Why do I need to know this stuff?
From Research Methods in Psychology
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[edit] Introduction
You came to university to learn about psychology. You thought you would learn about people and their behaviour. Perhaps you thought that you would learn a little about yourself, or your friends and family. You might want to work in an area of applied psychology, such as clinical psychology, counselling psychology, or occupational psychology. You might not want to work in psychology itself, but see psychology as being a useful subject to have studied in your planned career in market research, advertising, teaching or any one of a large number of jobs.
But when you get to university to study psychology, you find that you need to study research methods and statistics. So why, you might ask.
There are several good answers to that question.
[edit] Because you have to
In the UK, the | British Psychological Society (BPS) recognises psychology degrees. Many jobs and postgraduate training courses specify that you should have studied a degree that is recognised by the British Psychological Society (BPS). The BPS specify certain criteria that a psychology graduate should satisfy – and one of these criteria is a knowledge of research methods and statistics.
Of course the BPS don’t insist upon you studying research methods and statistics just to be unpleasant or cruel – they have very good reasons for insisting - and we will look at these reasons now.
[edit] Understanding and Evaluating Research
In your psychology degree, you will spend a great deal of time reading about research. In order to read about research with understanding, you need to understand the research process – and so you need to study research methods. You must be able to differentiate good research from bad research (or more likely, good research from OK research or speculation.)
If you go on to work in any applied field in psychology, you need to be able to evaluate research findings. If you are working as a counselling psychologist you will read about research findings, and you need to decide whether those findings are built on firm methodological foundations. In addition, you might need to understand why your own hunches and feelings about what works and what does not work are not necessarily correct.
If you do not go on to work in an area of psychology, you will still find that you will use the skills that you have gained through studying research methods. Almost any job that you end up doing will require you to evaluate findings and data that are presented to you. Having studied research methods, you will be able to make better decisions based on those data.
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Crucial Tip: The word ‘data’ is a plural. The singular of the word ‘data’ is ‘datum’. You should always write ‘the data are …’ not ‘the data is ….’. (See how often you can catch your tutors making this mistake.) |
[edit] Carrying Out Research
After your psychology degree, you might go on into a career of research and if this is your intention, then it is obvious why you should study research methods. All kinds of organisations that you might work for in the future carry out research. A commercial enterprise wants research done to find out levels of customer satisfaction. Police authorities do a large amount of research – they look into and evaluate different policing methods, so that they can make decisions about how they should operate and these decisions will then be based on evidence, not just hunches. Hospitals carry out research looking at patient satisfaction, and examining what changes should be made that might improve patient satisfaction. Banks and loan companies carry out research to examine what kind of people pay back their loans, and what kind of people do not, so that they can place their money with the least risk of losing it on a bad debt.
[edit] Enjoyable
It is now that you will think that I am completely mad, but bear with me for a moment, and I will try to explain. If you know about research methods, you can carry out research, and carrying out research can be, for want of a better word, fun. If you study psychology, you may well come across questions that no one has tried to answer. You might think of a novel way of answering that question. You design a study that, you think, will answer that question, and then you carry out your research. You analyse your results and find that you have the answer to the question that your research was designed to find out. Finally, you write the report. You will have added to the knowledge of psychology.
[edit] So Why Is It So Hard?
Learning about research methods and statistics is hard. And it can be boring – although usually it is boring, because it is hard.
It is hard, because there are a large number of ingredients to a research study, which need to be put together properly. In this way, carrying out psychological research is a little like cooking. To cook a recipe you have to follow the correct steps, in the correct order. If you get one step wrong, they recipe will not work. There are therefore two ways of learning about research methods and statistics.
The first way to learn about research methods and statistics is the ‘cookbook approach.’ If we were using the cookbook approach to teaching you research methods and statistics we would describe the recipe for each procedure (or food) that you wanted to make, and you would follow it, to the letter. There are two problems with the cookbook approach. The first problem is that if something does not go according to plan, you do not know what to do. I had a friend who regularly made scones, according to a recipe. The recipe book said to cook the scones for 15 minutes, but the scones were always undercooked, and soggy in the middle. Because my friend always followed the recipe, to the letter, they could not adapt the recipe and cook them properly. The second problem is that you need to learn an awful lot of different recipes. You need to learn the recipe for cheese and onion pie, and jam tarts, and sausage rolls and apple turnovers all separately. But the basic recipe for each of these is the same – make some pastry, put something in it. Just change the shape and the filling.
Therefore, a better approach to the cookbook approach is to teach you about the principles of designing research. However, here we strike another problem – there are a lot of steps to take to design a research study, and before you can go ahead you need to understand each of these steps, and you have to get every step right. The same is true for cooking, but we don’t realise it. Imagine an alien from another planet trying to understand something as simple as cooking potatoes. ‘So, I peel them, and then put them in the oven. Oh, with oil. But if I don’t peel them I don’t need oil. Or I peel them and put them in a saucepan. With water. Or I chop them and put them in a saucepan, with oil. But I can chop them before I put them in the water.’ Imagine the disaster if the alien forgot the water in the saucepan.
