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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Free Psychology Books: A Handbook for Social Science Field Research -Design and Methods by Perecman & Curran

A Handbook for Social Science Field Research -Design and Methods by Perecman & Curran

If you are a social scientist and you plan to write about the past—for example, about the ending of the Cold War or the vicissitudes of the Venezuelan oil industry or the twisting course of democracy promotion in the Philippines or in Haiti—then you will have to adopt the method of historians. 2 That is, you will have to go to the archives. Virtually all social scientists preparing to write a dissertation in international or comparative or area studies today take it for granted that they will be conducting research abroad, in the field, for 1 or 3 or 6 or 12 months, perhaps in Cairo or Jakarta, Maracaibo or Baku, Paris or Chiapas. Much of their training before and after taking general exams or writing qualifying papers is geared (we hope) toward developing the skills and techniques necessary for this fieldwork: studying Tagalog or Farsi or Spanish, designing appropriate survey instruments, making contacts with research institutions and scholars, taking classes in and practicing ethno-graphic methods, figuring out where to find data sets that they need or how to build their own, and the like. Virtually no one successfully obtains fund-ing and begins a project away from home without first demonstrating some degree of sophistication and rigor about place and about method. Writing seriously about a place in a time other than one’s own.....................

 
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Free Psychology Books: Case Study Research Methods by Bill Gillham

Case Study Research Methods by Bill Gillham

What is a case study? Perhaps we should first ask: what is a case? The word 'case' (like 'intelligence' and 'neurosis') is one we all use, and feel we understand, but is rather challenging to define. Here is an attempt:

• a unit of human activity embedded in the real world; 

• which can only be studied or understood in context; 

• which exists in the here and now; . 

• that merges in with its context so that precise boundaries are difficult to draw. 

A case can be an individual: it can be a group - such as a family, or a class, or an office, or a hospital ward; it can be an institution - such as a school or a children's home, or a factory; it can be a large-scale community - a town, an industry, a profession.
All of these are single cases; but you can also study multiple cases: a number of single parents; several schools; two different professions. It all depends what you want to find out - which leads us on. A case study is one which investigates the above to answer specific research questions (that may be fairly loose to~begin with) and which seeks a range of different kinds of evidence, evidence which is there in the case setting, and which has to be abstracted and collated to get the best possible answers......................

 
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Free Psychology Books: Interviewing as Qualitative Research by Irving Seidman

Interviewing as Qualitative Research by Irving Seidman

This book is intended for doctoral candidates who are engaged in that search and who think that in-depth interviewing might be appropri-ate for them and their research topic. It will also serve more experienced researchers who are interested in qualitative research and may be turning to the possibilities of interviewing for the first time. Finally, the book is geared to professors in search of a supplementary text on in-depth inter-viewing that connects method and technique with broader issues of qualitative research. For both individual and classroom use, the book provides a step-by-step introduction to the research process using in-depth inter-viewing and places those steps within the context of significant issues in qualitative research. The text centers on a phenomenological approach to in-depth in-terviewing. The Introduction outlines how I came to do interviewing research. Chapter 1 discusses a rationale for using interviewing as a research method and the potential of narratives as ways of knowing. Chapter 2 presents a structure for in-depth, phenomenologically based interviewing that my associates and I have used in our research projects. The text provides specific guidance on how to carry out this ap-proach to interviewing and the principles of adapting it to one’s own goals. Chapter 3 explores issues that may make proposal writing daunt-ing and discusses meaningful but simple questions that can guide the researcher through the process. Chapter 4 stresses pitfalls and snares to avoid in the process, and discusses issues in establishing access to, mak-ing contact with, and selecting participants. Chapter 5, responding to the increasing concern about ethical issues in interviewing research, intro-duces the Institutional Review Board (IRB) process and its implications for researchers who interview. This chapter explains the risks inherent in interviewing research that lead IRBs to require Informed Consent Forms. The chapter explicates the major points that an informed con-sent form should include, alerts readers to corresponding ethical issues.............

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Free Psychology Books: the Emotional Nature of Qualitative Research by C. R. Figley eds

the Emotional Nature of Qualitative Research by C. R. Figley eds

Emotional intelligence, a concept coined by Goleman,1 is the ability to dis-cern, utilize, and shape the emotional reactions of self and others. Emotions represent an area rich in tradition and span fields of study, as well as culture and time. This is the latest book in the series, Innovations in Psychology. Professor Kathleen Gilbert, through this book, introduces the field to an important new area, emotion-focused research. Emotions include, but are not limited to, stress and flow or lack of it (the manifestation of emotions), feelings (that represent and cause the emotion stress), and emotional controls (our efforts to modulate our emotional effects). Emotions account for an extraordinary amount of the human expe-rience. It is remarkable how little we know about this phenomenon. It is about time that we address the emotional nature of research. “How do we manage the emotions stimulated by researchers? What does it mean if the researcher is profoundly affected by the experience, even to the extent of going through a spiritual epiphany?”Dr. Gilbert, a professor at Indiana University for many years, addresses these and other related questions in a book for researchers and practitioners who wish to apply qualitative (as opposed to simply quantitative/data analysis-driven) research methods to human research. The tradition of this book series represents substantial and trendsetting innovations in psychology, has set new agendas for burnout in families, 2and has opened new areas of clinical innovation by introducing energy psychol-ogy, 3 traumatology, 4,5 and poetry therapy. 6 In a period of substantial scholarly activity in the social and medical sciences, giving voice to research participants is suddenly more acceptable beyond anthropology and those practitioners of qualitative research meth-ods. This trend is part of a larger cultural trend, even a global trend. In part this is due to the impersonal aspects of the internet, the growing concentration of people in the cities, and other demographic explanations. However, some suggest that psychology has lost its heart and soul. Gone are the influences of social psychology that led to major breakthroughs in......

