Ch 2Methods of Enquiry in Psychology — Class 11 Psychology, concept-first.

Psychology studies experience, behaviour and mental processes, and this chapter turns to the question of HOW psychologists actually study these things.

Like every scientific discipline, psychological enquiry works toward five interlocking goals, pursued objectively rather than through personal opinion.

What sets scientific enquiry apart is not the topic it studies but the manner in which it studies it - in an objective, systematic and testable way.

Psychologists disagree about which broad approach best suits the study of human behaviour, and the chapter contrasts two such approaches.

Psychological data differ in important ways from the data collected in other sciences, so it is worth pausing on what 'data' actually means here.

The wide variety of data described above cannot all be gathered through a single technique, so psychologists rely on a toolkit of complementary methods, choosing whichever one is best matched to the r…

Observation is one of the most powerful tools of psychological enquiry, and an especially effective way of describing behaviour.

Experiments are conducted specifically to establish a cause-effect relationship between two sets of events or variables, under carefully controlled conditions.

Correlational research is used when a psychologist wants to know how two variables are related to each other, usually for the purpose of prediction, for example, whether the amount of time a student s…

Survey research grew out of the need to study opinions, attitudes and social facts on a large scale; its earliest uses were to establish an existing 'baseline' reality, such as literacy rates, religio…

Assessing individual differences has been one of psychology's central concerns since the discipline began, and psychologists have accordingly built specialised tests for assessing characteristics such…

The case study method places the emphasis on an in-depth, detailed study of one particular case, chosen because it can shed light on a phenomenon that is not yet well understood.

Tools such as psychological tests, questionnaires and structured interviews typically contain a series of close-ended questions, where the question and its likely responses are both specified in advan…

Human experience is often too complex and layered to survive being reduced to a number; a great deal of that richness is simply lost the moment a respondent's experience is squeezed into a fixed, clos…

Beyond the strengths and weaknesses already discussed for each individual method, psychological measurement as a whole faces three broader, more general problems.

Because psychological research is fundamentally concerned with real human beings, researchers are expected to follow a defined set of ethical or moral principles while carrying out any study, broadly,…