Psychology

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LESSON 2:  RESEARCH METHODS

Research Methods:  Description and Data

Descriptive... Case Studies Naturalistic... Survey Methods...

Descriptive Research and Data Collection The first step in science is simply to take advantage of the most human thing about each of us - our ability to wonder!  Wondering how the world (both physical and mental) works comes naturally to each of us and leads to all sorts of intriguing questions that we might want to investigate further.  How does love work?  Does more money lead to more happiness?  Why do we forget things?  How do we learn a new language?   The first thing one must do when investigating a phenomenon is learn about what is already known about the topic.  It is quite likely that someone else has already wondered about and explored the same idea you have.  Even if this is true, you still could expand on their work or even challenge their answers with different findings of your own!

Once you decide to investigate a phenomenon further, the next step is often what is called is descriptive research. What is the behavioral phenomenon of interest? What does this behavior look like in its natural or typical form? What are its boundaries or its subtypes? In this section you will begin to see the diversity of psychological methods as you learn about different kinds of descriptive research.  In particular, we'll focus on the case study, naturalistic observation, and the survey approach.  Each of these methods will produce data that can then be analyzed for patterns.  These patterns could then form the basis of even deeper inquiry.

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Case Studies One way to begin a descriptive analysis of a behavioral phenomenon (what falling in love looks like, for example) is the case study approach.  In this approach, a single individual (or a small group of individuals) are studied intensively (through observation, structured interviews and administration of tests and measures) in order to gain a near-complete understanding of the phenomenon of interest.  This is a very comprehensive approach with one major drawback - your limited sample size.  That is, you only will really have insight about that particular individual who you studied and you'll have a hard time drawing conclusions about all humans in general.  That said, the case study is a great starting point for getting ideas for further study.

Read from this article to find out more about case studies in general, and click on the image link and video below to learn about one of the saddest and most fascinating case studies in child psychology, Genie Wiley.

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GenieGenie

Naturalistic Observation Another approach when starting your exploration of a phenomenon is naturalistic observation.  Here, you seek to witness the behavior of interest in its natural/typical/authentic environment.  This will give you a GREAT sense of all the different factors that are at play in producing the behavior of interest.  Think about how you'd study people falling in love - where would you go to observe this in its natural form?  Some things to keep in mind - you've likely already encountered this before in your life - when someone is observing, the mere fact of your presence could alter the behavior, which is exactly what you do not want to happen!  So you have to find ways to be as unobtrusive as possible.  Probably holding a clipboard and wearing a white lab coat isn't going to help!  The final drawback of this approach is that you can't ask questions or measure anything (if you did, then that's not a natural feature of the environment and you will have altered the behavior) - so all you can do is observe and hypothesize about what is going on.  Still, this is another approach to gain rich detail about the behavior of interest.

Click on the image link below to read more about naturalistic observation, and watch the following video to learn how Dr. Jane Goodall practiced naturalistic observation in her study of chimpanzees. 

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First Look at Jane | National GeographicFirst Look at Jane | National Geographic

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Finally, to get around some of these limitations, we have the survey approach.  This approach typically involves administering a series of well-defined questions and sets of questions (called measures) to large groups of people under similar conditions.  Of course, this adds an element of artificiality to any situation ("Excuse me, could you stop staring into each other's ideas and answer a few questions for me?") but it adds the power of collecting a LOT of information about a LOT of people very quickly (and often inexpensively).  We'll explore the survey approach in more detail below.

For more information about survey methods, visit the web site of the Gallup organization, a prominent polling company. To read specifically about the research methods used by Gallup, click on the following image link to learn about how polls are conducted.

Survey Methods and the Gallup Poll