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| Chapter 3: Personality Psychology as Science: Research Methods |
- Psychology emphasizes the methods by which knowledge can be obtained, and in general is more concerned with better understanding human nature than with cataloging specific facts.
- The essence of science is that conclusions should be based on data. Data can vary widely in quality; in personality psychology the important dimensions of data quality are reliability, validity, and generalizability.
- Reliability refers to the stability or repeatability of measurements. Validity, on the other hand, refers to the degree to which a measurement actually measures what it is trying to measure. Generalizability is a broader concept that subsumes both reliability and validity, and it refers to the kinds of other measurements to which a given measurement is related.
- The plan one uses for gathering psychological data is the research design; the three main methods are case, experimental, and correlational.
- Case studies examine particular phenomena or individuals in detail and can be an important source of new ideas that might apply more generally. To test these ideas, correlational and experimental studies are necessary. Each of these methods has advantages and disadvantages, but the experimental method is the only one that can be used to determine the direction of causality.
- Representative design is a technique used to maximize the generalizability of research results.
- The statistical significance of a result represents the probability that it came about by sheer chance, but "significance" is not the same as the strength or importance of the result.
- The best way to evaluate research results is in terms of effect size, which describes numerically the degree to which one variable is related to another. One good measure of effect size is the correlation coefficient, which can be evaluated with the Binomial Effect Size Display.
- Ethical issues relevant to psychology include the way research results are used, truthfulness in science, and the use of deception in research with human participants.
- Knowledge of research methods is critical because nature does not give up her secrets easily. It is important to do everything possible to enhance the reliability and validity of data to have any hope of using them to understand how the world works.
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