3 Formulate one or more hypotheses based on this literature
4 Design a study based on recommended approaches
5 Select valid and reliable scales to measure your variables of interest
6 Prepare a survey or other instrument to collect your data (using online survey software or a paper-based document)
7 Write a proposal to be evaluated by an ethics board (typically called the Human Subjects Institutional Review Board [IRB])
8 Collect data (using a campus subject pool, a source off campus, or an online source)
9 Create a data file or download your data from survey software
10 Analyze your data using a statistical package such as SPSS Statistics®
11 Understand what your data mean and how to report your results
12 Discuss your findings in the context of your hypotheses and the broader literature
13 Identify the limitations of your research, and propose directions for future research
Finally, you will learn how to write up this research following the guidelines of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2020) and avoid common mistakes in writing and style. In addition, you will learn how to prepare your article for publication and decide where to submit it if that is a goal. At the end of this book, you should have the skills to produce a well-executed project and a well-written research report or manuscript.
The skills you have acquired in the process of conducting research will enable you to compete successfully for internships and jobs. Students who have mastered the research process know how to locate measures, how to use survey software such as Qualtrics, how to analyze data using IBM SPSS, and perhaps even how to collect data using a crowdsourcing online tool such as AmazonMTurk®. With these skills, you are well positioned to compete effectively for a variety of jobs.
Each chapter contains three kinds of questions to promote learning: Revisit and Respond; Try This Now; and Build Your Skills. Revisit and Respond items generally ask directly about the information in the chapter (e.g., explain why or list two examples of …) and would be considered review questions. Try This Now questions ask you to pause and stretch a bit to go beyond the information given at the moment (e.g., after reading the list, come up with three additional settings where you think ethnographic research could be conducted; see Chapter 6). Build Your Skills items at the end of the chapter are either questions or activities that ask you to apply what you have learned to some of the major issues in the chapter. For example, you might be asked to make a case for having institutional review board (IRB) review (see Chapter 4) even for projects with no more than minimal risk or to create an account to try out a free version of an online survey software (see Chapter 5).
Chapter 1 Research, Biases in Thinking, and the Role of Theories
Chapter highlights
Why research matters
Humans as limited information processors
Heuristics (representativeness and availability)
Shermer’s (1997) categories of how thinking goes wrong:Problems in scientific thinkingProblems in pseudoscientific thinkingLogical problems in thinkingPsychological problems in thinking
The role of common sense in posing research questions
Laws, theories, and hypotheses: Importance and qualities
What makes something a good research question?
Why Research Matters
In the movie The Big Short, which depicted the implosion of the housing market and the collapse of the financial system in the United States, hedge-fund manager Mark Baum (the character played by actor Steve Carell) and his team go out in the field to collect data on the “health” of the housing market. Rather than accepting someone else’s conclusion that the housing market was a “bubble” about to burst, they collect their own data by consulting a real estate agent, several mortgage brokers, and even an exotic dancer (who has adjustable rate mortgages on five houses, as it turns out). Social scientists might not consider this credible research, but at least Baum and his team were willing to look at some evidence. As you will learn later in this book, there were some problems with their approach, although their conclusion was correct (it wouldn’t have made a good story, otherwise). As you will see in Chapter 11, their sampling strategy was flawed because they looked at only one housing market in the United States (Miami); they needed a random sample of housing markets across the United States to be more certain about the housing bubble.
Every day you see behavior that triggers questions ranging from the mundane—“What do people think of students who wear pajamas to class?”—to the more important—“Do people disclose less information to their health care providers when a ‘medical scribe’ (i.e., someone taking notes for the physician) is in the room?” How do we evaluate the research in terms of its credibility? That is, what makes research believable or convincing? What criteria should we use in evaluating the findings of a research study? Courses in research methods provide the tools to conduct and evaluate research. Students may take a research methods course because it is required, but the information will serve them far beyond the course. Learning how to evaluate research may help students make more informed and potentially life-altering decisions in the future (e.g., whether to take a particular medication to treat a condition or how much to pay for a particular home).
Research can help you answer a variety of questions, some of them very important. Being able to evaluate research gives you a powerful set of tools to solve problems, especially because the body of knowledge is expanding exponentially. To ask and answer good questions, it is helpful to understand how humans think because humans have cognitive capacities that both help (category formation; common sense; flexibility; creativity) and hurt (stereotypes; heuristics, that is shortcuts in thinking) the research process. In fact, the same cognitive capacity can be adaptive in some situations and maladaptive in others. For example, using speed to make a decision under duress might save your life, but it might make you an unreliable eyewitness. Recognizing these cognitive characteristics in yourself will help you maximize the positive aspects and minimize the negative aspects in the research process. In this chapter, you will learn about the kinds of heuristics or shortcuts humans use in thinking and how these may shape our approach to research. Armed with this information, you will be better prepared to both evaluate the research that others conduct and carry out your own research.
Heuristics: Mental shortcuts (e.g., estimations and common sense) that often guide thinking and problem solving.
In this chapter, four categories of how thinking “goes wrong” from a list generated by Michael Shermer (1997) will be highlighted. The chapter will also present some adaptive characteristics humans have, most notably, common sense. The chapter also introduces you to the distinctions between law, theory, and hypothesis (a proposed explanation for the relationship between variables that must be tested) and explores why theory is important and how a good research question is connected to theory.
Hypothesis: “A testable proposition based on theory, stating an expected empirical outcome resulting from specific observable conditions” (Corsini, 2002, p. 463).
The Research Process: Humans Make Predictions
Humans