Chapter 1: Professor-Oriented Summary

Why do you love research methods? Count the ways:

1. Doing research is fun. You get to do psychology rather than read about it. You get to write your own play, interact with the audience, and discover something new. That is, you can be the writer, actor, director, detective, and reporter.
   
   

2. Understanding research methods helps you deal with a problem we all face-- information overload.

   
   No one can know everything. Thus, the important thing is to be able to find and evaluate the information you need. This course, rather than giving students more content to learn, teaches them how to find out what they need to know.

3. A firm grasp of research methods prevents you from being fooled. Although the truth is often out there, so are a lot of lies and half-truths.
   There are many people on television, on the web, and in government, who would lead us astray, either because they are misguided

   
   
   

   or intentionally trying to deceive us.

   
   
   

   Without being able to separate fact from fiction, sense from nonsense, science from pseudoscience, we can easily become confused.
   

   
   

4. Knowing about research methods not only makes students better learners, thinkers, and decision makers, but it makes them more marketable . In fact, the skills taught in this course are the main skills that psychology majors are supposed to acquire. Thus, this course, even though it has little "content," is one of the few required by almost all psychology programs. To emphasize the marketability of the skills learned in this course, you might decide to assign this internet appendix.
   

   
   

5. Knowing about research methods teaches one about the core of psychology. Without such knowledge, one doesn't know psychology (and can't distinguish between psychology and other fields) because psychology and science are intimately connected.
   
   

Science versus other ways of knowing

Largely because common sense alone has been the

and science has proven to be an effective tool.

Although students aren't all enthralled with the scientific approach, they see its merits when compared to quackery. Unfortunately, they may not see science as necessary to rid us of quack notions. They may believe that common sense would be enough to effectively combat quackery. Point out that today's common sense will be tomorrow's quackery. To shake their faith in common sense, you can have them evaluate some proverbs --and their opposites-- (as we do in Box 1.1). To shake their faith in "social proof" (if everyone knows it, it must be true), you can also ask them some questions that everyone "knows" the answer to, but that are wrong. For example, although everyone "knows" that George Washington was the first president of the United States, he was, in fact, the eighth (as this link clearly explains). The following links can help you to get more facts that:

1. your students thought they knew, but didn't know, or
2. everybody "knows," but are really urban legends.

Understanding Types of Validity

One reason students have trouble with construct validity is that they don't really understand what constructs are. To help them understand constructs (and thus construct validity), emphasize that:

• "Constructs are constructed" (Levy,1997)
• Constructs can't be directly observed. They require us to "look inside the black box." Unlike cartoon characters, humans don't produce thought bubbles that allow us to see what they are thinking.
  
  
• Because people may mask their feelings, what we see may not reflect what people are really thinking.
  
  

Students may confuse construct validity with external validity. To help them, tell them that external validity often refers to P(eople) and P(laces), whereas construct validity tends to focus on M(anipulations) and M(easures).

Critiquing Study's Validity

Students are pretty good at finding flaws with the external validity of a study (although they are fooled by large, non-random samples). In fact, they may be a bit overcritical of the external validity of research. Just because each individual is unique, that doesn't mean we can't study individuals scientifically and find general rules. Science forms general laws about things that are unique all the time. Two examples:

Similarly, lab studies often do generalize to the real world.

Although students are skeptical of the external validity of research, they are a little too trusting of cause-effect claims. To motivate them to question these claims, you may want to stress (1) the importance of knowing the cause and (2) that it makes one clever, smarter, and wiser to not be fooled about causes.

To stress the importance of knowing the cause, you might

1. Talk about people wrongly accusing parents of neglecting their autistic child because of the finding that parents of an autistic children held that child less than the normal child was held.
2. Talk about the millions of dollars and tons of frustration that were caused by jumping to the conclusion that the reason poor readers eyes moved differently across the page than good readers was because something was wrong with their eyes. As a result, schools purchased machines to train poor readers' eyes.
3. Discuss facilitated communication.
4. Talk about the problems resulting from jumping to the conclusion that high self-esteem is the cause of all kinds of good outcomes and that low self-esteem is the cause of all kinds of bad outcomes.
5. Talk about all the poor students who paid to have their papers typed, thinking that typing it would result in a better grade when a controlled study showed that teachers graded typed happers harder than hand-written ones.
6. Recent research suggests that children's delinquent behavior is not a an effect of divorce. Divorced parents of delinquents may be feeling guilt ("I should have stuck it out for the sake of Johnny") that they shouldn't.
7. Our neighbors came to us in tears. They had returned from their child's 8-month check-up. The physician noted that the child seemed to have allergic symptoms. He then asked them whether they had a dog. When they said they did, the physician ordered them to get rid of their dog. They were quite upset because they considered the dog to be "a member of the family."
8. Just talk about the fact that if you don't know what is causing a problem, it's hard to fix it.

1. A person reportedly asked a reference librarian the following question: "Why were so many Civil War battles fought on national parks?"
2. The funny case against bread

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