Free Psychology Books: Research in Psychology by J. Goodwin

Research in Psychology by J. Goodwin

The most obvious reason for taking a course in research methods is to begin the process of learning how to do research in psychology. My ideal scenario would be for you to become fascinated by research, decide that you would like to do some, get your feet wet as an undergraduate (e.g., collaborate with a professor and perhaps present your research at a research conference), go to graduate school and complete a doctorate in psychology, begin a career as a productive researcher, get lots of publications and win lots of grants, achieve tenure, and eventually be named recipient of the APA’s annual award for ‘‘Distinguished Scientific Contributions’’! Of course, I’m also a realist and know that most psychology majors have interests other than doing research, most do not go on to earn doctorates, most who earn doctorates do not become productive researchers, and very few productive scholars win prestigious APA awards. If you won’t be a famous research psychologist some day, are there still reasons to take this course? Sure. For one thing, a course in research methods provides a solid foundation for other psychology courses in more specific topic areas (social, cognitive, developmental, etc.). This is an important reason why your psychology department requires you to take a methodology course. 

The difference between the methods course and these other courses is essentially the difference between process and content. The methods course teaches a process of acquiring knowledge about psychological phenomena that is then applied to all the specific content areas represented by other courses in the psychology curriculum. A social psychology experiment in conformity might be worlds apart in subject matter from a cognitive psychology study on eyewitness memory, but their common thread is method— the way in which researchers gain their knowledge about these phenomena. Fully understanding textbook descriptions of research in psychology is much easier if you know something about the methods used to arrive at the conclusions. To illustrate, take a minute and look at one of your other psychology textbooks. Chances are that virtually every paragraph makes some assertion about behavior that either includes a specific description of a research study or at least makes reference to one. On my shelf, for example, is a social psychology text by Myers (1990) that includes the following description of a study about the effects of violent pornography on male aggression (Donnerstein, 1980). Myers wrote that the experimenter ‘‘showed 120...men either a neutral, an erotic, or an aggressive-erotic (rape) film. 

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