In order to prevent that harm, proposed studies are usually approved by an institutional review board to ensure that the risks to the research subjects are justified by the anticipated benefits.
Methods can be categorized by the kind of data they produce: qualitative or quantitative—and both these are used for pure or applied research.
The method of experimentation involves an experimenter changing some influence—the independent variable(IV)— on the research subjects, and studying the effects it produces on an expected aspect—the dependent variable (DV)— of the subjects behaviour or experience.
The paper showed that, in some cases, the lack of violence on television made the boys more aggressive.
[8] This means that extraneous variables are important to consider when designing experiments, and many methods have emerged to scientifically control them.
In a true experiment, participants are randomly chosen to remove the chance of experimenter's bias.
[11] Participant observations are methods that involve a researcher joining the particular social group they are studying.
For example, the social psychologist, Leon Festinger and his associates, joined a group called The Seekers in order to observe them.
[12] When the foretasted event did not happen, Festinger and his associates observed how the attitudes of the group members changed.
[19] An example of a descriptive device used in psychological research is the diary, which is used to record observations.
A special case of a diary in this context, that has particular importance in development psychology, is known as the baby biography,[21] and was used by psychologists such as Jean Piaget.
For example, forensic psychologists record custodial interrogations to aid law enforcement.
[25] Sigmund Freud made extensive use of case studies to formulate his theory of psychoanalysis.
Famous case studies include: Anna O. and Rat Man of Freud's Genie, who is one of the most severe cases of social isolation ever recorded,[26] and Washoe, a chimpanzee who was the first non-human that had learned to communicate using American Sign Language.
[27] Interviews and questionnaires intrude as a foreign element into the social setting they would describe, they create as well as measure attitudes, they elicit atypical role and response, they are limited to those who are accessible and who will cooperate, and the responses obtained are produced in part by dimensions of individual differences irrelevant to the topic at hand.
[28]Bradburn et al. (1979) found a tendency for survey respondents to over-report socially desirable behaviors when interviewed using less anonymous methods.
One part of the field is concerned with the objective measurement of skills and knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and educational achievement.
[1] For example, researchers studying developmental psychology might select groups of people who are remarkably similar in most areas, but differ only in age.
This observational research technique involves studying the same group of individuals over an extended period of time.
The brain and computer are viewed as general-purpose symbol-manipulation systems, capable of supporting software processes, but no analogy is drawn at a hardware level.
[32] The term unobtrusive measures was first coined by Eugene Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, and Sechrest in a 1966 book, Unobtrusive methods: Nonreactive research in the social science,[28] in which they described methods that do not involve direct induction of data from research subjects.
For example, a study was published about child sexual abuse and how it might relate to psychopathology in college students.