Doing Psychological Research - Essay Example

The correlation would reveal if people who lived together before marriage got divorced, if they did not live together before marriage and got divorced, or if no relationship exists between the two separate variables. Correlations do not suggest that one variable causes or influences the other variable, but that there are characteristics in common between the two individual variables. The experimental procedure of psychological investigation requires the researcher to influence one variable to dictate if variations in one variable causes changes to occur in another variable; experiments are undergone to “determine if there is a causal relationship between two or more variables (Hayes, 2007).

” Part of the experimental procedure is to tweak certain variables to aim at a certain result, or else to see if that certain result is even capable of being reached. One of the greatest benefits of experimentation in psychology is that experimenters are able to have a reasonable amount of control over the variables. An example of when a researcher would rely on experimentation would be if they wanted to determine how a certain group of people or individuals naturally act in any given environment.

The researcher could tweak the variables of the experiment by changing the environment that their subjects would find themselves in. The researchers would not be able to personally alter or even predict the behavior of their subjects, but by adding distractions or other variables to the environment, they can reach a specific conclusion of their investigation.