Pshycology asgmt. 1 (june 17,'010)

source: http://www.visionapexcollege.blogspot.com

Q: What are the methods on pshycology ?
     Explain.

    (Submition date: Tuesday, 22 june, '010)

hints: - Focus on experimental, observational,
            correlation, case study methods.
          - write/type minimum 2 pages. (upto 4 pages)
          - concern books on library (on sunday's pshycology period),
            internet, handsout etc.

SAMPLE: (below's asgnmt. is done and submitted by Amish, do not copy it !)

Introduction


Scientific discipline that studies mental processes and behaviour in humans and other animals.

Psychology is the science of individual or group behaviour. The word psychology literally means “study of the mind”; the issue of the relationship of mind and body is pervasive in psychology, owing to its derivation from the fields of philosophy and physiology. Psychology is intimately related to the biological and social sciences.

The broad reach of psychology sometimes gives it the appearance of disunity and promotes the lack of a universally accepted theoretical structure. Some of the divisions within psychology are applied fields, while others are more experimental in nature. The various applied fields include clinical; counseling; industrial, engineering, or personnel; consumer; and environmental. The most important of these specialties, clinical psychology, is concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. Industrial psychology is used in employee selection and related contexts in business and industry. The broad field known as experimental psychology includes specializations in child, educational, social, developmental, physiological, and comparative psychology. Of these, child psychology applies psychological theory and research methods to children; educational psychology is concerned with learning processes and problems associated with the teaching of students; social psychology is concerned with group dynamics and other aspects of human behaviour in its social and cultural setting; and comparative psychology deals with behaviour as it differs from one species of animal to another. The issues studied by psychologists cover a wide spectrum, comprising learning, cognition, intelligence, motivation, emotion, perception, personality, mental disorders, and the study of the extent to which individual differences are inherited or are shaped environmentally, known as behaviour genetics.

Methods of studying psychological phenomena and processes

Experimental work using humans as subjects involves legal and ethical limitations. Therefore, a significant amount of research is done with animals, with the hope of transferring the knowledge gained concerning psychophysiological or behavioral functioning to humans.

The methods used in human research include observation (sometimes in nonlaboratory settings), interviews, psychological testing (also called psychometrics), laboratory experimentation, and statistical analysis. Psychometrics has in fact become a field in its own right, with psychometrists devising new tools for data collection, analysis, and new designs for experimental research.

Experimental psychology

The experimental method in psychology attempts to account for the activities of animals (including humans) and the functional organization of mental processes by manipulating variables that may give rise to behaviour; it is primarily concerned with discovering laws that describe manipulable relationships. The term generally connotes all areas of psychology that use the experimental method.

These areas include the study of sensation and perception, learning and memory, motivation, and biological psychology. There are experimental branches in many other areas, however, including child psychology, clinical psychology, educational psychology, and social psychology.

Experimental psychological research is conducted in a laboratory under controlled conditions. This method of research relies on the application of the scientific method to understand behavior. Experimenters use several types of measurements, including rate of response, reaction time, and various psychometric measurements. Experiments are designed to test specific hypotheses (deductive approach) or evaluate functional relationships (inductive approach). A true experiment with random allocation of subjects to conditions allows researchers to infer causal relationships between different aspects of behavior and the environment. In an experiment, one or more variables of interest are controlled by the experimenter (independent variable) and another variable is measured in response to different conditions (dependent variable). Experiments are one of the primary research methods in many areas of psychology, particularly cognitive/psychonomics, mathematical psychology, psychophysiology and biological psychology/cognitive neuroscience.

Experiments on humans have been put under some controls, namely informed and voluntary consent. After World War II, the Nuremberg Code was established, because of Nazi abuses of experimental subjects. Later, most countries (and scientific journals) adopted the Declaration of Helsinki. In the US, the National Institutes of Health established the Institutional Review Board in 1966, and in 1974 adopted the National Research Act (HR 7724). All of these measures encouraged researchers to obtain informed consent from human participants in experimental studies. A number of influential studies led to the establishment of this rule; such studies included the MIT and Fernald School radioisotope studies, the Thalidomide tragedy, the Willowbrook hepatitis study, and Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience to authority.

