1. Research Methods I Psychology 241 David Allbritton dallbrit@depaul.edu

2. Plan for today Introductions Syllabus Psychology and Science Types of Studies Homework 1

3. Psychology and Science Ways of Knowing Characteristics of Science 2 Goals of Science –Discovering regularities –Developing theories

4. Ways of Knowing Non-empirical –Authority –Logic Empirical – based on experience –Intuition –Common sense –Science Test of scientific knowledge

5. Characteristics of Science Empirical Objective – what is observed does not depend on who does the observing –Replication Self-correcting – no final answer Progressive Parsimonious – simpler is better Theoretical – seeks systematic explanations

6. Psychology and Science Ways of Knowing Characteristics of Science 2 Goals of Science –Discovering regularities –Developing theories

7. Theory Explains the lawful relationships that are observed Observations = data Regularities in repeated observations = laws Explanation for the observed laws = theory Is a set of statements that organizes a large body of facts into a single explanatory system Contains at least one unobserved concept or construct –Construct: abstract term referring to a general idea in a theory.

8. What makes a theory a good one? Falsifiability – testable Explanatory adequacy – explain as much data as possible Parsimony – a simple theory is preferable to a complicated one Productivity – suggests hypotheses to test with new data

9. The process of Research data -> theory -> hypothesis -> data... data –observations to be explained theory –explanation that organizes and predicts data hypothesis –specific testable prediction

10. Collecting Data: Types of Studies Non-experimental Methods (“correlational”) –Observational research –Archival research –Case studies –Survey research Experiments Quasi-Experiments