Research Methods and Statistics

CHAPTER PREVIEW

You probably know a great deal about people and some interesting and important facts about psychology, but you probably know relatively little about psychological research. This book will show you how research helps you learn more about people from a psychological point of view. You can be certain of one thing: There are no simple explanations.

When you read through this chapter, you will learn that there are different ways of knowing about behavior. As a beginning psychologist, you will get a glimpse about why some types of knowledge are more useful than others. In addition, you will see that people can be resistant to changing what they believe. For instance, a lot of people believe in ESP or other paranormal phenomena, even though the scientific evidence for it just isn't there. One reason for such beliefs is that most people don't approach life the same way that scientists do, so the evidence they accept is sometimes pretty shaky.

Finally, this chapter will introduce you to some of the cautions you should be aware of when you read about psychological research in the popular media. Journalists are not scientists and scientists are not journalists, so there is a lot of potential for miscommunication between the two.

Why Are Research Methods Important Tools for Life?

The great thing about psychology is that people are both interesting and complicated, and we get to learn more about them. As you learn more, you will see that there can be a big difference between what we think we know about behavior and what is actually true. That is why you need this course.

Your course on research begins the process of learning about how psychological knowledge emerges. This knowledge can be useful when applied to people's lives. For instance, even four years after a domestic terrorist destroyed a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, about half the survivors were still suffering from some kind of psychiatric illness (North et al., 1999). This pattern mirrors the effects of the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, the devastation and hurricane damage in Louisiana in 2005, and the experiences of many soldiers in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, indicating the critical need to provide effective treatments (Humphreys, 2009).