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- Conducting your own psychological research means analyzing data, designing and executing surveys or experiments, and drawing conclusions from your findings. Conducting original or primary research is how scholars and students contribute to the body of scholarly knowledge.
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What does it mean to conduct your own psychological research?
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Conducting your own psychological research means analyzing data, designing and executing surveys or experiments, and drawing conclusions from your findings. Conducting original or primary research is how scholars and students contribute to the body of scholarly knowledge.
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- Overview
- Find a Research Problem or Question
- Define Your Variables
- Develop a Hypothesis
- Conduct Background Research
- Select an Experimental Design
- Standardize Your Procedures
- Choose Your Participants
- Conduct Tests and Collect Data
- Analyze the Results
1.Ask a testable question
2.Define your variables
3.Conduct background research
4.Design your experiment
5.Perform the experiment
6.Collect and analyze the data
Investigate a Commonly Held Belief
Folk knowledge is a good source of questions that can serve as the basis for psychological research. For example, many people believe that staying up all night to cram for a big exam can actually hurt test performance. You could conduct a study to compare the test scores of students who stayed up all night with the scores of students who got a full night's sleep before the exam.
Review Psychology Literature
Published studies are a great source of unanswered research questions. In many cases, the authors will even note the need for further research. Find a published study that you find intriguing, and then come up with some questions that require further exploration.
Think About Everyday Problems
There are many practical applications for psychology research. Explore various problems that you or others face each day, and then consider how you could research potential solutions. For example, you might investigate different memorization strategies to determine which methods are most effective. 2
Null Hypothesis
In order to determine if the results of the study are significant, it is essential to also have a null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is the prediction that one variable will have no association to the other variable. In other words, the null hypothesis assumes that there will be no difference in the effects of the two treatments in our experimental and control groups. The null hypothesis is assumed to be valid unless contradicted by the results. The experimenters can either reject the null hypothesis in favor of the alternative hypothesis or not reject the null hypothesis. It is important to remember that not rejecting the null hypothesis does not mean that you are accepting the null hypothesis. To say that you are accepting the null hypothesis is to suggest that something is true simply because you did not find any evidence against it. This represents a logical fallacy that should be avoided in scientific research. 4
Once you have developed a testable hypothesis, it is important to spend some time doing some background research. What do researchers already know about your topic? What questions remain unanswered?
You can learn about previous research on your topic by exploring books, journal articles, online databases, newspapers, and websites devoted to your subject.
Reading previous research helps you gain a better understanding of what you will encounter when conducting an experiment. Understanding the background of your topic provides a better basis for your own hypothesis.
After conducting a thorough review of the literature, you might choose to alter your own hypothesis. Background research also allows you to explain why you chose to investigate your particular hypothesis and articulate why the topic merits further exploration.
Pre-Experimental Design
A single group of participants is studied, and there is no comparison between a treatment group and a control group. Examples of pre-experimental designs include case studies (one group is given a treatment and the results are measured) and pre-test/post-test studies (one group is tested, given a treatment, and then retested).
Quasi-Experimental Design
This type of experimental design does include a control group but does not include randomization. This type of design is often used if it is not feasible or ethical to perform a randomized controlled trial.
True Experimental Design
A true experimental design, also known as a randomized controlled trial, includes both of the elements that pre-experimental designs and quasi-experimental designs lack—control groups and random assignment to groups. 6
In addition to making sure that the testing conditions are standardized, it is also essential to ensure that your pool of participants is the same.
If the individuals in your control group (those who are not sleep deprived) all happen to be amateur race car drivers while your experimental group (those that are sleep deprived) are all people who just recently earned their driver's licenses, your experiment will lack standardization.
Address Ethical Concerns
First, you need to be sure that your testing procedures are ethical. Generally, you will need to gain permission to conduct any type of testing with human participants by submitting the details of your experiment to your school's Institutional Review Board (IRB), sometimes referred to as the Human Subjects Committee.
Obtain Informed Consent
After you have gained approval from your institution's IRB, you will need to present informed consent forms to each participant. This form offers information on the study, the data that will be gathered, and how the results will be used. The form also gives participants the option to withdraw from the study at any point in time. Once this step has been completed, you can begin administering your testing procedures and collecting the data. 9
After collecting your data, it is time to analyze the results of your experiment. Researchers use statistics to determine if the results of the study support the original hypothesis and if the results are statistically significant.
Statistical significance means that the study's results are unlikely to have occurred simply by chance.
The types of statistical methods you use to analyze your data depend largely on the type of data that you collected. If you are using a random sample of a larger population, you will need to utilize inferential statistics.
These statistical methods make inferences about how the results relate to the population at large.
Because you are making inferences based on a sample, it has to be assumed that there will be a certain margin of error. This refers to the amount of error in your results. A large margin of error means that there will be less confidence in your results, while a small margin of error means that you are more confident that your results are an accurate reflection of what exists in that population.
Why Statistics Are Necessary in Psychology
6.3 Conducting Experiments – Research Methods in Psychology. Learning Objectives. Describe several strategies for recruiting participants for an experiment. Explain why it is important to standardize the procedure of an experiment and several ways to do this. Explain what pilot testing is and why it is important.
Know what methods exist for conducting psychological research in the real world. Introduction. The laboratory experiment is traditionally considered the “gold standard” in psychology research. This is because only laboratory experiments can clearly separate cause from effect and therefore establish causality.
Part of generating a hypothesis involves identifying the variables that you want to study and operationally defining those variables so that they can be measured. Research questions in psychology are about variables. A variable is a quantity or quality that varies across people or situations. For example, the height of the students enrolled in ...
- Rajiv S. Jhangiani, I-Chant A. Chiang, Carrie Cuttler, Dana C. Leighton
- 2019
6 days ago · Even a Little Bit of Expertise Can Go a Long Way. My usual approach to helping students get past this floundering stage is to tell them to avoid thinking up a study altogether. Instead, I tell ...
It can give you ideas for how to conduct your own study. It can tell you how your study fits into the research literature. The research literature in psychology is enormous—including millions of scholarly articles and books dating to the beginning of the field—and it continues to grow.
