Chapter 2
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
- Explain how psychologists discover the underpinnings of human behavior and mental processes through the conduct of empirical research and theory development.
- Summarize the three principles that underlie the scientific endeavor.
- Identify and describe the five basic steps of the scientific method.
- Define the key elements of the experimental method and be able to identify these components in a research study.
- Identify and describe the various types of descriptive research methods and state the strengths and limitations of each.
- Compare and contrast the strengths and limitations of experimental and descriptive methods of research.
- Define and differentiate between descriptive and inferential statistics.
- Provide examples of some of the commonly used descriptive statistics.
- Compare and contrast the idea of statistical significance and meaningfulness.
- Identify factors that contribute to human diversity and that potentially may be related to bias in psychological research. Summarize each and explain why universal statements about human behavior are not always true.
- Describe how human participants in research experiments are safeguarded by ethics.
- Discuss the use of deception in psychological research and the conditions that must be met when deception is used.
