There are lots of different types of research type of research design pdf, different types of research design methods that scientists can use to figure out how to test their hypotheses. So we’re going to go over a few here. One category research type of research design pdf, different types of research design methods are non experiments because they’re usually just observing people in the natural environment. A good example of this are case studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design where you observe one or a few special cases of individuals in order to learn something about people in general a lot of case studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design in psychology. Have to do with people who have some kind of specific brain damage a very famous example of this is HM who we now know as Henry mOLAISON we know this since he’s passed away but HM was someone who had a brain disease that caused parts of his hippocampus to die away and we discovered with him that these areas are key in forming new memories. Because that was something he couldn’t do after he incurred that type of brain damage so case. Studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design are great in that they can uncover certain things about how the brain works or about how different environments can affect people and they can give us information on things that we couldn’t experimentally manipulate. Of course we absolutely couldn’t destroy someone’s brain just to see what happens but when these things naturally arise we can study type of research design pdf, different types of research design them. What if the downsides is that often case studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design only come from one or two individuals and so. It’s really hard to generalize from that to assume that these results would be the same with anyone else so they’re very limited but can be helpful. A more common type of non experiment is a naturalistic observation. Study type of research design pdf, different types of research design where you just observe people in their natural setting. This could be really interesting because sometimes you can get that behavior that maybe people wouldn’t want to admit to in surveys so for example the American Society for Microbiology regularly conducts studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design in which they want to see who actually washes their hands and public restrooms now in surveys. The vast majority of adults say they wash their hands every time they go to the bathroom that 96 percent of people say this but experimenters do to test.
This out is well actually hide in bathroom stalls but mark the stalls out of order and then they’ll sit there and wait for people to go to the bathroom and then listen to see whether they wash their hands or not and what they actually find is that while about 93% of women do wash their hands in public restrooms only 77% of then actually do so that’s about a 20% difference between what people say they do and what people actually do and just to make you feel a little better about this in other countries such as the UK we find that actually rates of people washing their hands is much lower with only 64% of women and only 32% have been washing their hands in public restrooms. So actually we in the US are more on the clean side compared to a lot of other countries. But still if you just relied on survey results you’d get misleading data now. Speaking of surveys surveys are a great way to have people tell us about their behavior past experiences opinions attitudes. It’s a really easy. And cheap way to collect lots of data for example a lot of studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design show that kids with high self-esteem tend to get good grades. But then the big problem with a lot of results like this is. What does this mean could it be the case that simply having high self-esteem leads kids to getting good grades and this was something that a lot of psychologists believed in the 1970s and 80s that if you helped a kid feel good about themselves. They’d reach their full potential but the reverse could also be true. Maybe it’s just that kids who get good grades have resulting higher self-esteem the world tells them that they’re smart and they feel better about themselves more. Recent research type of research design pdf, different types of research design shows that this is actually more often the case at least when it comes to the causal link between good grades and self-esteem and there are also a lot of factors that maybe we’re not even aware of perhaps it’s good parenting that leads to both of these high self-esteem and good grades so the problem with a lot of Survey Research type of research design pdf, different types of research design is it leads to something called the third variable problem that just because two things are related like self-esteem and good grades doesn’t mean you know how they’re causally related and there could be a lot of other factors involved so with this link between self-esteem and school there’s a lot of potential third factors for example good parenting and also maybe kids who go to better schools live in better neighborhoods or more wealthy or have higher social economic status.
Maybe all these things lead to kids feeling better about themselves. Having high self esteem and attaining better grades there could be a lot of genetic or personality factors related with both as well and so a lot of survey miss all these other variables. And since you can’t control for anything you really don’t know what causes what one thing that comes up with a lot of these. Non experimental methods is you can find a relationship or correlation but again not necessarily know the cause and you often hear this phrase correlation does not equal causation. Just because one thing is related to another doesn’t mean that one thing is causing another and we often call these types of relationships spurious a spurious relationship is basically when the relationship between two variables is actually caused by a third variable and there are many examples of the media getting a relationship in some type of psychological research type of research design pdf, different types of research design and then assuming that one thing is causing another so for example. I saw this the other day in a newspaper. A study type of research design pdf, different types of research design found that having more books in the home is related to children being more likely to go to college but the way the newspaper reported it was. If you get more books in the home it’ll seemingly help the child get into college. That’s probably not true. You could just put a bunch of books in someone’s home and if the child doesn’t engage with them or no one reads to them.
