Methods in Psychology
• Does Facilitated Communication
work for Autistic children?
• Careful investigative methods
reveal problems
• How to find reliable facts rather
than unfounded beliefs?
• Sort out conflicting views (e.g.,
does arousal help or hinder
performance?)
• Correct false ideas
• Why not go straight to the finding?
: You need to have the skills to
investigate findings yourself
• What makes Psychological methods
scientific?
• Precision: Conceptual precision
• General Theory: An organized system
of assumptions and principles
• Hypothesis: A statement or
proposition
• But how do we make the enterprise
empirical? -> Operational definitions:
Statement of concepts such that they
can be observed / measured
• Skepticism: Neither previous
findings nor authorities are sacred
 Methodology
• Empiricism: No reliance on
popularity, pleasing,
plausibility, imaginativeness.
Nor on anecdotes or
authority
• Falsifiability: Must be
potentially refutable by some
observation
• Confirmation bias
• Openness: Full disclosure,
replication, verification and
challenge
• Descriptive Studies
• Multiple methods which each play
their own roles in knowledge
creation
• How to select participants from
whom to collect data?
• Representative Samples: Will
characterize the populations from
which they are drawn and allow
generalization
• Sample size less critical than
representativeness
• Volunteer bias
• Convenience sample
 Methodology
• Descriptive Studies: Allow description
and prediction but may not support a
particular explanation for phenomena
• Case Study: Single (or 1-2) individuals.
Careful observation including testing.
Used by clinicians, in exploratory
studies or for ethical reasons
• Language: Genie 13 year old
• Case studies make for powerful
illustrations of principles. However,
information is missing or hard to
interpret e.g., did mental deficits play a
role with Genie?
• Problems of bias and interpretations of
observed facts
• Unrepresentative
• Hypothesis generation
• Observational Studies: Observing, measuring and
recording behavior, usually of a larger number of
subjects
• Naturalistic observation: Systematic recording
• Laboratory Observation: Stranger Anxiety / Strange
situation: Ainsworth
• Secure, anxious-avoidant, anxious-resistant
• Behavior may change under observation
• We can get useful descriptive categories, but not
necessarily solid explanations
• Tests
• Procedures used to measure / evaluate personality,
emotions, aptitudes, abilities etc.
• Inventories or Objective tests
• Standardized: uniform procedures for implementation
+ norms or reference for interpreting scores
• Reliability: Test-Retest. But people gain familiarity ->
Alternate form reliability
• Validity: Content and Criterion validity
 Methodology
• Surveys
• Asking directly about
experiences, attitudes, opinions.
• Sampling and Volunteer bias
• Issue of honesty: Survey vs. uri-
test 30-79% mismatch:
Anonymity and privacy help
• Same question with different
wording to check consistency
• Inaccurate perceptions,
misunderstandings,
misremembering
• Phrasing bias / Framing effect
• Correlational Studies
• Finding relationships between
phenomena
• Variables: phenomena that can be
tallied, categorized or in other ways
quantified
• Positive and Negative correlations
• Coefficient of Correlation ‘r’ 1. 0, -1
• Illusory correlations: Confirmation bias
• Autism and MMR vaccination: time of
vaccination and first diagnosis coincide
• Correlations are not Causation: Crime
– Post Offices
• Unexamined variable
 Methodology
• The Experiment
• Instead of passive recording of
behavior, actively introduce an
element to effect behavior
• Independent and Dependent
Variables
• Confounds
• Control conditions: Everything
except the independent
variable to ensure nothing
else in experiment is causing
dependent variable shifts
• Random Assignment: balancing all preexisting
differences
• Placebo effects
• Experimenter effects: Single and double blind
studies
• Representative sample and generalization
• Cross cultural work
• Methods and Reliability / Validity
• Stereotyping
• Reification
•
• Descriptive and Inferential statistics
• Best explantion: IQ and Age. Cohort effect or
increase -> Cross sectional and Longitudinal
studies