Want to try a psychology experiment?
How to conduct a psychology experiment?
You have techniques but you don’t know how conduct a
psychology experiment on others. Don't panic! Learn more about ten of the steps
you should follow in order to successfully complete a psychology experiment.
Conducting your first psychology experiment can be a
long, complicated, and intimidating process. It can be especially confusing if
you are not quite sure where to begin or which steps to take. Like other
sciences, psychology utilizes the scientific method and bases conclusions upon
empirical evidence. When conducting an experiment, it is important to follow
the five basic steps of the scientific method:
1. Ask a
question that can be tested
2. Design a
study and collect data
3. Analyze
results and reach conclusions
4. Share the
results with the scientific community
5. Replicate
the results
These five steps serve as a general outline of the entire
process. You should follow these steps while conducting an psychology
experiment.
The first step in
your psychology experiment is to come up with a research question or problem.
Learn more below about some of the places to look for ideas for your psychology
experiment.
Picking a research problem can be one of the most
challenging steps. After all, there are so many different topics you might
choose to investigate. Stumped for an idea? Consider some of the following:
• Investigate a commonly held belief. Folk psychology is
a good source of unanswered questions that can serve as the basis for
psychological research. For example, many people believe that staying up all
night to cram for a big exam can actually hurt test performance. You could
conduct a study in which you compare the test scores of students who stayed up
all night studying, versus the scores of students who got a full night's sleep
prior to the exam.
• Review psychology literature. Published studies are a
great source of unanswered research questions. In many cases, the authors will
even note the need for further research. Find a published study that you find
intriguing, and then come up with some questions that require further
exploration.
• Think about everyday problems. There are many practical
applications for psychology research. Explore various problems that you or
others face each day, and then consider how you could research potential
solutions. For example, you might investigate different memorization strategies
to determine which methods are most effective.
2. Operationally Define Your Variables
Before you begin
your psychology experiment, it is essential to operationally define all of your
variables.
Variables are anything that might impact the outcome of
your study. An operational definition describes exactly what the variables are
and how they are measured within the context of your study. For example, if you
were doing a study on the impact of sleep deprivation on driving performance,
you would need to operationally define what you mean by sleep deprivation and
driving performance.
In this example you might define sleep deprivation as
getting less than seven hours of sleep at night and define driving performance
as how well a participant does on a driving test.
What is the purpose of operationally defining variables?
The main purpose is control. By understanding what your are measuring, you can
control for it by holding the variable constant between all of the groups or
manipulating it as an independent variable.
3. Develop a Hypothesis
The next step in conducting your psychology experiment is
to develop a testable hypothesis.
The next step is to develop a testable hypothesis that
predicts how the operationally defined variables are related. In our example in
the previous step, our hypothesis might be: "Students who are sleep
deprived will perform worse than students who are not sleep deprived on a test
of driving performance."
In order to determine if the results of the study are
significant, it is essential to also have a null hypothesis. The null
hypothesis is the prediction that one variable will have no association to the
other variable. In other words, the null hypothesis assumes that there will be
no difference in the effects of the two treatments in our experimental and
control groups.
The null hypothesis is assumed to be valid unless
contradicted by the results. The experimenters can either reject the null
hypothesis in favor of the alternative hypothesis ornot reject the null
hypothesis.
It is important to remember that not rejecting the null
hypothesis does not mean that you areaccepting the null hypothesis. To say that
you are accepting the null hypothesis is to suggest that something is true
simply because you did not find any evidence against it. This represents a
logical fallacy that should be avoided in scientific research.
4. Select an Experimental Design
Learn more about
three of the basic experimental designs you might use when conducting your
psychology experiment.
After conducting background research and finalizing your
hypothesis, your next step is to develop an experimental design. There are
three basic types of designs that you might utilize. Each has its own strengths
and weaknesses.
• Pre-Experimental Designs: This type of experimental
design does not include a control group. A single group of participants is
studied, and there is no comparison between a treatment group and a control
group. Examples of pre-experimental designs include case studies (one group is
given a treatment and the results are measured) and pre-test/post-test studies
(one group is tested, given a treatment and then retested).
• Quasi-Experimental Designs: This type of experimental
design does include a control group, but the design does not include
randomization.
• True Experimental Designs: A true experimental design
include both of the elements that the pre-experimental designs and
quasi-experimental designs lack on their own - control groups and random
assignment to groups.
6. Standardize Your Procedures
Standardizing your
procedures helps ensure that the things that you are comparing are equivalent.
In order to arrive at legitimate conclusions, it is
essential to compare apples to apples. Each participant in each group must
receive the same treatment under the same conditions. For example, in our
hypothetical study on the effects of sleep deprivation on driving performance, the
driving test must be administered to each participant in the same way. The
driving course must be the same, the obstacles faced must be the same, and the
time given must be the same.
7. Choose Your Participants
When conducting
your experiment, you do not need to test every individual in a group. Instead,
you can select a random sample of participants from the larger population.
In addition to making sure that the testing conditions
are standardized, it is also essential to ensure that your pool of participants
is the same. If the individuals in your control group (those who are not sleep
deprived) all happen to be amateur race car drivers while your experimental
group (those that are sleep deprived) are all people who just recently earned
their drivers licenses, your experiment will lack standardization.
When choosing subjects, there are a number of different
techniques you can use. A simple random sample involves randomly selecting a
number of participants from a group. A stratified random sample requires
randomly selecting participants from different subsets of the population. These
subsets might include characteristics such as geographic location, age, sex,
race, or socioeconomic status.
8. Conduct Tests and Collect Data
After carefully
designing your study, now is the time to actually conduct the experiment.
Administer your testing procedures and then collect the data from the
participants.
After you have selected participants, the next steps are
to conduct your tests and collect the data. Prior to doing any testing,
however, there are a few important concerns that need to be addressed. First,
you need to be sure that your testing procedures are ethical. