Research Methods - Book Report/Review Example

Response The main aim of this film is to show the importance of critical thinking and research in psychology in orderto find out the truth and do not believe in misleading or biased assumptions which can seem to be right. People take too many things for granted. They operate a set of beliefs which create a certain filter to everything they see. Psychologists test all assumptions to find out the truth. This truth often challenges people because it does not correspond to their beliefs. Beauty standards, gender roles, expression of emotions are influenced by cultural and individual beliefs.

They can trick people because they are unproved and unexplained. People need to apply scientific method to think critically and find out the truth. The film depicts the application of the scientific method, which is a set of procedures for gathering and interpreting data, in psychology. If data is collected by accurate research methods and measurements, different researchers can have the same results. Psychologist can use tests, surveys and interviews to explore human personality. Scientists can also work in laboratories where they can create certain conditions to conduct specially designed experiment.

In laboratories they have hypotheses, which are expected outcomes of the experiment. In order to test the hypotheses, scientists divide all participants into two groups. One of the groups is experimental; members of this group receive the treatment. The members of the other group do not receive the treatment; they are called control group. The results are compared. Field research does not alter conditions for its members; it is based on observations. All these methods allow people to find out the truth instead of believing in something they do not know.

There are many areas where research is required to find out the truth. It is a common belief that young people do not want to get married. However, this belief is not supported by any evidence or relevant data. If people want to study intentions to get married of young people in the USA and prove this belief, they need to choose a sample of people. Moreover, this sample should be unbiased in order to make the results highly applicable to all young people in the country. When the sample is chosen, researchers need to collect data using appropriate research methods like surveys, interviews and observations.

Only data from a relevant sample can give some meaningful results in this case; otherwise, wrong sample can results in irrelevant research results. The film included such an example, when wrong sample indicated 98% of women dissatisfied with their marriage life while the actual study with randomly selected sample showed that 93% of women in the United States were totally satisfied with their marriage. Only having real results of the study one can say that young people in the USA do not want to get married.

This film also explains how relevant sources of information should look like. For instance, if people want to be sure that they get relevant information, they need to pay attention to the source where they find it. If the article describes has hypothesis, experiments, relevant data, findings and interpretation of the results which utilizes scientific method, this article can be a relevant source. It iv very important to remember because there are many article written in pseudo psychology; they imitate scientific style, but they do not support utilized data with any research or fail to use real scientific methods to discover the truth.

If people know scientific methods which are used in psychology they can differentiate fake information from the real one. In this way the film explains the relevance of real scientific psychological research and different methods researchers apply to make their finding relevant and unbiased. Work Cited“Research Methods in Psychology”. Anneberg/CPB. Film.