Transcription
Glass, so this week, I hope that you are feeling refreshed after your hopefully long weekend. We're gonna pick up where we left off, and we're gonna talk about not just the development of a research question, but the history of psychology as a science. So we understand how we got to our processes around developing a research question and studying psychology from a scientific and experimental and quasi-experimental perspective as well.
So any discussion of the history of psychology has to begin with two of its founding fathers: Wilhelm Wundt and William James. And Wilhelm Wundt, the names might sound familiar to you from introductory psychology courses, from any history of psychology course that you have studied. But for Wilhelm Wundt, he was really seen as the father of experimental psychology, and he was a German scientist who was the first person to be referred to as a psychologist. In fact, his famous book entitled "The Principles of Physiological Psychology" was published in 1873.
Now, Wundt viewed psychology as a scientific study of conscious experience, and he believed that the goal of psychology was to identify components of consciousness and how those components combine to result in our conscious experience. Wundt used introspection, he called it internal perception, but it was essentially the same thing. And when we define introspection, we are saying it is a process by which someone examines their own conscious experience as objectively as possible, making the human mind like any other aspect of nature that a scientist observed.
Wundt's version of introspection used only very specific experimental conditions in which external stimuli was designed to produce a scientifically observable or repeatable experience of the mind. The first stringent requirement was the use of trained or practical or practiced observers could immediately observe and report a reaction. The second requirement was the use of reputable stimuli that always produce the same experience in the subject and allowed the the subject to expect and thus be fully attentive to their inner reaction. For example, highly trained assistants would be given a stimulus such as a ticking metronome and would reflect on the experience. They would report on what the experience made them think and what it made them feel. The same stimulus, physical surroundings, and instructions were given to each person, so there was an effort at standardization here. These experimental requirements were put in place to eliminate interpretation in the reporting of internal experiences and to counter the argument that there is no way to know that an individual is observing their mind or consciousness accurately, since it cannot be seen by any other person. This attempt to understand the structure or characteristics of the mind was therefore known as structuralism, and that is the school of thought that is associated most with William Wundt and experimental introspection.
Wundt established his psychology laboratory at the university level in 1879, and in this university laboratory, Wundt and his subjects conducted experiments on, for example, reaction times. A subject, sometimes in a room isolated from the scientist, would receive a stimulus such as a light, image, or sound. The subject's reaction to the stimulus would be to push a button, and an apparatus would record the time to a reaction. And through this, Wundt could measure the reaction time to a one one-thousandth of a second. Now, this is pretty impressive for the time, and it really showed the beginnings of experimental and scientific thought within the psychological field.
But as we know, Wundt wasn't the only one. Willy James was an original thinker in between the disciplines of physiology, psychology, and philosophy. His 1200-page masterwork, "The Principles of Psychology," published in 1890, is a rich blend of physiology, psychology, philosophy, and personal reflection that has given us ideas such as the stream of thought and the baby's impression of the world. It contains seeds of pragmatism and phenomenology and influenced generations of thinkers in both Europe and the Americas.
In 1878, James agreed to write this psychology textbook for the American publisher Henry Holt, but it took him 12 years to produce the manuscript. And when he did, he really didn't describe it too positively. He described it using words such as "loathsome," "distended," and "bloated." But nonetheless, it was it proved to be James's masterwork, containing early statements of his main philosophical ideas in extraordinarily rich chapters on the stream of thought and the consciousness of self, emotion, will, and many other topics. James tells us that he will follow the psychological method of introspection in this text, which he defines as "quote, the looking into our own minds and reporting what we discover there." In fact, he takes a number of methodological approaches in the book. He was really the first North American psychologist who espoused a different perspective on how psychology should operate.
So with both Wilhelm Wundt and William James, they both followed introspective views, but they differed in their process. James was introduced to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and accepted it as an explanation of an organism's characteristics. Key to that theory is the idea that natural selection leads organisms that are adapted, or leads to organisms that are adapted to their environment, including their behavior. So adaptation is key here. And adaptation means that a trait of an organism has functioned for the survival and reproduction of the individual. So functionalism was the perspective that James espoused. As James saw it, psychology's purpose was to study the function of a behavior in the world. Functionalism focused on how mental activities helped an organism fit into its environment. Functionalism has a second, more subtle meaning, in that functionalists were more interested in the operation of the whole mind rather than of its individual parts, which were the focus of structuralism.
