Psych Research @ UPDDP

Your task as a researcher is to unpack the phenomenon of interest—to collect and process information, as to arrive at viable answers to the questions posited at the start of the whole research journey.

LM Portus, EB Barrios, MCG Conaco, & SP GoDoing Social Science Research: A Guidebook (2018)

[image XKCD: Research Risks, via xkcd.com]

What this class is about.

Foundations of research, methodologies, and research issues in psychology. 3 units. (UPD General Catalogue)

What we aim to do.

Psychology helps us develop a scientific and critical perspective in understanding human affect, behavior, and cognition—through the theories and methods of psychological science.

But how do psychologists make the conclusions that they do about what makes us human?

In this course, we aim to become better consumers of social science research—being able to distinguish between good and bad studies, and appropriately use their findings to improve our personal and social lives.

At the same time, we want to develop skills necessary to become rigorous and ethical producers of psychological research, using the many tools and perspectives at our disposal to unravel the mysteries of human experience. Or at least why bubbles sounds funny when you say it menacingly.

So, by the end of this course, you’ll be able to:

Talk about what makes research good in terms of theory, method, and ethical considerations—and why we should do research in the first place.
Figure out what research designs, paradigms, and methods are typically used in psychological research—and justify why these research decisions are good as they are.
Evaluate the researches you encounter based on quality and relevance—considering issues of reliability and validity, sampling, and ethics.
Make your own literature review for a socially relevant or conceptually interesting psychological phenomenon—as part of the preparation for doing research in higher psychology courses.

To be clear, we won’t do actual data collection in this subject. I won’t ask you to correlate hours of sleep with grades, ask people why they wake up early to go to class everyday, or disentangle how our personal world interacts with larger social realities. (You can do these though in your spare time.)

What you’d get away with is the basic knowledge of how to read through large amounts of research and put them together to make sense of them all at the same time. A good literature review is then something that allows future researchers to know where to go with their own studies.

PSYCH RESEARCH: The Big Ideas

We do research in order to understand how we feel, think, and do things⁠—and why we feel, think, and do things the way we do.

Research is something we do all the time, just that scientific research is a bit more systematic and critical.
Without scientific research, we’d end up relying on sources of information that do more harm than good in helping us understand ourselves.

We use many tools and methods (often at the same time) to make sense of the human condition.

Our beliefs and priorities in research shape how we see the world, what problems we try to answer, and how we go about our research.
The method that we choose (based on our worldview) shapes the things we do, what data we’d consider to be good evidence, and what conclusions we’re likely to make.

We make sure that our research captures human experiences as best as we can, so we can use our findings to make our lives and society better.

Good research uses tools that capture reality as our participants see it and as close to how they make sense of their experiences.
When we try to generalize, we admit the limits to where our findings can apply by recognizing how our participants’ background shapes what we’ll find.
We do good research that respects scientific integrity and human welfare, so we can contribute transparent and rigorous findings to the psychological discipline while protecting the interests of our participants.

Psych 105: Research, Methods, Statistics, and Other Issues (YouTube Playlist)

Admit it: Reading can be fun, but nothing beats having someone else explain things for you when you’re too confused (or too tired) to look through complex stuff. So, here’s a playlist of videos that we’ll refer to. And hopefully they’ll help you understand that reading. (Or at least finish it.)

For more online resources to add to what you’ll learn in our offline readings, refer to the links in our Topic Outline.

Psych 105 19201 / Class Info

Report abuse