Introduction

Psychology studies experience, behaviour and mental processes, and this chapter turns to the question of HOW psychologists actually study these things. Like every science, psychology aims to describe, predict, explain and control what it studies, and it does this through systematic, formal observation rather than casual impression. Because human behaviour raises so many different kinds of questions, no single method can serve every purpose, so psychologists draw on a toolkit that includes observation, experiments, correlational studies, surveys, psychological tests and case studies, choosing whichever method best fits the question at hand. This chapter introduces the goals of psychological enquiry, the kinds of data psychologists work with, the major methods used to collect that data, how the data collected is analysed, and the practical and ethical limits within which all this research must be conducted.