Pre-Reading Commentary 2 Part 1: The Methodology of Social Psychology
Why do we need to talk about Methodology?
That’s a very good question. As with any academic discipline the purpose of conducting research is to gain knowledge. In Social Psychology researchers are interested in a wide variety of topics. You were introduced to some of them in Chapter 1, but that was only a small sample. You will be learning about many more as you work through the course, and at first glance most of the individual studies discussed will seem to be basically unrelated to one another. Of course they all share some things in common. They are all related to learning about social influence, and they are all (or almost all) conducted using a set of scientific principles that ensure the quality of the work, and ensure that the results of the studies are interpreted properly. Remember that Social Psychologists often study how the situation can influence how people construe reality. Ironically, even the interpretation of a scientific study is subject to possible differences in how the researchers themselves construe the results. For this reason, Social Psychologists use that set of scientific principles that I just mentioned. A really “good” experiment is designed and conducted in such a way as to remove most of the interpretation that can lead to different construals of the results. This is an oversimplification, and certainly there are many theories of Social Psychology that are still debated even after many studies have been conducted, but it does stand as a basic goal of research design.
In this Chapter we will be talking about, “How do we gain knowledge?” We will briefly examine three basic forms of research design (Observational Research and Correlational Research in this section, and Experimental Research in the second part of the chapter). We will also discuss “How do we share knowledge?” and finally “What do we do with knowledge?”
Before we move on, watch the video Research Methods. Go to the CourseCompass website. Click on Course Documents, then click on Student Learning Resources and click on the link for the video. The three types of research are briefly introduced.