, are confounded with differences in history. Imagine that we asked 30-, 40-, and 70-year-olds about their attitudes about monogamy. If we found that 70-year-olds have much more liberal attitudes, could we conclude that this is a maturational effect? Probably not. People who are in their 70s today spent their formative years during the 1960s, a very sexually free time in our history.
A solution is to study a single age cohort over a number of years. With longitudinal research, everyone has a similar history, but the research is going to take years! This raises problems of cost and the tracking of participants over time.
Field Versus Laboratory Research
The distinction between field and laboratory research highlights a difference of control. In the laboratory, researchers may have total control over most variables, whereas in the field, they may have difficulty controlling even a few. The control afforded by laboratory research makes it more likely that you will detect a treatment effect or a relationship between variables. But the artificiality of the laboratory may mean that your results do not generalize to the real world. On the other hand, there is nothing artificial about research in the field, but your lack of control of variables may mean that you do not obtain significant results. The decision to conduct research in the laboratory or in the field is a trade-off, then, among artificiality (high in the lab, low in the field), control over variables (high in the lab, low in the field), and generalizability (low in the lab, high in the field).
We have discussed why researchers do what they do and the general approaches taken by researchers in the social sciences. Regardless of the approach that a researcher takes, the process of planning and conducting research follows a logical series of steps.
Steps in Planning and Doing Research
Most of you will be expected to conduct some sort of research project in your methods course. Here we will discuss how to start thinking about doing research.
Selecting a Research Topic
From Life Experience
Very often, some life event inspires a researcher. Many years ago, one of your authors met a man who could not remember anything he had just learned. She had to introduce herself to him every time she met with him because he could not remember ever having met her before. She found this to be such an interesting phenomenon that she decided, when she began her graduate training, that she would focus on human memory.
Have you noticed that people in elevators rarely make eye contact with you? Have you ever found yourself trapped on the phone by a telemarketer, unable to just hang up? These kinds of personal experiences are a great source of research ideas. As psychology students know, Pavlov did not set out to discover the basic laws of classical conditioning. He was not even interested in psychology. But he noticed something odd in the behavior of his dogs when doing research on digestion. This personal experience led him to begin investigation into an entirely new area.