PSY 112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Falsifiability, Operational Definition
21 Jul 2018
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Document Summary
One goal of research is to organize info into meaningful statements that can be applied in many situations: laws: principles that are so general as to apply to all situations in a given domain of inquiry. Good theories have 4 important characteristics: general: summarize many different outcomes, parsimonious: provide simplest possible account of those outcomes, generative: provide ideas for future use, falsifiable: variables of interest can be adequately measured. & predicted relationships between variables can be shown through research to be incorrect: hypotheses: crafting testable predictions: Translation of a hypothesis into specific, testable procedures that can be measured & observed. A precise statement of how a variable is measured/manipulated by researcher. The variables are very specific for 2 reasons: more specific definitions = less danger that collected data will be misunderstood by others. Specific definitions enables future researchers to replicate research. Psychologists rely on formal theories and hypotheses for many reasons.
