Initial stages in conducting scientific research
Getting Ideas
Before beginning a research project, you must determine what aspects of the topic you wish to focus on and refine these interests into a specific research design. For your final paper you will be creating an experimental design with two IVs and one DV. We’ve got a lot to cover before we get there, but in the meantime you should already be thinking about Paper 1 Assignment. Some of you probably already have an idea about your proposal, and some of you are probably struggling to come up with something. Here are a few of the ways that researchers go about developing new hypotheses.
You read in your lesson 2 textbook reading assignment about the Inductive and Deductive methods for idea development. To summarize, the Inductive method involves getting ideas about the relationships among variables by observing specific facts. With this method you are using facts to generate theories. The Deductive method is the process of using a theory to generate specific ideas that can be tested through research, in other words, using theory to examine the facts.
An Odd Example
Imagine that on the first day of this course I told you that your final grade will depend on whether or not you can come up with a way to improve on the design of the thing pictured to the left. For those of you who didn’t immediately drop the course (and lodge a complaint with the university) what would you need to do first in order to complete this ridiculous task?
First you would need to figure out what that thing to the left actually is. It’s an automatic transmission for a car.
Next you would need to understand what people already know about these things (how do they work, how are they put together, which designs are most efficient, etc.).
Finally then you might be able to come up with a way to improve upon the design. This same sort of idea is actually taking place in this course. You are required to come up with a hypothesis that in some way improves upon what other psychologists have been working on for years. You shouldn’t expect to have the perfect idea right away.
A good researcher starts with a topic that is of interest, and then spends a great deal of time finding out what other people know about this topic. This knowledge can be found in a number of ways, but the most common is by conducting a literature search. You will be doing this for your first Lab, so I won’t go into the specifics now. What I will say is that understanding human behavior requires a lot of reading because thousands of researchers have published tens of thousands of articles over the past one hundred years. Don’t panic. You won’t be required to read thousands of articles, but you should expect to read a dozen or so.