So like Wundt, James believed that introspection could serve as one's means by which someone might study mental activities. But James also relied on more objective measures, including the use of various recording devices and examinations of concrete products of mental activities and of anatomy and physiology. So really, we have two differing but also complementary views that started off the process of studying psychological phenomena from a scientific perspective.
Which brings us to behaviorism. And it has sometimes been said that "behavior is what organisms do." Behaviorism is built on this assumption, and its goal is to promote the scientific study of behavior, the behavior in particular of individual organisms. Now, for behaviorists, this is not of social groups, it's not of cultures, but of persons and animals. Wilfred Sellars, who was alive between 1912 and 1989, was a distinguished philosopher, and he noted that a person may qualify as a behaviorist, loosely or attitudinally speaking, in that they insist on confirming "quote, hypotheses about psychological events in terms of behavioral criteria." A behaviorist, so understood, is someone who demands behavioral evidence for any psychological hypothesis. For such a person, there is no knowable difference between two states of mind, beliefs, desires, etc., unless there is demonstrable evidence in the behavior associated with each state. Consider the current belief of a person that it is raining. If there is no difference in his or her behavior between believing that it is raining and believing that it is not raining, there is no grounds for attributing the one belief rather than the other. Attribution is empirically empty or unconstrained.
So we need to be able to see the behavior take shape. Belief and emotion, as it were, is more difficult to be studied and impossible to be studied by the behaviorist perspective. But still, this created a foundation for psychological study because if we could look at somebody's corollary behavior, if we could look at their behavioral manifestation of something, then it would lead us to at least a beginning of an understanding of what what the reason for that behavior was or is. So that gives us a historical foundation.
But when we talk about scientific study of psychology and research, for that matter, in the current context of today, people have always been curious about the natural world, including themselves and their behavior. In fact, this is probably why you are studying psychology in the first place. Science grew out of this natural curiosity and has become the best way to achieve detailed and accurate knowledge. Keep in mind that most phenomena and theories that fill psychology textbooks are the products of scientific research. In a typical introductory psychology textbook, for example, one can learn about specific cortical ideas for language and perception, principles of classic and operant conditioning, biases in reasoning and judgment, and people's surprising tendency to obey those in positions of authority. And scientific research continues because what we know right now only scratches the surface of what we can know.
Scientific research is often classified as being either basic or applied. So, basic research in psychology is conducted primarily for the sake of achieving a more detailed and accurate understanding of human behavior without necessarily trying to address any particular practical problem. Applied research is conducted primarily to address some practical problem. On the other hand, research on the effects of cell phone use on driving, for example, was prompted by safety concerns and has led to the enactment of laws to limit this practice. Although the distraction, or the distinction, I should say, between basic and applied research is convenient, it's not always clear-cut. For example, basic research on sex differences in talkativeness could eventually have an effect on how marriage therapy is practiced, and applied research on the effect of cellphone use on driving could produce new insights into basic processes of perception, attention, and action. So we can see it gets a little bit murky. So think of these as broad and somewhat fluid categories, but important categories nevertheless. So that's the starting point when you're understanding what kind of research that you're looking at, basic versus applied.
But when you're looking for research, the question becomes, where to find your data, right? So the first thing is to think about, before you can design a study that will contribute to this to psychological knowledge, you need to have a good idea of what is already known, whether it's basic or applied research. And the new newcomers to the field often tend to display one of two opposite tendencies. The first is to act as though he or she were the first intelligent person to have ever contemplated this particular problem and to plunge right into designing a study. The second tendency is to become overwhelmed by the number of books in a particular field and conclude that every conceivable study must have been thought of already.
So how do you steer a course between these two extremes? Well, avoiding the first involves realizing that for thousands of years, thoughtful people have considered most of the important issues that we confront, albeit until recently without the benefit of modern methods to guide them. So discovering the results of their labors may be difficult. However, as someone has said, "more is known than is known is known." There is, in fact, a considerable amount of information in libraries that has been forgotten or overlooked. It happens with some regularity that someone with a historical bent will show that a researcher many years ago found the same thing that is now being presented as brand new. It takes hard work to keep knowledge from being forgotten and to ensure that scientific knowledge actually is cumulative. This is the purpose of conducting literature reviews on the research in the field.
