Research Techniques

3 Key excerpts on "Research Techniques"

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  eBook - ePub

  Why Psychology?

  • Adrian Furnham, David Oakley(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3 Major research methods in psychology Psychologists study everything from memory in the octopus to schizophrenic breakdown in people. They study issues as diverse as learning, perception and social behaviour. As such they need a wide range of methods to investigate the issues that fascinate them. How psychologists go about their research is in itself interesting. They have to be imaginative and flexible because of the diversity of things they study and because if people are aware they are being studied their behaviour may not be typical. The research process Scientific knowledge is knowledge obtained by both reason and experience (observation). Logical validity and experimental verification are the criteria employed by scientists to evaluate claims for knowledge. These two criteria are translated into the research activities of scientists through the research process. The research process can be viewed as the overall scheme of scientific activities in which scientists engage in order to produce knowledge; it is the paradigm of scientific inquiry. As illustrated in Figure 3.1, the research process consists of seven principal stages: problem, hypothesis, research design, measurement, data collection, data analysis, and generalization. Each of these stages is interrelated with theory in the sense that it is affected by it as well as affecting it. The most characteristic feature of the research process is its cyclic nature. It often starts with a problem and ends in a tentative generalization based on the experimental evidence. The generalization ending one cycle is the beginning of the next cycle. This cyclic process continues indefinitely, reflecting the progress of a scientific discipline. The research process is also self-correcting. Tentative generalizations to research problems are tested logically and empirically. If these generalizations are rejected, new ones are formulated and tested

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  eBook - ePub

  Sport Psychology: A Student's Handbook

  • Matt Jarvis(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10 Research methods in sport psychology

  Learning objectives

  By the end of this chapter, you should able to:

  • understand the distinction between quantitative and qualitative research
  • describe the experimental method and discuss its use in sport psychology research
  • describe the correlational method and discuss its use in sport psychology
  • describe survey methods, including questionnaires, interviews and focus groups, and discuss their use in sport psychology
  • outline the case study method and discuss its use in sport psychology
  • discuss the use of archived data in sport psychology research
  • critically discuss the usefulness of systematic review and meta-analysis as ways of drawing conclusions from multiple studies.

  This chapter is devoted to understanding the sort of research conducted in sport psychology. There are two purposes of this. First, it should give you a slightly deeper understanding of the research you will come across in this and other books whilst studying sport psychology. For example, you might wish to understand better why a study was done the way it was, or what the strengths and limitations are of the different research methods. Second, it should help you begin to plan your own research. There is no attempt to include everything you might ever want to know about carrying out research; that would be a book in itself, and there are several good books of that sort. However, it should give you a sound background in some basic principles.

  Quantitative and qualitative research

  Hayes (2000) defines quantitative methods as those ‘which involve the manipulation of numerical data’ (p 239). In other words, the researchers are dealing with information in the form of numbers. Qualitative approaches, on the other hand, attempt to draw out the meanings

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  eBook - ePub

  Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology

  • S Alexander Haslam, Craig McGarty(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  3 Research Methods

  Key goals for this chapter

  1. Explain the purpose of psychological measurement and the different forms it can take.
  2. Outline the major methods used in psychological research.
  3. Understand the key strengths and weaknesses of different research methods.

  In the previous chapter, we asked why researchers do research in psychology and what they are looking for when they do. If a researcher has decided to go ahead and conduct research, the next obvious question is ‘What different research strategies are available?’.

  Our response to this question starts with an examination of the things that psychologists measure and of the basic types of psychological measurement. We then look in turn at the four major research methods that psychologists employ in order to conduct research: (a) experimental, (b) quasi-experimental, (c) survey and (d) case study. The strengths and limitations of each of these methods are considered in separate sections in which we also discuss the basis on which researchers choose among them. This choice can be difficult to make and quite controversial. At the same time, as we shall see, it is often affected by factors over which the researcher has limited control.

  Psychological measurement

  In the previous chapter we noted that one of the things that differentiates psychology from other sciences is the fact that the things in which psychologists are typically interested – mental states and processes – can never be directly observed or measured. You cannot touch or see a mood, a thought, a disposition, a memory or an attitude. Instead, you can only observe things that are associated with

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