Types of Psychological Research

There are two kinds of reasoning in scientific circles. Deductive reasoning involves the formation of a hypothesis and the testing of the hypothesis in order to form a conclusion. Inductive reasoning involves making a specific observation and coming up with a generalized conclusion based on what you have observed. In inductive reasoning, the observation comes first and then the hypothesis or general premise. Case studies involve inductive reasoning, while most experimental research relies on deductive reasoning.

Theories are an interesting aspect of the scientific method. A theory can be created or modified by the observations made during experimentation. Alternatively, a theory can be the starting point in the formation of a new hypothesis. In such cases, the theory is not the endpoint of the experiment but is the starting point of a new hypothesis.

TYPES OF PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Psychology research is often eclectic, which means it relies on knowledge acquired from other scientific fields of study. It is also research that is used as part of other areas of scientific study, such as the social sciences, medical science, and behavioral science. There are many different types of research methods used to study psychological processes. Because of the nature of psychology, not all research studies are of the same type.

We will talk more about experimental psychology later in this chapter. This is a field of psychological research that uses inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning in order to arrive at specific hypotheses and conclusions. There are independent variables that are changed in the experiment, which have an effect on the dependent variable. There will be other variables, called extraneous variables, some of which can be tightly controlled, while others are confounding and interfere with the interpretation of the data. Controlled variables are known and are kept constant so that only the independent variable is changed as part of the experiment.

Observational studies or observational research involves the observation of behaviors. There are several types of these studies. These include participant observations, non-

participant observations, and naturalistic observations. Participant observations involve the researcher or researchers actually joining the group they are studying.

Non-participation studies involve observing a group without being a participant. A variation of this is the naturalistic study, which looks at behaviors that are already in their natural environment. No researcher manipulation is done. As much as is possible, the researcher uses unobtrusive methods of observation to create a study that is ecologically valid. In all of these types of observational studies, there must be interobserver reliability so that everyone doing the observation sees basically the same thing. Intra-observational reliability involves being reliable each time by the same observer.

In a naturalistic study, it is crucial to have the ability to unobtrusively observe the study group. If they know they are being observed, their behavior is likely to change, which will affect the study. Naturalistic studies can be done on animals as well as on people. The observer can study social interactions among groups of animals or humans from an appropriate distance. This is the type of study that was done by Jane Goodall when she studied primates in Africa. These types of research studies are hard to set up and are hard to control. The data are realistic but not very controllable and things like cause and effect cannot be determined.

Descriptive research involves a detailed explanation of what is being observed. It involves the use of a diary that is kept by the researcher or the participant. Video or audio methods can also be used. Descriptive research studies answer the what” of a person or population by describing what is going on without getting into why it is happening. This is greatly different from experimental research because there is no hypothesis generated.

Case studies are commonly used in psychological research. Freud s research was largely based on case studies of individuals with abnormal conditions. It can be used in situations where the case is unique and when there is little possibility of gathering a group of individuals with the same condition in order to do a larger study.

The statistical survey is another way to do a study. It is often done on larger groups of people using an interview or questionnaire. The upside of this type of study is that it can be easily done on a lot of people. The downsides are that it introduces some type of

foreign element into the subjects lives and there is a tendency for the subjects to overreport or under-report certain things on the survey, depending on whether or not the behavior asked about is socially acceptable.

Surveys can be electronically delivered, done on paper, or done in a structured interview. A sample is taken from the entire population and the data are generalized to the population. These types of studies do not take much time to do and can be delivered to a large sample size. The most accurate surveys are done anonymously. Interviews can be skewed with misinformation gotten from the participants.

Archival research uses existing data in order to make specific conclusions. It can make use of a variety of existing resources, such as old surveys, past written records, and statistical data that have been collected from prior experiments. Not every conclusion in a study needs to be based on new data; archival data can be used to generate a new conclusion or theory.

Cross-sectional studies are the type often used in education, social sciences, and developmental psychology. These are shorter studies that are done on people who generally share the same characteristics, such as educational background, economic status, and ethnicity but vary in one specific variable of interest. These types of studies are comparatively not as long as other studies because they are not performed over a period of time.

Cross-sectional studies often examine people for a short period of time who are of different ages. It eliminates the need to study the same group of people as they progress through the different ages, as would be seen in a longitudinal study. One of the downsides is that it cannot control issues related to different generations, which do not necessarily have anything to do with the people s ages. This kind of bias is essentially eliminated by doing a longitudinal study instead.

Longitudinal studies take an extended period of time. A group is selected in the beginning of the study and data points are collected over time. These can last several decades with the same things studied periodically throughout the research time period. Often, several conclusions can be made based on these types of studies.

Longitudinal studies can be done on thousands of individuals and are done to look at risk factors for different diseases. This is the kind of study done by the American Cancer Society, such as the Cancer Prevention Study. This type of research, while taking a long time to do, can be the most valuable type of study in looking at specific risk factors that do not necessarily show up immediately in the population.

Cohort studies are generally done on individuals who are about the same age. Different types of studies can be done on these individuals, including cross-sectional studies and longitudinal studies. This is a way of keeping one variable (the subjects ages) the same.

Unobtrusive research involves things like looking at graffiti and obituaries or other data that is left behind as part of the subjects lives. It does not involve things like surveys or interviews that would interfere with the subjects in any way. There is no experimenter bias and no selection bias that can come out of the researcher interfering with the project. The downside is that the researcher does not have the luxury of choosing the type of data available.

As you can imagine, the type of research study done depends on what types of research questions are being asked. Survey research has the advantage of being able to select a large sample size. Observational studies are good but often have a much smaller sample size to study. On the other hand, surveys are limited in that they involve self-reporting, which is not always accurate. Archival studies are inexpensive but there is an inability to choose exactly the data you want to collect.

Cause and effect are two things that cannot be determined by every research study. Many of the studies listed are correlational research studies that can identify a relationship between two variables but cannot select between cause and effect. Only experimental research studies can identify what is the cause and what is the effect.

There are advantages and disadvantages to doing a study, such as an observational study, on a small group of individuals. The major advantage is that large amounts of information can be gathered over time. The disadvantages are that the observations are also done on individuals who have unusual characteristics so the information may not generalize to larger groups of people and the study size is small and this too might not generalize to a large group.