Getting Ideas

(Research Hypothesis)Getting Ideas

As you can well imagine, there are plenty of topics to study and plenty of approaches to studying those topics. For instance, my colleagues within the  Psychology Department at the University of Maryland study such diverse topics as:

 Anxiety in children 

The interpretation of dreams 

The effects of caffeine on thinking 

How birds recognize each other 

How praying mantises hear 

How people from different cultures react differently in negotiation 

The factors that lead people to engage in terrorism

 The point is, there are a lot of things to study! 

      You may already be developing such ideas for your research projects. As with most things based on creative and original thinking, these ideas will not come to you overnight. For the best scientists, research is always in the back of their minds. Whether they are reading journal articles, teaching classes, driving in the car, or exercising, scientists are continually thinking about ways to use research to study the questions that interest them. Good behavioral scientists are always alert to their experiences and ready to apply those experiences to their research. 

        Because there are so many things to study, you may think it would be easy to come up with research ideas. On the contrary, informative research ideas are hard to come by. For instance, although you may be interested in studying depression, nurturance, memory, or helping, having an idea of a research interest is only a very preliminary fi rst step in developing a testable research idea. Before you can begin your research project, you must determine what aspects of your topic you wish to focus on and then refi ne these interests into a specifi c research design. And for your ideas to result in an accumulation of knowledge, they must be informed by past research. This is going to take time and require a lot of thought on your part. 

          Scientists develop their ideas about what to study in a number of different ways, and in the next sections we will consider some methods for getting ideas.1 As you read this section, keep in mind the types of research that we discussed in Chapter 1. You may want to begin your search for ideas by determining whether you are more interested in a basic research project or in a specifi c applied question. And you will want to think about whether your research question is best tested using a descriptive, a correlational, or an experimental research design.

Solving Important Real-World Problems

Many behavioral scientists develop their research programs around their concerns with human problems. For instance, behavioral scientists have studied how to improve children’s reading skills, how to alleviate stress in corporate managers, how to promote volunteering, and how to reduce aggression among gang members. Other scientists have studied methods for reducing risky behavior such as unprotected sex and cigarette smoking. Still others have studied the effectiveness of psychotherapy or how juries make decisions. Thus, one way to get ideas for research is to develop an applied research project that has the goal of producing a better understanding of the causes of, or potential solutions to, everyday problems. 

Using Observation and Intuition 

          Because much behavioral research involves the study of people in their everyday lives, it is often possible to develop research ideas on the basis of intuition or hunches, which are themselves based on observation of everyday behavior. Getting ideas about the relationships among variables by observing specifi c facts is known as the inductive method. In this approach, your own curiosity becomes the source of your ideas. For instance, you may have noticed that several friends of yours have had trouble developing satisfactory romantic relationships. You may have developed a theory about why these particular people have this particular behavioral problem, and you may want to test this idea in a research project. As we have seen in Chapter 1, it is useful to test hunches about behavior because those hunches often “feel” more right to us than they actually turn out to be. Only by subjecting our hunches to systematic investigation can we be sure of their validity. Some important scientifi c ideas have been developed through observation. For instance, Sigmund Freud developed his theory of personality by carefully observing the patients in his clinical practice. In a similar way, Jean Piaget developed his theory of cognitive development in children by watching

the development of his own children. 

        Although using observation and intuition has the potential of producing new ideas and approaches, there is also a possible danger to this approach. Studies that are based on intuition alone but do not relate to existing scientifi c knowledge may not advance the field very far. Consider a research project designed to test the idea that people learn more in a class taught by left-handed teachers than in a class taught by right-handed teachers. In the long run, such research could make a contribution to science by linking brain symmetry and creativity to teaching effectiveness. But, the results of a single study testing this prediction will probably not make much of a  contribution to the larger body of scientific knowledge because there is no existing explanation for why a left-handed instructor should be better than a right-handed instructor other than the hunch of the person who developed the idea.  

          Although you may use your observations of everyday behavior to generate research ideas, or develop your research around solutions to a practical social problem, you should try to link your research to the fi ndings from other studies investigating the same concepts. A study concerning creative thinking will be more useful if it is related to existing research about creativity, even if the goal of the study is to demonstrate that the existing research has drawn incorrect conclusions or is incomplete. The more links you can draw between your research and existing research, the greater is the likelihood that your research will make an important contribution to the field.

Using Existing Research

         The previous discussion has perhaps already suggested to you that I think that the best way to generate research ideas is by reading about and studying existing scientific research and then using this existing knowledge to generate new research ideas and topics. Although basing your research ideas on already existing research may seem to limit the contribution that your project can make, this is not the case. In fact, research that is based on or related to previous research fi ndings tends to advance science more rapidly because it contributes to the accumulation of a unifi ed and integrated body of knowledge. Our substantial knowledge about topics such as the causes of prejudice or the development of reading skills in children exists precisely because of the cumulative work of hundreds of investigators who have conducted research that built on previously conducted research.

 Finding Limiting Conditions. Because every research project is limited in some way or another, the goal of most research is to expand on or improve existing research. One useful strategy for developing research ideas is to consider the potential limiting conditions of previous research. For instance, for many years people believed that women were more likely to conform to the opinions of others than men were. Only when scientists began to consider the types of tasks that had been used in conformity research was a basic limiting condition found. Previous research had relied to a large extent on topics (such as football and baseball) in which men were more knowledgeable than women. However, subsequent research demonstrated that the original conclusion was too broad. This research showed that women do conform more than men, but only when the topic is one about which women believe that men have more knowledge than they do (Eagly & Chravala, 1986). If the topic is one in which women believe they are more knowledgeable (for instance, fashion design), then men are found to conform more than women. In this case, research assessing the limiting conditions of existing fi ndings made a signifi cant contribution by developing a new explanation for a phenomenon. A finding that had previously been explained in terms of differences between men and women was now explained in terms of differences in knowledge about the topic.

Explaining Conflicting Findings. Another strategy for developing research ideas is to attempt to explain confl icting fi ndings in a research area. In many cases, some studies testing a given idea show one pattern of data, whereas other studies do not show that pattern. And some studies may even show the opposite pattern. Research that can account for these discrepancies can be extremely useful. One classic example of this approach occurred in the 1960s when Robert Zajonc (1965) noted that some studies had demonstrated that tasks such as bicycle riding or jogging were performed better in the presence of others, whereas other studies showed that tasks such as solving mathematical problems were usually solved more effi ciently when people were alone. There was no known explanation for these differences.  

            Zajonc proposed that being with others increased psychological arousal and that arousal amplifi ed the “dominant” or most likely response in a given setting. Because the dominant response was usually the correct response on easy or well-learned tasks (such as jogging) but the incorrect response on diffi cult or poorly learned tasks (such as math problems), the presence of others might either increase or decrease performance depending on task difficulty. This became a very important principle in social psychology, and the findings have been confirmed in many different experiments. Zajonc’s research was particularly valuable because it was able to account in a consistent way for what had previously appeared to be inconsistent research findings. 

         In short, because existing research provides so many ideas for future research, it is very important to be aware of what other research has been done in an area. Indeed, one of the most important qualities of a good scientist is an open mind. Careful and creative analysis of existing research can produce many important ideas for future research projects.