Learning about research methods and statistics in psychology
From Research Methods in Psychology
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[edit] Taking Responsibility
You will find studying at degree level somewhat different from your previous educational experiences: you are not guided along a well-trodden trail (though you should get direction and encouragement). The main difference is that with a certain amount of help and encouragement, you have to work out your own path, and use your own initiative and self-discipline to replace constant supervision. Your lecturers will not shout at you if you do not do the work that is required. You will simply fail.
One approach is to write the following on your bathroom mirror, to make sure you see it each morning: The person you are looking at will determine how well you do in your psychology degree
Many students find this thought a little scary. Your education is now down to you. Whether you succeed or fail depends on what you do. Of course, this was always true in the past. Whether you succeeded or failed at school or college was also down to you, but at school or college, as long as you listened to what your teachers said, and did pretty much what they told you to do, you will have been OK. At university, this is not enough any more. You are now expected to take more responsibility for your learning – it is, after all, your degree: you have to take responsibility for your learning.
[edit] Managing your time
You will find when you go to university that you seem to have a lot of time to do what you want to do – you are not expected to spend a great deal of time in lectures or seminars. You can (and should and will) spend some of that time doing all sorts of things that your parents would disapprove of, and that you will not get the chance to do again. You will watch daytime television. You will stay up talking to your friends until it is light outside, and then you will sleep all day. You will eat only toast for days on end. You will do the kind of things that I am not going to write about in this kind of book.
But whilst you are doing all of those things, you need to think about the fact that you want to pass your degree – you probably want to do more than pass, you want to do well, and to get a good degree you need to spend some time studying. Actually, you need to spend quite a lot of time studying. This doesn’t need to get in the way of doing other things – there are 168 hours in a week, and you will spend about 56 of those hours sleeping. That leaves 113 hours to divide between your studies, and things that you want to do.
At university, deadlines tend to be very strict. At the start of your course, you will probably have been told about the deadlines for work that you need to submit - perhaps this information was given to you in a course handbook or a module handbook or even on a piece of paper. It is quite likely that no one will remind you that the work needs to be completed, until it is due to be handed in. In addition, unlike at school or college, it needs to be handed in – not the day after the deadline, not five minutes after the deadline but absolutely before the deadline. And if you try to work at the last minute: your computer will crash, the library will be shut, you will run out of ink - so prepare yourself to be ready well ahead of deadlines. When you were at school, your teachers were likely to be sympathetic if your computer crashed and wiped out the essay, just before you printed it. At university, you will be asked why you didn’t have a backup.
[edit] Following instructions
In lectures, in handouts and on the Internet, you will find instructions. These instructions will tell you what to do and often when to do it; they will also provide you with ideas for background reading, suggest where to find help if you are stuck, and give lots of other useful information. You need to read any instructions extremely carefully. If you skim them and do not absorb the details, you may end up having to say ‘Oh, but I didn’t know that I was supposed to do that, I didn’t read it…’ your lecturers are likely to have little sympathy with you.
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Crucial Tip: It may seem like you have an awful lot of information to absorb, but it is worth trying to absorb it. If you waste your tutors time, with questions that you have the answers to in your materials, your tutors will not be pleased with you. |RTFM , as they say. Students have failed their courses, and left university, because they did not read something that was given to them. When they have appealed, and said that they didn't know that they were supposed to. It's very sad. And it happens. |
[edit] Arranging to study
At university, you will need to spend more time studying on your own. You need to plan where, when and how. It is very important to choose somewhere suitable to study. You need to find a place where you have some space and where you can concentrate. Spending time studying in the communal areas is more fun than studying on your own, but if you cannot concentrate then that study time is not of much value. If you want to be with other people, you should be with other people properly, and not be glancing at a book. If you want to study, do that properly too. I don’t need to tell you that you should:
- Avoid having to study when you are too tired to concentrate properly;
- Select the studying times best suited to you;
- Set yourself time targets for studying - you need to take breaks to remain fresh.
[edit] Learning from Textbooks
As a university student, you will be expected to spend a lot more time learning from books. You will probably buy a textbook on research methods and statistics, and you may use other books in the library.
Studying from books on research methods and statistics is a little bit different from studying other areas of psychology. Most textbooks cover very similar material – most of the sections you find in one textbook on research methods and statistics you will find in all. You will not need to spend time searching for a book that has the material that you need to answer a particular question. However, it is still a good idea to look into different textbooks, even though they cover the same material: you might find that when you read some material in one book, it does not make sense to you, but by reading it in a second book, it becomes clearer. Often there are many different ways of explaining concepts in research methods, you might find that if it is explained to you one way, it does not make sense, but if it is explained a second way, the parts of the jigsaw might start to fit together, and it will make more sense to you.
