Research Ideas - Experimental Research Methods - Lecture Slides, Slides of Research Methodology

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Research Ideas, Critiquing Research,

and Hypotheses

The Research Idea

• You find a research idea when you find a gap in the current knowledge or an unanswered question that interests you.

Sources of Research Ideas

• Nonsystematic Sources
  • Inspiration: Ideas that pop into one’s mind from (seemingly) nowhere. Inspiration usually comes more easily after one has been working on a particular problem for some time.
  • Serendipity: Refers to those situations where we look for one phenomenon but find another.
  • Everyday Occurrences: The people and/or situations one encounters daily provide some of the best possibilities for research.

Sources of Research Ideas

• Systematic Sources
  • Past Research
    • A careful survey of the research done in a specific area will highlight any knowledge gaps or unanswered questions in that area. - A failure to replicate a previous finding raises additional questions that only continued research will be able to answer.

Developing a Research Question

• Regardless of the source of your research idea, your first goal should be to turn it into a question.
• Once you have a question, you need to survey the literature to find out what is already known about the question.

Surveying the Psychological Literature

• Selection of Index terms
  • Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms
    • Is a collection of index terms taken from abstracts of all published psychological research.

Surveying the Psychological Literature

• Obtaining the Relevant Publications
  • You need to assemble all of your original source materials in one place.
  • PDF Online
  • Photocopy
  • Interlibrary loan
    • If your library does not have the relevant journals or books, you can request them through interlibrary loan. There is sometimes a small fee for this service and the amount of time it takes to get your materials will vary.
  • Requests for reprints
    • You can write or e-mail the author of a journal article directly and ask for a copy of the article (reprint). Many colleges and universities have searchable faculty e-mail databases. This makes it very easy to e-mail the author and ask for a reprint.

Surveying the Psychological Literature

• Integrating the results of the Literature Search
  • This is the process of making sense of the materials you have assembled.
  • Taking good notes from articles read and summarizing information under APA headings on a single page is a helpful technique.

Guidelines for Critiquing Psychological Research Literature

• Does the literature review adequately describe the research area? Is this material consistent with the specific research question?
• As a research project evolves, the literature review and the actual experiment diverge somewhat over time.
• After you complete your project and work on the report, double- check to make certain that the actual project still shows a direct link with your research literature.
• Because most researchers carry out programmatic research, their new research ideas are likely to build directly on their (and others’) previous research.

Guidelines for Critiquing Psychological Research Literature

• Is the research question stated clearly? Do you have a clear idea concerning the research to be reported?
• The title and abstract of a research report should give you an indication of the research’s topic, although they may not contain the specific question per se.
• You will find the author’s review of relevant literature in the article’s introduction. As you read further into the introduction, the literature should apply more specifically to the particular research question. The research question will often be in the last paragraph of the introduction.

Guidelines for Critiquing Psychological Research Literature

• Are the key terms operationally defined?
• The reader should not have to guess what a researcher means when he or she refers to a specific independent, dependent, or extraneous variable.
• Remember that operational definitions mean that you should define your variables in terms of the operations you use to manipulate, measure, or control them. docsity.com

Guidelines for Critiquing Psychological Research Literature

• Are the IV’s and their levels appropriate?
• Be sure to pick a manipulation that is actually appropriate to the IV – don’t choose something merely because it is easy or convenient to use.
• Be sure to choose the levels of your IV appropriately. Choose levels of the IV to answer your experimental question, but do so economically (remember the principle of parsimony).

Guidelines for Critiquing Psychological Research Literature

• Are the controls sufficient and appropriate? Are there any uncontrolled variables that could affect the results of the experiment?
• Leaving variables uncontrolled can result in a confounded experiment which leaves the researcher unable to draw a conclusion.
• As you look for possible extraneous variables, you should concentrate on variables that have a legitimate or reasonable chance to actually make a difference.
• Look for extraneous variation, but don’t go overboard and find variation that most researchers would consider negligible.

Guidelines for Critiquing Psychological Research Literature

• Did the author(s) use an appropriate research design to test the specific hypotheses and answer the general research question?
• With poor planning, it is possible to gather data for which there is no appropriate research design and, thus, no appropriate statistical test.
• Make sure that research reports use designs that match the question(s) they sought to answer. - For example, if the researcher asked a question involving multiple IV’s, the experiment should involve a factorial design.