Carrying Out Research Studies

Design and Carry Out Studies

It's time! Time to design your own studies and carry them out.

You will likely not have the resources to carry out a complex study or one that requires special populations, such as people with specific psychological disorders. Think in terms of a study that would make sense to carry out with college students. Perhaps all the students in the class could agree to serve as participants in each other's studies. By now you know the steps, but you may have to go back to Chapter 2 to remind yourself of their order. Refresh your memory about the phases of research.

Idea-generating phase
Problem-definition phase
Procedures-design phase
Observation phase
Data-analysis phase
Interpretation phase
Communication phase

Note how each of those phases now represent something meaningful for you. When we first presented them in Chapter 2, they probably sounded more like jargon.

You may already have some research ideas. More likely, you will need to do some reading to find something interesting to study. Perhaps you want to study some aspect of learning and memory. Perhaps you want to evaluate some aspect of social influence. The research literature will give you ideas about what to study and more ideas about the best ways to study it. The idea-generating and problem-definition phases tend to blend together as you read about an area that you want to study.

The procedures-design phase was the focus of the majority of this text. You want to select the best possible design and implement the controls that are necessary to adequately control confounding. You want to use measures for your variables that have demonstrated both reliability and validity. Remember that you should plan your data-analysis during the procedures-design phase.

Gathering your data will take time, but if you have planned carefully, it should go smoothly. The data analysis should be easy because you have already decided how you would analyze the data. If your instructor included SPSS for Windows in the textbook package, that program will handle most analyses easily. You can learn how to use SPSS for Windows with the Tutorial included on this website. If you do not have access to the program or other data analysis programs, you can compute the necessary statistics with a simple calculator following the instructions included on this website.

The fun part is interpreting your findings. Were your intuitions correct? Did you find what you expected, or did you get a surprise? There is nothing wrong with being surprised; nature surprises us all the time.

If you did things correctly, you would have written a proposal for the study that included introduction and methods sections. This proposal discussed why you were studying a problem, what others have found, exactly what question you would be addressing, and how you would study the problem. That is half of your write-up of the study. Just change the tense of the method section from future to past and start to write the results section after you have completed the data analysis.

In the discussion section, you pull it all together, explaining what your findings mean and what you think should be done next to further understand the phenomenon you have been studying. That's right, no matter how good a study, it only raises more questions that need answers. Like education in general, the more you learn the more you realize that you have to learn. The procedures for writing a research report in APA publication style are detailed on this website.

Good luck with your first research project.