[edit] Using Your Book
If you have bought a book, it is your book. You should use it as your book. If you want or need to re-sell it, you might be tempted to try to keep the book in as near-new a condition as possible: but then why did you buy it? Books are there to be read, and that means they must suffer some wear and tear. Whilst you might be able to recover some of the cost of your book by reselling it, you really want to get everything that you can from the book. Use a highlighter pen, and make notes in the margins. You may find that if you do this, it will help to identify these key areas, and helps you access them quickly and easily, and it helps you remember and apply the information. (If you ever see my bookshelves, it is very easy to see the books that I like, they look old and battered, and they are full of notes, marks, highlights, and have post-it notes sticking out of different pages. The books I don’t like are shiny and new.)
[edit] Using Books
If you want to do well in your degree, you will need to refer to journal articles and a range of books as well as your own textbook. In research methods and statistics you will need to use journals less, and books more. In this section, I will give you some advice about how to approach reading a journal article or section of a textbook.
Cognitive psychologists talk of people as being ‘cognitive misers’ or say that people are ‘cognitively lazy.’ They mean that our brains are actually very lazy, and do not want to do anything that they don’t really have to do. (This is a good thing - one of the reasons that we humans are so clever at doing things is that our brain puts as little effort as possible into whatever it does: the result of this economising is that we have plenty of brain power remaining to do other things.) When you sit down to read a book, your brain probably doesn’t want to read the book – it is rather mean with its energy, and doesn’t want to waste it on reading any boring old psychology textbook (especially a book on research methods). Everyone, on occasions, has had the experience of reading a book, and finding that they get to a stage where they have no idea what has happened on the last few pages. Your brain switched off because it is lazy. Your brain thought to itself, ‘I will just keep their eyes moving from side to side across the page, that will make them think that they are reading, and I will go and do something more interesting.’ Sometimes you get to the stage where you can read and reread the same line three or four times, and yet your brain still will not take in the information. You need to do something that makes your brain carry on working.
One way to force your brain to keep concentrating is called the SQ3R technique. SQ3R stands for
- Survey
- Question
- Read
- Review
We will have a look at these one at a time.
Survey means to have a quick skim through the text, see what it is going to tell you. At this stage you should be having an overall look at the text to see what it is going to be about. Look at the whole chapter or article to see what it is going to tell you.
To survey a chapter in a book
- Look at the subheadings.
- Look at the figures, diagrams.
- Read the chapter abstract (if there is one)
To survey a journal article
- Read the abstract.
- Look at the subheadings.
- Look at the tables or graphs in the results section.
- Read the first paragraph of the introduction, and the first paragraph of the discussion, and maybe the last paragraph of the discussion.
Question. Now, take one section at a time. In a journal article, the sections are likely to be the introduction, method, results and discussion. In a textbook the chapter will probably be divided into sections, each of which will have a subheading. Before you read each section, ask yourself what this section is going to tell you. Why did the author write this section? What will you learn from reading this section? How does this relate to what you already know?
Read. The third stage is to read. Now read the section that you have asked yourself about. Keep the questions in mind as you read. It is probably better not to make notes at this stage, making notes will distract you from reading and understanding what the text.
Recall. Now is the time to make notes. Try to recall the important parts of the section that you just read, and write them down. Avoid the temptation of just copying from the text - if you do that, your brain will switch off again. Instead, write down the details in note format. If you can’t remember something, go and read it again (but wait until you have finished reading before you start to make notes again.)
Review. Finally, you should review what you have learned. Test yourself to make sure that you have learned. If you aren’t sure, or can’t remember something, go back to your notes to check up on it.
[edit] Using Your Old Books
If you have studied A level or AS level psychology, or psychology on an Access course, you may well have studied research methods and statistics as part of that course. You might have noticed that many of the topics that we cover here will be the same topics that you covered on that course, and you might, therefore be tempted to reuse your notes, and particularly your textbook. This is not a very good idea. (And not just in research methods and statistics, it is not a very good idea for any of your psychology work.)
It is not a very bad idea. Don’t become downhearted if you were hoping to reuse these materials – just be aware of the drawback. And the drawback is that you will read the book, which has the same topics as your degree level texts (many of the sections may even have the same headings) but they will not cover the information in the same detail. You might then find that you use the material in these lower level books, and you do OK, but it is unlikely that you will ever do much better than OK – you need to ‘step up a gear’ and start using slightly more sophisticated thinking, and approaches. Imagine English students - they might have studied Shakespeare when they were doing GCSE, and again when doing A levels, and again when studying for a degree - but they would never consider using those books you had to help you pass your GCSE English at university.
I will give one example to demonstrate this is true in psychology. If you are carrying out an experiment that incorporates a repeated measures design, you will be aware (if you have studied A level) that you need to be aware of order effects, or which there are two types, practise effects and fatigue effects. You will also be aware that you need to counterbalance the order of the presentation, to cancel out the order effects. Or so you would have been told, when you did A level. However, we'll see later on that you need to think about order effects in a more sophisticated way.