It’s unlikely to do anything for them. But it’s probably likely that parents who are more affluent who went to college themselves are more likely to have books in the home and it could be all these third factors that actually help their kids get into schools another recent study type of research design pdf, different types of research design found that those living on the East Coast especially in New York tend to have higher levels of anxiety and again a lot of newspapers interpreted that is if you live in New York. You’re more likely to have anxiety but there is a big third factor here which is access to mental health care. New York has a lot more therapists and thus diagnoses a lot more people than other neighboring states so it could be that people in New York aren’t even necessarily more anxious they’re just more likely to get diagnosed and treated for anxiety and I bet a lot of you have heard that doing crossword puzzles and Sudoku puzzles helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Now there’s probably nothing wrong with doing crossword or Sudoku puzzles but there’s no experimental evidence that assigning people to do these tasks actually helps to prevent these types of brain diseases. It’s just that those who do these types of tasks regularly tend to be less likely to get Alzheimer’s as others but it could just be that a healthy brain and a high IQ is most likely to result in people doing more brain puzzles and games and also being less likely to get Alzheimer’s and in fact there have been some studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design that have randomly assigned people to do these types of brain games with 50% of the sample doing them 50% of the sample not and it turns out they don’t really make any difference at all when it comes to things like Alzheimer’s or other areas of cognitive functioning so it’s very common that a relationship found in a study type of research design pdf, different types of research design will often get overblown and people especially in the media will assume that one thing is causing another. So let’s now get into experiments which have control and are often done in laboratory settings and are the only types of studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design that can actually provide evidence for causation or causal links between variables and so experiments do this through exerting experimental control where all the variables or all.
The things that happen to participants are held constant every participant is the exact same experience when they come into the lab and go through the experiment except one thing. The independent variable is varied between conditions. So in this case if you have two groups and there’s only one thing different between them the independent variable and the two groups end up different in some way you can assume pretty safely it must be the independent variable. That’s the cause of that and of course this only works if you have absolute control over everything participants are experiencing so. This isn’t something you could just do in the real world. You have to do it. In a laboratory one interesting experiment that used as well first came from an observational study type of research design pdf, different types of research design that found that sports teams that wear predominantly black. Uniforms tend to have worse behavior than those with other types of uniforms. What they did is they looked at a bunch of football and hockey teams that were black uniforms and found that they all had extremely high penalty rates not only that. They observed that when teams change their uniforms from some color to black. They actually started to become more aggressive and have more penalties so one idea. Is that the black costume. In our culture sort of signifies evil and oftentimes when you watch cowboy movies. The villain is wearing the black hat and the hero is wearing the white hat and so we have these cultural understandings of what the color black signifies and so it could be that when people Don a black uniform they become themselves almost villainous or at least more aggressive but of course this is just an observation. Now we need to experimentally test this idea out and so some researchers did just that in one experiment they had participants come in and they said okay.
We’re going to put you into teams and then you’re going to decide what kind of game you want to play. And they assign participants randomly to either a white team or a black team and then they add them decide as a group whether they wanted to play a non violent game which in one study type of research design pdf, different types of research design was a putting contest game or a more violent game such as playing with dart guns and having a dart gun duel what they found actually across multiple studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design is that simply being assigned to a white team led participants to be much more likely to pick a non-violent game as the one they wanted to play and then again randomly assigning them to go. Black team overwhelmingly made them pick a more violent game and so in this way they could show that the only difference between these two groups was whether they were assigned to a white team or a black team and this seemed to have a consistent effect on what types of games they want to play another reason. We can trust that. The team color had an effect on their behavior is that all participants were randomly assigned. This means participants came in and basically there was a coin flipped or some other randomizing method and they were assigned to either the White team or black team purely randomly that way. There aren’t any big differences between these two groups sort of balances them out. So if someone comes in. And they’re a man says men tend to be more aggressive. They have an equal chance of being assigned to the white team or the black team saying if they’re extroverted introverted naturally aggressive or passive no matter. What their personal characteristics are they’re just randomly assigned and so all the groups tend to be balanced out in the end. This is a way to exert what’s called participant control. And you can think about what would happen if they didn’t do this. What if participants were just left on their own to decide whether to be on the black or the white team.
