Research Designs and Methods

If I was to ask you how much sleep you had last night your response would be SUBJECTIVE as you are giving me
your opinion(contains a bias answer)
.
If I was to attach devices to your brain and measure the amount of sleep you had via this equipment the reponse would
be OBJECTIVE as it was not based on your opinion.

Research Designs
What do you do to get a psychological response? How do we design an
investigation? There are three!
Experimental
 The experimenter is able to manipulate a particular variable (the independent variable) on the
behavioural/psychological response (dependent variable) investigated under controlled or field
conditions:-
o Differences between treatment and control groups,
o Associations between the variables within a group of participants,
o Mixed between and within group designs.

Quantitative Observational
 The investigator collects quantitative data by observation of selected participants- existing groups
 Used when the predictor variable cannot be manipulated for ethical, cost or other reasons,
 Not as ‘rigorous’ as experimental, but may be the best that can be done under the circumstances,
 The investigator does not manipulate variable(s) of interest as they can’t eg. gender.
 Capitalises on pre-existing differences.
 Example:- amount of sleep a student has the night before OR difference between males and
females effort. Groups already exist!!

Qualitative
 A more open-ended approach used to investigate the thoughts of a select sample of people about a
topic of interest,
 Rich verbal data,
 Uses subjective and objective language that is descriptive rather than quantitative
 Often used when exploring a completely new topic,
 Examples are conducting a:-
o Focus groups= group of participants discussing questions OR Delphi technique=
professionals

Methods of Assessing Psychological Responses

How was the response turned into data? There are three ways!
Objective Quantitative Measures (numbers)
o Physiological measures (heart rate)
o Behavioural counts (Number of errors on a memory test)
o Scores on standardised Intelligence tests

Subjective Quantitative Measures (numbers)

 Survey questionnaires:-
o YES-NO questions, response to rating scales etc.
 Scores on standardised personality tests

Qualitative (words only)

 Content analysis of themes and explanatory concepts invoked in relevant texts such as:-
o Advertisements, natural conversation, verbal responses in focus groups or interviews,
newspaper stories, court reports, government policy documents .

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