Avoiding the opposite extreme of being overwhelmed by the sheer bulk of what is known requires knowing some techniques for cutting the literature down to a manageable size. Okay, so when we think about how we do this and what our starting point is, obviously the first place we're going to go is to the internet. Now, one of the things to keep in mind is that the internet is not a library, but it is an excellent tool. So the internet is something like a library in that it contains a great deal of information, and libraries provide access to the internet, in fact, including ours at Los Angeles Valley College. But it is necessary to realize that there is a big difference between the internet and libraries. All information in libraries was put there by a person other than the author who made a decision to do so. Furthermore, books and journals that are selected by the librarian have editors. The internet has none of these filters. Anybody and their cousin can put information on the net, and they do. Website creators range from cranks and jokers, though well-meaning amateurs of varying competence, I'm looking at you, Wikipedia, to highly professional organizations. Crackpots and jokers can set up web pages that look every bit as good as those of professional societies and government agencies. Some even make their sites seem to be those of reputable organizations to fool people and to sell fake information or misinformation.
So now, more than ever, let the buyer beware. And you, as the budding researcher, are the buyer. How the source is structured and some elements of the source can help you to identify whether the information you're looking at is reputable or not. So much so, one always useful rule is to consider the source. Is the website sponsored by a university, a professional society, a reputable private organization, or a government agency? If so, you can have some confidence, not 100% confidence, but some degree of confidence, that the author is of, or the author of the material has some credibility and has followed professional and ethical guidelines.
Okay, another way of looking and narrowing your search is to not just use Google, use Google Scholar, which tries to limit the articles and websites that are generated to more reputable ones that are more academic in nature. Also, consider the use of proprietary websites. So access to a website that would be proprietary would be free, right? So we would be looking, or it would be free through an academic institution. So proprietary websites are often privately owned and accessible only by permission. There is usually a fee associated with it, but if you're at an academic institution, that fee is often covered by your tuition. So proprietary websites, examples of this would be PsycINFO, PsycLIT, for and so those might be ones that you might have heard of from other institutions or popularly mentioned in psychology classrooms. At La Valley College, through our library, we have access to the EBSCO, the Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection.
I've also posted a number of proprietary websites and open-source journals that are free to you for the purposes of this course. Let me give you a piece of advice: do not pay for any academic articles from proprietary fee-based sites. There's plenty of stuff out there that is free, that is open-source, and is legit. So if you're having trouble finding stuff for your research paper topic, topics, articles, email me. We can brainstorm together. But a number of sites are listed on this week's module with links in them, and also through the LA Valley College Library site. So I would encourage you very much to use that.
But even within those sources, discriminate among those potential sources. Usually, peer-reviewed published articles, especially if you're looking in the psychiatry versus psychology realm, will have information about potential conflicts of interest among the researchers. Buyer beware on articles that are talking about psychotropic medication effectiveness that are funded by drug companies. In fact, some of the major resources like WebMD, for example, on the internet are funded by major drug companies. And I'm not saying that the information is inaccurate, but it does introduce the potential of bias when the person who's trying to sell something is doing so in in such a way as to present that information that validates the sale or encourages you to to purchase a medication or see a specific drug company's medication as the treatment of choice. So think about that as well.
And both when you are starting to develop a research question, think first about the qualities of a good topic. First question is, is it meaningful to you? It requires, does it require several types of sources to address? Is it researchable in the first place? You know, can you do this? A research question, if a research question meets all these criteria, plus it's manageable, which means it's neither too broad or too narrow, given the time and length of the assignment, which is coming up for this semester, then you have to ask yourself, are there sufficient academic and scholarly sources available to use? Finally, a research question makes it possible to say something new about a topic. So if somebody else is already written exactly what you would want to study about the topic, then the question needs to change or be modified. Look at a different angle, look at some elements of that question that maybe hasn't been addressed by previous researchers.
So then try asking yourself the questions on this PowerPoint to develop your research question: Who? What? Where? And Why? So examples might be, if you wanted to study obesity, right? The question would be, who? What would be a good population to study obesity on? Well, childhood obesity is certainly a big topic. So let's say teenagers would be a good, would be a good "who" for studying obesity. And then look at what might be one cause of obesity, right? Well, so that's your "what." Consumption of high-fat foods could be that. And then the question is, where? What is manageable to study and what's something that is pretty uniform among teenagers? Well, what about school cafeterias? That would be a good "where," something that you could isolate, something more narrow that you could study. And then you could ask your research question based on those elements, right? How does the consumption of high-fat foods in school cafeterias contribute to teenage obesity? There you go. You have a good start, right? So then the question is, why? Why is it important? Right? Well, why? Because it's affecting the health of a segment of population of the population. You would also want to look to see research that says that this is really an issue. And so putting that all together creates a solid research question and a foundation for a good paper topic.
