In this section, we’ll talk about different
types of research study, and special
jargon we use for different parts of an
experiment.
1 2
Descriptive research is often forgotten, but it is often
the important first step in answering a problem in
science, especially for real-world (‘applied’) problems.
It has no hypothesis! It just tries to describe the
behaviour, thoughts, or feelings of a group of people. It
does not look for any relationship between variables.
Examples: opinion polls; customer surveys; what
proportion of new mothers have depression?
3 4
Isn’t every piece of research an
experiment ..?
NO! We use the word ‘study’ to describe
any piece of research – an experiment is
something much more specific.
There are four types of research/study
we might do…
To understand the behaviour we see, we need
to know how variables are related to each other.
[A variable is anything that can change –
e.g. someone’s age, how happy they are,
how sunny it is today etc.]
Correlational research looks for relationships
between (naturally-occurring) variables.
E.g. do shy people have lower self-esteem? Is
bad parenting related to problems in
adolescence? Is drug abuse related to
personality factors?

The problem with correlational studies is that we

can’t know what causes what. Does shyness
cause low self-esteem, or the other way round?
Is there something else which causes them
both?

[Quasi = pseudo, kind of, a bit like ...]

In quasi-experiments, we compare two or more

naturally-occurring groups, e.g. men and
women, older people and younger people,
schizophrenic patients and healthy people.

Quasi-experiments are very similar to

correlational research. Again, we are not
manipulating the variables ourselves, so we
cannot be sure what causes what.

4 5

less healthy. We could make two groups of

people, make one group stressed, and make the
other group not stressed. Because we have
made the stress, if the stressed group get sick,
we can be fairly sure that stress caused this.

When we do this, it’s important that we

randomly allocate our participants to the two
groups.

The only way to know what causes what is to

use an experiment. Experiments involve
comparing groups of people, or groups of
things.

Important feature: We manipulate the variable

of interest. Manipulation means that we, the
researchers, change the variable we are
interested in.

Imagine we want to know if stress makes you

6 6
Just like correlational research, an
experiment looks for a relationship between
two variables. We want to know whether
one variable affects the other. So we
manipulate one variable, and measure the
other variable to see if it changes.
The independent variable (IV) is the one we
manipulate.
The dependent variable (DV) is the one we
measure.
7 8
Often in an experiment we want to know if the presence of
something (e.g. caffeine, stress) affects the DV. So we need to
compare people who took caffeine to people who did not take
caffeine.
Condition with caffeine = experimental condition
Condition with no caffeine = control condition
Think of the experimental condition as the ‘interesting
condition’, and the control condition as the ‘comparison
condition’ or ‘baseline condition’. We do not use a control
condition in every experiment, it depends on the research
question.
9 10
Every IV has two or more conditions. These are the
‘groups’ we were talking about earlier.
IV = stress: whether the participants are stressed or
not
Condition 1: participants are stressed
Condition 2: participants are not stressed
OR ... IV = amount of caffeine the participant is given
Condition 1: 300 mg caffeine
Condition 2: 600 mg caffeine
Condition 3: no caffeine
We want to know how taking caffeine affects memory.
We have three conditions: 300 mg, 600 mg, no caffeine.
We can make three groups of participants, give each
group a different amount of caffeine, and then measure
their memory. This would be a between-subjects IV.
OR we can give each participant 300mg one day, 600
mg another day, and no caffeine on a third day; we
measure their memory all three days. This would be a
within-subjects IV, or repeated measures IV.