 
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Free Psychology Books: Introducing Qualitative Research in Psychology, by Carla Willig

Introducing Qualitative Research in Psychology, by Carla Willig

How, and what, can we know?
•Positivism
•Empiricism
•Hypothetico-deductivism
•Critique of the ‘scientific method’
•Feminist critique of established epistemologies
•Social constructionism
•Epistemology and methodology
•Qualitative research
•Overview of the book
•Three epistemological questions
•Further reading

‘It involves opening up to new and possibly unsettling experiences.’ ‘It means venturing into new territory.’ ‘It’s discovering something new and exciting; there’s a little bit of danger.’ ‘It is exciting and unusual, out-of-the-ordinary. There’s a big element of enjoyment and there may be an element of challenge. It’s something that will develop me as a person.’ ‘Enid Blyton stories . . . [laughs] . . . It’s exciting, possibly involving a degree of risk to oneself; scary on occasion but it comes out alright at the end. You’re glad you’ve had them.’ ‘An exploration involving new places, meeting new people and having new experiences outside of the norm. These could be both positive and negative in nature.’ ‘Adventures are sudden, surprise events which are pleasurable, because they are unexpected.’ Talk of an ‘adventure’captures the imagination. We want to know what it was like, how it felt, what happened next. We look upon the adventurer as someone who has been changed by the experience, someone who will never be quite the same again.

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Free Psychology Books: Research Methods In Psychology by John, J. Shaughnessy et al.

Research Methods In Psychology by John, J. Shaughnessy et al.

 

Psychologists develop theories and conduct psychological research to answer questions about behavior and mental processes; these answers can impact individuals and society.

• The scientifi c method, a means to gain knowledge, refers to the ways in which questions are asked and the logic and methods used to gain answers. 

• Two important characteristics of the scientifi c method are an empirical approach and a skeptical attitude. It seems safe to assume that you’ve been exposed to many research fi ndings in psychology, both in media presentations and in your psychology course work. If you are like the authors of your textbook, you are very curious about the mind and behavior. You like to think about people’s (and animals’) behavior. You wonder about people—why they act the way they do, how they became the people they are, and how they will continue to grow and change. And you may wonder about your own behavior and how your mind works. These thoughts and refl ections set you apart from other people—not everyone is curious about the mind, and not everyone considers the reasons for behavior. But if you are curious, if you do wonder why people and animals behave the way they do, you have already taken the fi rst step in the intriguing, exciting, and, yes, sometimes challenging journey into research methods in psychology. Many students enter the fi eld of psychology because of their interest in improving people’s lives. But what methods and interventions are helpful to people? For example, students with a career goal that involves conducting psychotherapy must learn to identify patterns of behavior that are maladaptive and to distinguish psychological interventions that are helpful from those that are not. Psychologists gain understanding and insight into the means for improving people’s lives by developing theories and conducting psychological research to answer their questions about behavior.

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Free Psychology Books: Research Methods in Clinical Psychology 2nd Ed by Chris Barker

Research Methods in Clinical Psychology - An Introduction for Students and Practitioners,2nd 

This book is structured around a simple chronological framework, which we call the research process: that is, the sequence of steps that researchers go through during a project. The steps can be grouped into four major stages. Like all such frameworks, it is idealized, in that the stages are not always distinct and may interact with each other. However, we find it a useful way of thinking about how research is conducted, both one’s own and other people’s. 

1. Groundwork (Chapter 3). This stage involves both scientific issues—choosing the topic, specifying the conceptual model, reviewing the literature, formulating the research questions—and also practical issues—resolving organizational, political, financial, or ethical problems. Sometimes researchers give the groundwork short shrift, being anxious to get on with the business of running the project itself. However, we will argue that devoting careful thought at this stage repays itself with interest during the course of the project. 2. Measurement (Chapters 4 to 7). Having formulated the research questions, the next step is to decide how to measure the psychological constructs of interest. We are here using the term ‘‘measurement’’ in its broadest sense, to encompass qualitative as well as quantitative approaches to data collection.

 3. Design (Chapters 8 to 11). Research design issues concern when and from whom the data will be collected. For example: Who will the participants be? Will there be an experimental design with a control group? How many preand post-assessments will there be? What ethical concerns need to be addressed? 

These design issues can usually be considered independently of measurement issues. The research questions, measurement procedures, and design together constitute the research protocol, the blueprint for the study. Having gone through these first three stages, researchers will usually conduct a small pilot study, whose results may cause them to rethink the protocol and possibly to conduct further pilots. Eventually the protocol is finalized; the last stage then consists of implementing it.

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