PSYC 2360 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Informed Consent, Murder Of Kitty Genovese, Stanford Prison Experiment
Document Summary
Steps in the research process: form a question, search the literature, form a hypothesis, create an operational definition, collect and analyze data, propose or revise a theory. Forming a question: sometimes research questions are designed to test established theories in psychology as their start- ing point, many studies start with a question based on the observation of a real-world event. Ex. you get curious because some of your friends seem to do better under pressure but some of them seem to do worse. Form a hypothesis: testable prediction about the conditions under which an event will occur, expected effect and related variables, but not necessarily causal, includes specific prediction so you can test it directly. Create an operational definition: describes a specific procedure or measure you"ll use to test your hypothesis. Collect and analyze data: observation, surveys, pre-existing documents (records, archival data), or experiment, observation vs. Surveys: sometimes it"s difficult to observe something e. g. , personality variables.