So when you're evaluating information and you're going through various articles that are on the internet, you may remember that authority as a way of knowing was somewhat de-emphasized in science. Doesn't mean we don't use it. So when we're talking about authority, the first place we're looking as authorship. Is the author a well-known authority? If not, that's okay. But is the author's works cited approvingly by a known authority? If not, that's also okay. But can you find biographical information that would validate the author's credentials? Maybe they're a student who's working with a professor in a good academic department, or they're doing research under the supervision of another researcher who's more reputable, or they have other articles that they've published that have been thought of approvingly by other reputable sources. So that would be a starting point.
Now, what about the publishing body? Who sponsors the site? This gets back to what I just mentioned. Is the site linked to a respected organization, or is the site something that is promoting a certain product that would be suspect? Information that exists only on a personal website, a wiki like Wikipedia, or any other wiki pages, or discussion sites like Reddit, should be considered highly suspect. Oftentimes, people are posting opinions and they're posting them from an authoritarian or authoritative perspective, and that doesn't mean that it's true. They just means somebody is trying to sell you that information as true.
Another thing would be the point of view. Does the organization sponsoring the website have a point of view? Information provided by corporations in general should be considered as advertisements. So be especially wary of information provided by political organizations and advocacy groups because they're trying to sell an idea, and it doesn't necessarily mean that the information is in any way accurate.
What about connection to the literature? So are there references to other works in the field? Does that show that their work has cited sources and is built off of other reputable research, or are their cited sources not so reputable? Are they citing Wikipedia? Why are they citing newspaper articles, which can include opinion pieces? So that's very important. Are the appropriate theories discussed in their literature, or are they just kind of free thinking, which is great, but not for the purpose of science? Or any controversies acknowledged? A good scientist and good scientific literature that you would be citing or that you would be generating would be open to criticism, would be open to alternative ways of looking at that information, and would present those alternative ideas because they would have to stand up to them to be seen as legitimate. If you're trying to shy away from that information or not presenting that information, then it does lead one to question the validity of the research.
The other piece is verifiability. Is there information that would allow you to verify the methodology? Do they post their data? Do they show data tables, or did they just talk about the results without including that data? That would lead one to have questions if that data wasn't included. Also, currency. And by currency, I'm not talking about money, I'm talking about how recently was this study conducted? If you're looking at a study from 20 or 30 years ago, it may have been superseded by more recent research. So is there a date on the document that would allow you to evaluate the timeliness of the information? Very important things to consider.
So when locating important articles, as I mentioned, we have the Los Angeles Valley College Library, and I've included a link to this right here on the slide. The slides are posted to this week's module. I also included a link in this week's module separately, aside from Google Scholar, various other search engines. One other important idea, if you are really desperate for a specific kind of article, is interlibrary loan. So whereas some smaller libraries might not have computerized database capabilities, interlibrary loan is a service that all libraries provide. If you can find a reference to a book or journal that your library does not have, your librarian can generally obtain a copy within a few days. And the combination of database searching with the with interlibrary loan can make a small library almost as useful as a large one and save a long trip. But beware, this is a time-consuming process. The LA Valley College website says this can take anywhere from two to six weeks, and our library limits interlibrary loans to two weeks in terms of having the document. You can make the request for an interlibrary loan through librarians by the reference desk or call extension 2764 for assistance on campus using a campus phone. However, I wouldn't recommend interlibrary loan unless there is just some really important piece of information out there that you can't live without for your topic. But it's important for you to know that it's there, especially for future research projects that you might do beyond Valley College. So something to think about, as all libraries offer this.
So translating your research question into a search. Okay, so let's use an example. The example that we'll go for is, does the rate of medication compliance change when the number of prescribed medications increase for older adults? So essentially, we're asking, is it more difficult or not for people to stick with their medications as prescribed when they get older and likely have more medications that are prescribed to them? Okay, so our first step is just identify the main concepts. So we're picking it apart. So we're looking at medication compliance, we're looking at the number of prescribed medications, and we're looking at older adults. Okay, so the who, what, where, etc. Okay. And then we would want to begin a search. So whether we're using Google Scholar or we're using the library database through the Valley College library site, some things to consider.
