Some Important Methods in Psychology

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 research question. Observation is used, for instance, to study spectators' behaviour at a football match; an experiment can test whether students perform better in the room where they studied a topic versus in the exam hall, revealing a cause-effect relationship; a correlational study can check whether intelligence and self-esteem are related, for prediction purposes; a survey can capture students' attitudes toward the privatisation of education; psychological tests can measure individual differences; and a case study can trace how a single child's langu …