Q.What are the goals of scientific enquiry?

Psychological enquiry, like any branch of science, is organised around five interlocking goals that guide how a study is designed and interpreted. The first goal is description, capturing a behaviour or phenomenon as accurately and specifically as possible, so that it can be clearly distinguished from other, similar behaviours. This is more demanding than it sounds: a researcher interested in 'study habits', for example, has to break that broad idea down into concrete, observable components, attending classes regularly, submitting assignments on time, following a fixed revision schedule, before any meaningful description can be recorded. The second goal is prediction. Once a behaviour has been accurately described, a researcher can examine how it relates to other behaviours, events or conditions, and use that relationship to forecast, within some margin of error, when or under what circumstances the behaviour is likely to occur again; this predictive power becomes more dependable as more people are studied. The third goal is explanation, which asks the deeper question of WHY a behaviour happens. Here psychologists look specifically for the causal, or antecedent, conditions that bring a particular behaviour about, and equally, the conditions under which it fails to occur, with the ultimate aim of establishing a genuine cause-effect relationship between two variables or events, rather than merely noting that they tend to occur together. The fourth goal is control, which follows naturally from explanation: once the antecedent conditions of a behaviour are properly understood, a researcher (or practitioner) can deliberately change those conditions to make the behaviour happen, to reduce it, or to strengthen it; a therapist bringing about a change in a client's behaviour through a course of therapy is a good real-world illustration of control in action. The fifth and final goal is application, which is really the whole point of the first four: psychological research is ultimately conducted to solve genuine, practical problems in people's lives and to raise their overall quality of life, whether through education, therapy, workplace design, or interventions such as yoga and meditation to help reduce stress and improve efficiency. These five goals are not independent of one another, accurate description enables prediction, prediction depends on some implicit explanatory understanding, and genuine control is only possible once a behaviour has truly been explained, and together they define what it means for psychological research to be conducted in an objective manner, which is the standard every method described later in the chapter is trying to meet.