Well in that case if you found the black team did turn out to be more aggressive you could always say well maybe more aggressive people. We’re just more likely to pick the black team. Perhaps there’s something about the color black that attracted them or perhaps more men were drawn to being on the black team in either case it would be these other very would be causing aggression not necessarily the team color but by exerting that participant control. They can make sure that at least within larger samples all participant differences become equalized across conditions for example. Let’s imagine that you have two men and two women coming in to be participants in your study. If you’re assigning them purely randomly to either the white or the black team what’s the likelihood that all the men will be assigned to the black team well with just four participants. You have about 50/50 odds that both of the men will be assigned to the black team in other words that they won’t be equalized across conditions but even just upping that to 20 people 10 men and 10 women the likelihood that all the men are going to get randomly assigned to the same team is now a one in a thousand chance or 0.1 percent if you have what most scientists would consider a pretty good sample like 50 people in each 50 men and 50 women the number sudden the odds that all the men are going to be assigned to one team is astronomically small so if you have a decent sized sample which is around 50 participants per condition you have a really good chance that all the participant variables will be spread out equally across the conditions. So these are the two factors that make an experiment. An experiment at random assignment which controls for all the participant factors and experimental control which controls for all the third variable problems. In this way you have to balance groups where they’re treated exactly the same except for the independent variable so if the two groups turn out different it must be that independent variable.
That’s the cause of it. And this is why experiments are the only way to infer causation. Because they control for all the other elements that could be affecting your dependent variables. Now there are reasons why we can’t just do experiments all the time for one thing. Sometimes they’re impossible to do. There are a lot of things that you just can’t randomly assign to people because it would be unethical so for example we can never do a true study type of research design pdf, different types of research design or at least a randomized experimental study type of research design pdf, different types of research design on the effects of smoking on humans because we know smoking is probably quite dangerous and so you can’t just randomly assign 50 percent of your participants to smoke every day. We also for example couldn’t run an experiment on the effects of adoption because to experiment will require you to have a whole sample of kids and then randomly assign 50% of them to be adopted and obviously that would be really unethical also. There are a lot of things we can’t truly manipulate as experimenters. For example we can’t randomly assign someone’s gender so we could never run a true experiment of the effect of gender on really anything anything we do with gender as an independent variable has to necessarily be a non experiment with any type of study. We do one thing. We’re always going to be interested. In is the validity of that research type of research design pdf, different types of research design if validity just means that the study type of research design pdf, different types of research design accurately reflect the truth. There’s a couple ways of thinking about this for one. We could examine the external validity of a study. Which means do the results of the study type of research design pdf, different types of research design reflect. What would happen in the real world. And in this case naturalistic observation. Studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design tend to be the best at this. Because you’re often observing people who don’t even know that they’re being observed such as in the bathroom studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design and so in this case you’re just looking at people’s real-world behaviors and so that would have the highest level of external validity on the other hand.
You can also look at internal validity which is do you know what’s causing the results of your study. In this case experiments have the highest internal validity because with experimental control and randomization. You can really tell what’s causing people to behave differently. So in this way you kind of always have to choose between internal validity and external validity when running your studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design internal validity requires you control things in the environment so you usually have to conduct these studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design in a lab but this laboratory often causes you to have low external validity if people are in a lab and they know they’re being studied they’re probably not going to act all that naturally but if you look at people in the real world you’ll get real-world behaviors so you’ll have high external validity but this lack of control causes. You do not really know what’s causing their behavior so in that way. Internal and external validity is almost like a seesaw. Act if you have high internal validity you have a lot of control. You know exactly why people are doing the things you’re doing. This necessarily causes low external validity. You’re probably in an unnatural environment and people probably aren’t going to act naturally but you can flip it and observe things in the natural world and they’re your trading high external you’re getting real-world behaviors for low internal validity. You really don’t know what’s causing those behaviors so good research type of research design pdf, different types of research design will often try to combine multiple methods. They’ll often look at a topic. With non experiments through naturalistic observations surveys case studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design or even archival data which is publicly collected data that researchers then look at and these all have high external validity. They’re getting at real-world behaviors in these types of studies type of research design pdf, different types of research design are also very good for satisfying some of the early goals of science such as describing and predicting behavior and also induction making observations.
That can form new theories and these scientists will usually combine this with experiments which have high internal validity. You really get to know what’s causing behavior. And this is often very good for figuring out the cause and explanation of behavior and also for testing hypotheses or deduction so in this way researchers usually will switch back and forth between non experimental methods in order to get at real-world behavior to form observations and form new theories and then test out those theories by going back to the lab and running experiments that have high internal validity to figure out. Exactly what’s causing behavior.
Where to find great research papers?
Various great research journals such as Global Research Letters are a great option and way to help you look up impactful research papers with a great format. Here, you will find a number of various research papers that are provided and made available to you in the journal, which will help you write your own paper.
You can very easily find papers on a variety of topics at Global Research Letters, which will help you with your own research work and understanding of writing and publishing research papers properly. With access to so many amazing research papers, you can practice and learn the process of writing research papers and their importance.