The Importance of Studying Research Methods

The Importance of Studying Research Methods

I hope that you are now beginning to understand why instructors find it so important for students to take research methods or research laboratory courses as part of their behavioral science degree. To fully understand the material in a behavioral science course, you must fi rst understand how and why the research you are reading about was conducted and what the collected data mean. A fundamental understanding of research methodology will help you read about and correctly interpret the results of research in any fi eld of behavioral science. 

Evaluating Research Reports

One goal of this book is to help you learn how to evaluate scientifi c research reports. We will examine how behavioral scientists develop ideas and test them, how they measure behavior, and how they analyze and interpret the data they collect. Understanding the principles and practices of behavioral research will be useful to you because it will help you determine the quality of the research that you read about. If you read that ibuprofen relieves headaches faster than aspirin, or that children learn more in private than in public schools, you should not believe it just because the fi ndings are based on “research.” As we will discuss in more detail in later chapters, research can mislead you if it is not valid. Thus, the most important skill you can gain from the study of research methods is the ability to distinguish good research from bad research. 

Conducting Research

The second goal of this book is to help you learn how to conduct research. Such skills will obviously be useful to you if you plan a career as a behavioral scientist, where conducting research will be your most important activity. But the ability to design and execute research projects is also in demand in many other careers. For instance, advertising and marketing researchers study how to make advertising more effective, health and medical researchers study the impact of behaviors (such as drug use and smoking) on illness, and computer scientists study how people interact with computers. Furthermore, even if you are not planning a career as a researcher, jobs in almost any area of social, medical, or mental health science require that a worker be informed about behavioral research. There are many opportunities for college graduates who have developed the ability to conduct research, and you can learn about them by visiting the American Psychological Association website at http://www. apa.org/students/brochure/.

          There is no question that conducting behavioral research is diffi cult. Unlike beakers full of sulfuric acid, the objects of study in the behavioral sciences— human beings and animals—differ tremendously from each other. No two people are alike, nor do they respond to attempts to study them in the same way. People are free to make their own decisions and to choose their own behaviors. They choose whether to participate in research, whether to take it seriously, and perhaps even whether to sabotage it. Furthermore, whereas the determinants of the pressure of a gas or the movement of a particle can be fairly well defi ned, the causes of human behavior are not at this time well understood. Although these diffi culties represent real challenges, they also represent the thrill of conducting behavioral research. The path is diffi cult, but the potential rewards of understanding behavior are great.

Thinking Critically About Research

       Progress in the behavioral sciences depends on people, like you, who have the skills to critically create, read, evaluate, and criticize research. As you read this book, you will acquire skills that allow you to think critically about research. Once you have learned these skills, you will be able to conduct sound research and to determine the value of research that you read about. In short, you will be able to ask the important questions, such as “How was the research conducted?” “How were the data analyzed?” and, more generally, “Are the conclusions drawn warranted by the facts?” In the remainder of  this chapter, we will turn to these questions by considering the three major research approaches to studying human behavior.