Research Methods in Psychology Evaluating a World of Information 3rd Edition by Beth Morling

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Research Methods in Psychology EVALUATING A WORLD OF INFORMATION Beth Morling UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE n W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC. NEW YORK • LONDON W. W. Norton & Company has been independ ... ent since its founding in 1923, when William Warder Norton and Mary D. Herter Norton first published lectures delivered at the People’s Institute, the adult education division of New York City’s Cooper Union. The firm soon expanded its program beyond the Institute, publishing books by celebrated academics from America and abroad. By midcentury, the two major pillars of Norton’s publishing program— trade books and college texts—were firmly established. In the 1950s, the Norton family transferred control of the company to its employees, and today—with a staff of four hundred and a comparable number of trade, college, and professional titles published each year —W. W. Norton & Company stands as the largest and oldest publishing house owned wholly by its employees. Copyright © 2018, 2015, 2012 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved Printed in Canada Editor: Sheri L. Snavely Project Editor: David Bradley Editorial Assistant: Eve Sanoussi Manuscript/Development Editor: Betsy Dilernia Managing Editor, College: Marian Johnson Managing Editor, College Digital Media: Kim Yi Production Manager: Jane Searle Media Editor: Scott Sugarman Associate Media Editor: Victoria Reuter Media Assistant: Alex Trivilino Marketing Manager, Psychology: Ashley Sherwood Design Director and Text Design: Rubina Yeh Photo Editor: Travis Carr Photo Researcher: Dena Digilio Betz Permissions Manager: Megan Schindel Composition: CodeMantra Illustrations: Electragraphics Manufacturing: Transcontinental Printing Permission to use copyrighted material is included in the Credits section beginning on page 603. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Morling, Beth, author. Title: Research methods in psychology : evaluating a world of information / Beth Morling, University of Delaware. Description: Third Edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2017] | Revised edition of the author’s Research methods in psychology, [2015] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017030401 | ISBN 9780393617542 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Psychology—Research—Methodology—Textbooks. | Psychology, Experimental—Textbooks. Classification: LCC BF76.5 .M667 2017 | DDC 150.72—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030401 Text-Only ISBN 978-0-393-63017-6 W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 For my parents Brief Contents PART I Introduction to Scientific Reasoning CHAPTER 1 Psychology Is a Way of Thinking 5 CHAPTER 2 Sources of Information: Why Research Is Best and How to Find It 25 CHAPTER 3 Three Claims, Four Validities: Interrogation Tools for Consumers of Research 57 PART II Research Foundations for Any Claim CHAPTER 4 Ethical Guidelines for Psychology Research 89 CHAPTER 5 Identifying Good Measurement 117 PART III Tools for Evaluating Frequency Claims CHAPTER 6 Surveys and Observations: Describing What People Do 153 CHAPTER 7 Sampling: Estimating the Frequency of Behaviors and Beliefs 179 PART IV Tools for Evaluating Association Claims CHAPTER 8 Bivariate Correlational Research 203 CHAPTER 9 Multivariate Correlational Research 237 PART V Tools for Evaluating Causal Claims CHAPTER 10 Introduction to Simple Experiments 273 CHAPTER 11 More on Experiments: Confounding and Obscuring Variables 311 CHAPTER 12 Experiments with More Than One Independent Variable 351 PART VI Balancing Research Priorities CHAPTER 13 Quasi-Experiments and Small-N Designs 389 CHAPTER 14 Replication, Generalization, and the Real World 425 Statistics Review Descriptive Statistics 457 Statistics Review Inferential Statistics 479 Presenting Results APA-Style Reports and Conference Posters 505 Appendix A Random Numbers and How to Use Them 545 Appendix B Statistical Tables 551 vii viii About the Author BETH MORLING is Professor of Psychology at the University of Delaware. She attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Before coming to Delaware, she held positions at Union College (New York) and Muhlenberg College (Pennsylvania). In addition to teaching research methods at Delaware almost every semester, she also teaches undergraduate cultural psychology, a seminar on the self- concept, and a graduate course in the teaching of psychology. Her research in the area of cultural psychology explores how cultural practices shape people’s motivations. Dr. Morling has been a Fulbright scholar in Kyoto, Japan, and was the Delaware State Professor of the Year (2014), an award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Preface Students in the psychology major plan to pursue a tremendous variety of careers— not just becoming psychology researchers. So they sometimes ask: Why do we need to study research methods when we want to be therapists, social workers, teachers, lawyers, or physicians? Indeed, many students anticipate that research methods will be “dry,” “boring,” and irrelevant to their future goals. This book was written with these very students in mind— students who are taking their first course in research methods (usually sophomores) and who plan to pursue a wide variety of careers. Most of the students who take the course will never become researchers themselves, but they can learn to systematically navigate the research information they will encounter in empirical journal articles as well as in online magazines, print sources, blogs, and tweets. I used to tell students that by conducting their own research, they would be able to read and apply research later, in their chosen careers. But the literature on learning transfer leads me to believe that the skills involved in designing one’s own studies will not easily transfer to understanding and critically assessing studies done by others. If we want students to assess how well a study supports its claims, we have to teach them to assess research. That is the approach this book takes. Students Can Develop Research Consumer Skills To be a systematic consumer of research, students need to know what to priori- tize when assessing a study. Sometimes random samples matter, and sometimes they do not. Sometimes we ask about random assignment and confounds, and sometimes we do not. Students benefit from having a set of systematic steps to help them prioritize their questioning when they interrogate quantitative infor- mation. To provide that, this book presents a framework of three claims and four validities, introduced in Chapter 3 [Show More]

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