Research methods

Laboratory experiments, often using volunteer students as subjects, omit many features of daily social life. Such experiments also have been criticized as being subject to bias, since the experimenters themselves may influence the results. Research workers who are concerned more with realistic settings than with rigour tend to leave the laboratory to perform field studies, as do those who come from sociological traditions. Field research, however, also can be experimental, and the effectiveness of each approach may be enhanced by the use of the methods of the other.

Many colleges and universities have a social-psychology laboratory equipped with observation rooms permitting one-way vision of subjects. Sound and video recorders and other devices record ongoing social interaction; computing equipment and other paraphernalia may be employed for specific studies.

Social behaviour is understood to be the product of innate biological factors resulting from evolution and of cultural factors that have emerged in the course of history. Early writers (e.g., William McDougall, a psychologist) emphasized instinctive roots of social behaviour. Later research and writing that tended to stress learning theory emphasized the influence of environmental factors in social behaviour. In the 1960s and '70s field studies of nonhuman primates (such as baboons) drew attention to a number of similarities to human social behaviour, while research in cultural anthropology has shown that many features of human social behaviour are the same regardless of the culture studied. It is coming to be a widely accepted view that human social behaviour seems to have a biological basis and to reflect the operation of evolution as in the case of patterns of emotional expression and other nonverbal communication, the structure of language, and aspects of group behaviour.

Much research has been done on socialization (the process of learning from a culture), and learning has been found to interact with innate factors. An innate capacity for language, for example, makes it possible to learn a local language. Culture consists of patterns of behaviour and ways of organizing experience; it develops over the course of history as leaders and innovators introduce new elements, only some of which are retained. Many aspects of social behaviour can be partly accounted for in terms of their history.

Qualitative and descriptive research
Research designed to answer questions about the current state of affairs such as the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of individuals is known as descriptive research. Qualitative research is descriptive research that is focused on observing and describing events as they occur, with the goal of capturing all of the richness of everyday behavior and with the hope of discovering and understanding phenomena that might have been missed if only more cursory examinations have been made.

Qualitative psychological research methods include interviews, first-hand observation, and participant observation. Qualitative researchers sometimes aim to enrich interpretations or critiques of symbols, subjective experiences, or social structures. Similar hermeneutic and critical aims have also been served by "quantitative methods", as in Erich Fromm's study of Nazi voting or Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience to authority.

Quantitative psychological research
This lends itself to the statistical testing of hypotheses. Quantitatively oriented research designs include the experiment, quasi-experiment, cross-sectional study, case-control study, and longitudinal study. The measurement and operationalization of important constructs is an essential part of these research designs. Statistical methods include the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient, the analysis of variance, multiple linear regression, logistic regression, structural equation modeling, and hierarchical linear modeling.

Statistical surveys are used in psychology for measuring attitudes and traits, monitoring changes in mood, checking the validity of experimental manipulations, and for a wide variety of other psychological topics. Most commonly, psychologists use paper-and-pencil surveys. However, surveys are also conducted over the phone or through e-mail. Increasingly, web-based surveys are being used in research. Similar methodology is also used in applied setting, such as clinical assessment and personnel assessment.

Computational modeling
Computational modeling is a tool often used in mathematical psychology and cognitive psychology to simulate a particular behavior using a computer. This method has several advantages. Since modern computers process extremely quickly, many simulations can be run in a short time, allowing for a great deal of statistical power. Modeling also allows psychologists to visualize hypotheses about the functional organization of mental events that couldn't be directly observed in a human.

Several different types of modeling are used to study behavior. Connectionism uses neural networks to simulate the brain. Another method is symbolic modeling, which represents many different mental objects using variables and rules. Other types of modeling include dynamic systems and stochastic modeling.