Week 3,
9/8/08
Formulating research questions
Lecture notes
This week we finish up the discussion of personal values and science, and go on to the basic features of a scientific question. We will spend most of the time discussing where research questions come from, and some key terms:
- The Phenomenon -- the larger topic of study, the empirical question that underlies the research.
- Theory: a proposition about what causes the phenomenon. A theory links two hypothetical constructs or abstract psychological processes.
- The Hypothesis: a
testable prediction that describes of relation between two variables derived
from the theory,
each of which can be operationally
defined.
The lecture notes are here.
Readings
Chapter 3 of the text and three readings. Two interesting readings from paleontology show how hard it is to test a theory when the data are skimpy, but how new findings can change theory. The third describes die-hard attempts to produce "fusion energy", and shows how hard it can be to discard bad theories when there is a lot of wishful thinking in support of the theory.
Discussion group Assignment
(Click for a Word copy of Week 3 assignment).
Analyze
a journal article
For this week you will describe the core parts of a journal article using the “research flow” from lecture. The journal article is a recent paper of mine on the Internet and sexual risk among men who have sex with men. Note, it is a measurment study, not a true experiment.
Read the guide to research articles first – it will show you how to efficiently find the key parts of an article, and will help a lot with this assignment and your paper.
You may also find any other published article in a psychology journal. If you use the web to find your own article (which you will have to to for your paper eventually) you can find instructions in the guide to research articles.
You will find that this and other journal articles test several hypotheses, and may analyze multiple variables. For this assignment pick one basic hypothesis / variable to analyze: keep it simple!!
Read the paper, and answer the following, using no more than one typed page:
- What is the Phenomenon being addressed?
- Very briefly, what is the Theory?
- What was the hypothesis tested by the study?
- Was the hypothesis supported by the data?
- What conclusions can we reach about larger phenomenon from this study?
- What other research might be useful to clarify the phenomenon
