Brett W. Pelham - Conducting Research in Psychology: Measuring the Weight of Smoke

Fifth Edition

Conducting Research in Psychology

Measuring the Weight of Smoke

Fifth Edition

• Brett W. Pelham
• Montgomery College, Georgetown University
• Hart Blanton
• Texas A&M University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pelham, Brett W., 1961- author. | Blanton, Hart, 1967- author.

Title: Conducting research in psychology : measuring the weight of smoke / Brett W. Pelham, Montgomery College / Georgetown University, Hart Blanton, Texas A&M University.

Description: Fifth edition. | Thousand Oaks : Sage, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018010896 | ISBN 9781544333342 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: PsychologyResearchMethodology. | Psychology, Experimental.

Classification: LCC BF76.5 .P34 2019 | DDC 150.72/1dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010896

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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Before you begin this book, we would like to make a simple observation: Most undergraduate students dread courses in research methods. This fact was brought home by one of our own students, who (as part of a class exercise) wrote that he anticipated that few things could be more boring, useless, intimidating, or impenetrable than research methods. We find opinions such as this disturbing, not only because we each teach courses in research methods but also because we firmly believe that few things could be more interesting, useful, inviting, or intuitive than research methods. If this belief strikes you as strange, that is fine with us. However, we take it upon ourselves to convince you in this book that most students dread of research methods has much more to do with how the topic is presented than with the nature of research methods.

To make this point in a different way, we suspect that, with a little effort, we could write a boring, useless, intimidating, and impenetrable book about such topics as skydiving, juggling, or romantic trysts. The key to doing so would be to focus heavily on the rules and technical details of skydiving, juggling, or trysting without much attention to the actual experience of these inherently interesting activities. Unfortunately, common approaches to research methods frequently focus too much on the rules and technical details. In our opinion, this is a major reason why research methods courses have such a bad reputation. In contrast, the approach we adopt in this book takes you behind the scenes of psychological research. In this text, of course, we do describe and explain the technical skills you need to conduct solid research. However, we also try to communicate some of the excitement and pleasure that comes from actually conducting research. Along the way, we point out many interesting and surprising things scientific research methods reveal about human nature. To these ends, we generally pursue a hands-on, common sense approach to research, supplementing lively examples and stories with hands-on exercises that will give you a sense of what it is like to conduct your own research. In summary, our approach to this book is based on two important premises. First, research methods become easy to understand when you can relate them to things that you already know. Second, research methods become interesting when you can use them to discover things you never would have known otherwise. Although the study of survey wording, experimental design, and inferential statistics can be made difficult and boring, they can also be made both interesting and informative.

Because we both happen to be social psychologists, another important aspect of this text is that we emphasize what is social about psychological research methods. Being a good experimental psychologist requires the use of the same methodological rules that apply to all other scientific disciplines. However, the fact that people are social beings generates some practical dilemmas that are not likely to plague researchers in astrophysics, metaphysics, or psychophysics (a branch of perceptual psychology). The most ubiquitous of these problems is that when people know that their behavior is being studied, they often behave unnaturally. The challenge of experimental psychology is to study natural behavior in unnatural (laboratory) situations. The clever solutions psychologists have developed to deal with this problem make experimental research methods in psychology a little different and arguably much more interesting than experimental research methods in general. Because of the human element in psychological research, good experimental psychology is not just good science; it is also good art. It takes a good scientist to generate precise tests of psychological theories, but it takes a good artist (and occasionally a good con artist) to translate these tests into laboratory experiences that are psychologically real to research participants.