Chapter 2: Research Methods in Psychology

Psychologists use the scientific method to examine human behavior and mental processes. Some of the methods you learned about include descriptive, experimental, and correlational research designs.

Watch It

Watch the CrashCourse video to review the material you learned, then read through the following examples and see if you can come up with your own design for each type of study.

You can view the transcript for “Psychological Research: Crash Course Psychology #2” here (opens in new window).

Case Study: a detailed analysis of a particular person, group, business, event, etc. This approach is commonly used to to learn more about rare examples with the goal of describing that particular thing.

  • Ted Bundy was one of America’s most notorious serial killers who murdered at least 30 women and was executed in 1989. Dr. Al Carlisle evaluated Bundy when he was first arrested and conducted a psychological analysis of Bundy’s development of his sexual fantasies merging into reality (Ramsland, 2012). Carlisle believes that there was a gradual evolution of three processes that guided his actions: fantasy, dissociation, and compartmentalization (Ramsland, 2012). Read Imagining Ted Bundy (http://goo.gl/rGqcUv) for more information on this case study.

Naturalistic Observation: a researcher unobtrusively collects information without the participant’s awareness.

  • Drain and Engelhardt (2013) observed six nonverbal children with autism’s evoked and spontaneous communicative acts. Each of the children attended a school for children with autism and were in different classes. They were observed for 30 minutes of each school day. By observing these children without them knowing, they were able to see true communicative acts without any external influences.

Survey: participants are asked to provide information or responses to questions on a survey or structure assessment.

  • Educational psychologists can ask students to report their grade point average and what, if anything, they eat for breakfast on an average day. A healthy breakfast has been associated with better academic performance (Digangi’s 1999).

Correlational Design: two different variables are measured to determine whether there is a relationship between them.

  • Thornhill et al. (2003) had people rate how physically attractive they found other people to be. They then had them separately smell t-shirts those people had worn (without knowing which clothes belonged to whom) and rate how good or bad their body oder was. They found that the more attractive someone was the more pleasant their body order was rated to be.
Experiment: researchers create a controlled environment in which they can carefully manipulate at least one variable to test its effect on another. The key here is that the researchers can cause a change in one variable.
  • Clinical psychologists can test a new pharmaceutical treatment for depression by giving some patients the new pill and others an already-tested one to see which is the more effective treatment.
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  • Psychological Research – Crash Course Psychology #2. Authored by: Hank Green. Provided by: Crash Course. Located at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFV71QPvX2I. License: Other. License Terms: Standard YouTube License

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