Scientific Methodology

Crash Course: Psychological Research

Psychological Research

  • For any events and phenomenon, you need a conclusion
  • But your intuition is not always right. In fact, sometimes it is exactly wrong
  • Hindsight Bias: I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon

SCIENTIFIC METHODS

Operationalizing
1. Ask general question and need a theory which explains something
2. Turn it into a testable prediction: hypothesis 
3. Test it with a replicable experiment (replication: in order to generalize)

 

Case Study:
Look at the cases to determine or understand people’s mind and behavior

Naturalistic Observation:
It is great at describing behavior, but they are very limited in explaining it. (can observe the behavior but cannot really understand the mind behind it)

Survey:
An interview to people, great way to access people consciously held attitudes and beliefs but how to ask question is very tricky because a word choices can influence people’s answers and results.

Sampling Bias, Random Sample= the representative have equal possibility to be tested