The Third Edition of the Lab Manual for Psychological Research presents students with multiple opportunities to test their knowledge of the concepts they have learned in a research methods course. The manual contains exercises that connect to specific concepts in the course, exercises geared toward the development of a research project, APA style exercises that become progressively more complex, and instruction on how to avoid plagiarism. Packed full of useful exercises, checklists, and how-to sections, this robust lab manual gives students hands-on guidance and practice conducting their own psychological research projects.
Experimental design is important enough to merit a book on its own, without statistics, that instead links methodology to a discussion of how psychologists can advance and reject theories about human behaviour. The objective of this book is to fulfil this role. The first four chapters lay the foundations of design in experimental psychology. The first chapter justifies the prominent role given to methodology within the discipline, whilst chapters two and three describe between-subject and within-subject designs. Chapter four compares and contrasts the traditional experimental approach with that of the quasi-experimental, or correlational approach, concluding that the consequences of not recognizing the value of the latter approach can be far-reaching. The following three chapters discuss practical issues involved in running experiments. The first of these offers a comprehensive guide to the student researcher who wants to construct a good questionnaire, including a discussion of reliability and validity issues. The next chapter considers the basic tools of psychological research, whilst both discussing the theoretical problem of how a sample from a population is chosen and offering useful hints on the practical issue of finding adequate populations from which to select participants. The next chapter considers ethical practice within psychological research, written in large part so that psychology students will be better able to anticipate ethical problems in their studies before they occur. The final two chapters consider reporting and reading psychological papers. Chapter eight details what should and should not be included in a laboratory report. The contributors use their collective experience of marking numerous lab reports to highlight common errors and provide solutions. Finally, chapter nine describes the various elements of a journal article, including tips on how to get the best out of your journal reading.
This new introductory statistics text from Dawn M. McBride, best-selling author of The Process of Research in Psychology, covers the background and process of statistical analysis, along with how to use essential tools for working with data from the field. Research studies are included throughout from both the perspective of a student conducting their own research study and of someone encountering research in their daily life. McBride helps readers gain the knowledge they need to become better consumers of research and statistics used in everyday decision-making and connects the process of research design with the tools employed in statistical analysis. Instructors and students alike will appreciate the extra opportunities for practice with the accompanying Lab Manual for Statistical Analysis, also written by McBride and her frequent collaborator, J. Cooper Cutting.
This book combines the salient features of the methodology of experiments in psychology, the concepts of general experimental psychology, and the advantages of laboratory manual. It aims at developing in the student the understanding and skill to pose a problem, and to plan and conduct an experiment to answer it. Complete reports of a number of experiments have been given which, though based on hypothetical data, will enable students to realise that every step has a rationale behind it. Accounts of related problems and, in several cases, description of the ways to answer them, supplement the detailed reports. Aware of the importance of group experiments in the world of today, the author has included experiments highlighting some special features of group experiments like selection of sample, design of group experiments and treatment of group data. The author has also taken care to avoid use of costly apparatus to carry out the experiments worked out in the book, depending largely on locally improvised materials. This is an unvaluable book for students and teachers of psychology, especially for those in Indian universities.
Offering a hands-on introduction to how psychologists develop and test their research, this book takes students through each step of the process from hypothesis generation to the writing and dissemination of research findings. Students also gain experience in using diverse data collection methods.
Providing the perfect supplement for instructors who teach a lab component with their methods course, this lab manual is a well-rounded stand-alone supplement to any research methods textbook.
