Psychological Research Methods - Essay Example

The thrust of psychological research is the failure of psychological lists to contain new phenomena with their existing knowledge (Maniacs, 1983). Conducting research is a proper and orderly exercise for the subsequent reasons. First, conceptual skills are deployed to propose a theory for the to-be-explained phenomenon. Secondly, deductive logic is used to derive the research hypotheses from theory. Third, researchers collect data thoroughly according to the arrangement. The fourth, inductive rule that underlies the experimental plan makes it probable to rule out possible interpretations of the data. Fifth, correct statistical events are used to tabulate and examine the information. Lastly, deductive logic is used to describe hypothetical conclusions. In short, the accomplishment of the research procedure depends on a union of theoretical, meta-theoretical, procedural, and statistical skills (Maniacs, 1983).

Research methods available to psychologists fall into three categories: non-experimental, experimental, and quasi-experimental.

Non-experimental Methods

This research is without an applicable evaluation baseline (Maniacs, 1983). It majorly focuses on interviews, observation, measurement, or formalistic replication methods. For instance, the interview is used to gather information by talking to interviewees. No prearranged subject is used in the unstructured interview with an open-ended question, and interviewees determine the depth and manner of the answers (Maniacs, 1983). In contrast, the interviewers ask the participants a set of questions in a specific order in the structured interview. In addition, interviewees are given specific instructions as to how to answer the questions like yes-no, and agree-disagree (Maniacs, 1983). When the structured interview is administered in printed form, psychologists are administering the questionnaire.

Using a questionnaire, psychologists may use a mixture of the fixed question, yes-no, and rating-scale to collect information. Despite which process is used, the psychologist may ask direct or indirect questions.

Experimental

Experimentation requires an understanding of the relationship between a variable and its levels. Experimenters have to consider four variables: independent, control, dependent, and extraneous variables (Meehl, 1967). For instance, color is a variable in the sense that it is identified as black, white, or green. The electromagnetic wavelengths used to represent the variable color are its values. Hence red, yellow, blue, and yellow are three values of the color. In conducting experiments, psychologists manipulate the independent variable and measure the dependent variable while holding the control variable constant (Meehl, 1967).

The Quasi-Experiment

This method uses confounding variables. Suppose that the quasi-experiment is about the effect of color on employees’ moods in a department store (Show, 1992). Psychologists possibly will not have the comfort of being able to give subjects arbitrarily to the three color conditions; color is confounded with the type of clientele. For the most part important to methodology is the fact that the three color condition differs in more than color. Consequently, any difference in the employees’ moods among the three conditions cannot be ascribed clearly to the variation in color. The existence of confounding variables distinguishes between experiment and quasi-experiment (Chow, 1992).