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Acknowledgments
First, I would like to thank the wonderful team at SAGE and Leah Fargotstein, in particular. Without her encouragement, there would be no second edition. Leah was instrumental in identifying prerevision reviewers to provide direction for the second edition and also expertly guided me through the revision process. In addition, during the production process, Natasha Tiwari and Terri Lee Paulsen kept me on schedule and made sure the final product was visually appealing.
Several people at Connecticut College, where I teach, deserve special mention. Lisa Dowhan, the interlibrary loan supervisor, processed my requests for articles; research and instruction librarian Ashley Hanson, the library’s liaison to the Psychology Department, provided a perspective on the kinds of questions students ask about library materials used in research; and digital media specialist Michael Dreimiller reminded me how to prepare high-resolution graphics.
I would also like to thank my research methods students at Connecticut College. The material in this book is the foundation of my research methods class, and the students’ sense of accomplishment when they present their research projects at the end of the semester motivated me to share this material with others. Repeatedly students tell me how much they learned in the class and how often they refer to the material provided in the book. After the research methods course, the book continues to be a resource for upper-level individual study, an honors thesis, and graduate-level study.
Publisher’s Acknowledgments
SAGE wishes to acknowledge the valuable contributions of the following reviewers:
Laurie A. Manwell, University of Waterloo
Michael Mueller, University of Guelph-Humber
Michaela Porubanova, Farmingdale State College
J. Taylor Randolph, Northwestern Oklahoma State University
Christina S. Sinisi, Charleston Southern University
About the Author
Ann Sloan Devlinteaches at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut, where she is the May Buckley Sadowski ’19 Professor of Psychology. She is a published author with more than three decades of academic and research experience in the area of environmental psychology, with a particular focus on health care environments in recent work. She was editor in chief of Environment and Behavior, one of two premier journals devoted to the area of environment-behavior studies, from 2016–2018. She has published five other books, including Environmental Psychology and Human Well-Being: Effects of Built and Natural Environments (2018, Academic Press); Transforming the Doctor’s Office: Principles from Evidence-based Design (2015, Routledge); What Americans Build and Why: Psychological Perspectives (2010, Cambridge); Research Methods: Planning Conducting, and Presenting Research (2006, Wadsworth/Thomson); and Mind and Maze: Spatial Cognition and Environmental Behavior (2001, Praeger). In addition, she has published numerous research articles in such journals as Environment and Behavior, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Professional Psychology: Research & Practice, and Journal of Counseling Psychology. She is a former Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) board member and secretary. In 2020 she received the EDRA Career Award; the award recognizes a “career of sustained and significant contributions to environment design research, practice, or teaching” (https://www.edra.org/page/career_award).At Connecticut College, she has received the John S. King Faculty Teaching Award, the Helen Brooks Regan Faculty Leadership award, and the Nancy Batson Nisbet Rash Faculty Award for Excellence in Research. She is also a fellow of Division 34 of the American Psychological Association.
Introduction
Research. Many professors view research as the foundation of their discipline, the most important part of what they do. I agree. This book is written with the goal of exciting you about the research process. Many of us believe research methods is the most important course in the social and behavioral sciences, outweighing statistics, which might be viewed as a support system. Statistics are important, but their real value lies in their use to answer research questions.
Despite whether you plan to conduct research as part of a career, knowing the core values of the research process is important for you. Knowing the fundamentals of research design and analysis will not only help you in your education, but it will also make you a more sophisticated consumer of information in your personal and professional life.
Before taking a course in research methods, students provide interesting answers to the question, “What is research?” Some students think doing a Web search constitutes “research” (i.e., looking for articles by a given author); others think writing a literature review is “doing research” (i.e., presenting the existing research). In this book, we take the position that doing research involves (a) the formation of a hypothesis (or statement of purpose in exploratory investigations); (b) the acquisition of data to test that hypothesis or explore relationships (there are many approaches to such data acquisition); (c) evaluation of data or information, typically using inferential statistics; and (d) presentation of a conclusion or summary of findings based on the evidence.
One major hurdle in conducting sound research is avoiding the biases and faulty assumptions that are characteristic of human thought. That is why this book begins with an examination of such biases in thinking. Throughout the book, we will return to this theme of how the way we think influences the choices we make about the research process.
By working through the chapters in this book, you will learn how to do the following:
1 Recognize