Okay, so we're gonna want to add related terms or synonyms. So this slide is a bit messed up, so I apologize. Non-adherent should be here after adherence or non-adherence, but let's just go with this. So we're gonna first look at synonyms. So with those synonyms, we're gonna be searching for for this topic, drugs or medications. We'll also want to look at antonyms, adherence or non-adherence. Right? So the idea here would be to look at words, keywords that have been tagged to various articles that, and those articles might provide the information that you're looking for. And usually, you can get a sense of what those articles are studying by the results of the search, which will generate a list of titles, which you can click on and openly available abstracts, which are usually only about one paragraph, which summarize the entire study. Some are better than others, but it should give you an idea of as to whether that study or that paper includes enough information to be able to get you to where you want to go or includes valuable information for your topic. If it doesn't, then you can kind of move on to another article. But this way, you can narrow things down.
Now, also connect related terms with "or" and content related concepts with "and." Right? So you can search, especially in these academic databases, by medications or drugs and compliance or adherence or non-adherence. And by putting these "and" or "or" words, it helps the search engine to filter through various topics.
Okay, so when we're talking about the various elements of a research paper, once you've done your research and you're laying out the structure of how this proposal is going to go, now I'm talking about after you've given your topic to me and you've gotten your approval submitted through the Canvas link, you're going to want to lay out the the research proposal in the following ways. So I've asked you to prepare a proposal before you proceed with the next part of your research project. The the final research proposal sections. So this proposal is often called by many a prospectus. And proposals are required in various situations, which is why I'm asking you to do it. Graduate students and undergrad alike usually prepare proposals that are presented to a committee that oversees either an undergraduate honors thesis, a required thesis for one's major, master's thesis, or dissertation research for those at the graduate and doctoral levels. Proposals are also required by some agencies, including universities, before research is permitted in their institution.
So one of the things that is important to note is that I'm not asking you all to collect data or to analyze the data. And the reason for this is that I wouldn't want you to have to go through what's called an Institutional Review Board, or an IRB. Now, some, this is something we're gonna be talking about a little bit later when we talk about psychological effects. But Institutional Review Boards are essentially ethics committees, and they review research proposals and then they either approve, revise, or deny that research taking place. And this is kind of the gatekeeper to make sure that the research that we conduct as scientists is good and ethical. Now, there's a lot of variability between Institutional Review Boards, but the this is often a long and laborious process to varying degrees at different institutions. But for the purposes of this course, rather than go through that process, I'm gonna educate you about that process, but we're really just gonna be working on the proposal piece rather than the analytic piece. That way, we don't have to go through an Institutional Review Board and we don't have to collect data.
So a proposal is a statement of everything necessary to evaluate the adequacy of research before the research is conducted. And as such, the proposal serves some of the same functions as the published report that will result from the research. And in fact, final research papers are often a combination of the initial proposal and then the found data. So that's important to keep in mind as well.
The introduction section of a research proposal should explain your reasons for wanting to perform an experiment or a quasi-experimental study. Why is the study important? The introduction should explain the relevant theories and background literature as they relate to your specific problem. How does the previous literature suggest that your experiment is a good idea? What would each of the theories predict as an answer to your hypotheses?
In the methods section, explains the way in which you want to test your hypothesis. One of the key questions to ask at this point is, whether the experimental experimental results from this particular study will truly answer your research question? That is, can you actually find a solution to your problem by testing the hypothesis in this particular way?
The results section of the proposal indicates the expected results and the ways in which you intend to analyze and display them graphically. This function of the proposal is particularly useful. It is embarrassing to conduct a study and then find out that you have to use some unconventional statistic to analyze the data simply because you overlooked an elementary statistical design consideration. You can usually avoid this problem by deciding in advance what statistics you will use or obtaining advice when necessary.
Now, keep in mind, we're gonna be discussing various types of statistical methodology. I'm not gonna be asking you to run statistics again, but I am gonna ask you to have some basic rudimentary knowledge and maybe propose what kind of analysis might be appropriate for a study. This area, I'm not gonna get too hardcore into because for everybody's taking this course, you've already taken statistics. But I do want you to be aware of it and I want to be focused on it because if you are not, then this could present some difficulties in the proposal making sense. But we'll talk about this as we get further along in the semester.
Now, I have several videos that are required for this week for you to watch. They are posted to this week's module on Canvas. And we also will have a discussion question due by the end of the week, or the usual Sunday at 11:59 p.m. Okay, if you have any questions, feel free to inbox me through Canvas or email me. But inboxing me through Canvas is the quickest and most reliable way to get a hold of me. I hope you enjoyed this week's lecture, and I will look forward to chatting with you more, both in the discussion questions and in any kind of individual correspondence if you have any questions, concerns, or thoughts. All right, take care, and see you all next week.