• What Are The Strengths Of The Descriptive Methods That You Introduced Above?

Advanced Research Methods in Psychology

PSY 275

Research Design Review Assignment PART 1: Three of the basic goals of psychological research include: description of behavioral and cognitive phenomena, detection of relationships and inference of cause and effect. Research methods and data collection processes have been developed for purposes of meeting these objectives. For this assignment, I ask that you reflect back upon your previous coursework (i.e. PSY 210 & PSY 240) and address the questions that follow. 1.1 Descriptive Methods: There are various types of descriptive methods that allow psychologists to describe human behavior and cognition. Identify and describe as many descriptive methods as you can below. Be prepared to share these contributions with your peers.

Psychologists use observation,

You should address this question separately for the individual method types that you introduced.

The strength of observation varies based on the environment used. In a natural environment, a participant is most likely to behave in the manner they do on a normal day and thus the research is more genuine. In a lab setting, a participant may be more rigid and less likely to behave in their typical day to day manner. The strength of the lab is the controlled environment that the researcher can manipulate as needed for the purpose of their research.

The strength of the survey method is the ease of analyzing the results. With closed ended questions and rating scales, the research is easily compiled into statistics that can support the study. Open ended questions give researchers a wider understanding of the participants.

The strength of a case study is its ability to gather an enormous amount of detailed information due to the in depth look into a specific participant or group of participants. Case studies can be very useful as a way to gather research over a long period of