Research instruments critically considered (PSMIN02)
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Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RuG)
Aantekeningen van de 7 hoorcolleges van Research instruments critically considered - notes from the 7 lectures of the course of the minor psychology in society.
Research instruments critically considered (PSMIN02)
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Research instruments critically considered
Lecture 1
Book chapter 1 - 10
Practice exam questions: https://bit.ly/2NxBasg
Psychology as a science:
Often defined as: “The scientific study of human behaviour”
Quite an elusive subject matter
Early metaphysical systems of how physical law behaves: animism, mythology, religion,
astrology. Now philosophy (Physiology and physical sciences = the experimental method): “The
study of knowledge, behaviour, and the nature of reality by making use of logic, intuition, and
empirical observations”.
The nature of scientific reason
Four fundamental assumptions that scientific reason is based on, the four canons of science:
● Notion of determinism (there is order in the world – meaningfully related and systematic
causes, presence leads to this behavior and absence leads not – effect by cause
present in time and space) but things also happen because of chance/randomness, not
always a meaning as a pattern with causal relationship
● Empiricism: best way to understand the world is knowledge through observation.
Empirical evidence = central to all science.
● Parsimony: simplicity is key, determine which explanation is better at explaining when
they have an equally good outcome, you should choose the one with the least
parameters.
● Testability: all theories need to be testable in order to be scientific, should be
confirmable and disconfirmable. Some seem to make predictions, but you can't test
them. You should be able to find evidence against this theory. Scientific theories have to
be parsimonious and testable.
And what then is science?
Psychology is a science because of its use of the scientific method
Riddles (of backpack with parachute and hiccups) and scientific reason:
● Lateral thinking
● Prior assumptions can be dangerous
● Alternative and null hypotheses paralleled in the Yes/No questions
● Data that donʼt fit expectations can be key t fit expectations can be key
● The value of Persistence
● An expectation for complex answers
● Science can be frustrating!
Ways of knowing:
● Authority: should be on the bottom of the list of acquiring information, ask somebody
, ● Intuition: can fail us, not a big pillar in science - what you use with the door example
● Logic: one of the better ways of finding evidence in human behavior
● Empirical observations: is what we should be relying on, reached climax with positivism:
theories of human behaviour must be based on proven observations
How to be a good consumer of psychological research
● Is research based on evidence or on ejection?
● What was the sample (represented among the population you are interested in and want
to make conclusions about, randomly selected on selected on criteria)?
● Who paid for all this and where was it conducted (design based on preconceptions)?
Who is reporting the research (able to evaluate the sources)?
● Does it make sensational claims (often extraordinary claims are based on little
evidence)?
● Is there evidence or a claim of correlation or causation (not experimental)?
● Look for the original source
Lecture 2
Ethics in Psychological research
Ethical challenges in making decisions in collecting data from individuals/participants
(report, analyze etc.):
● Need to distract = give false information (- naive participants, not aware of the
purpose/goal - only then behave in natural ways) or deceive = reason of study not told,
is it reasonable (how generalize to real settings)
● Sensitive topics of interest: finding out how individuals behave in sensitive environment
● Working with special groups: careful in data collection with human rights - participants
can be unable to participate properly = prison, program - free will or not and bound by
relationship think about frequency, time that they devote to this?
● Working with animals: have no ability to decide whether to participate, when appropriate
to cause pain or death for scientific research.
Ethical guidelines through time:
At first no guidelines for human rights, we should participate because scientists perform in our
benefit - transgression started happening:
● 1930s Violation of ethics and human rights in ‘Tuskegee Syphilis Study’ - conducted by
medical federal government body of USA to understand the disease of syphilis, were no
medicines (could be more toxic than disease) for this wanted to understand what
happens if it goes untreated and understand stages of disease and if different treatments
worked different for different stages. Used black land leasers (wealthy white landowner
allows these shared propers to work the land). 1970s penicillin works very well as a
treatment and is cheap enough. It would be ethical to give these participants the
medicine (they had no knowledge about this treatment), but they continued the study
withholding the penicillin - they stopped it 25 years later when the media found out.
● Psychological organisation (as a science) came with own guidelines to deal with human
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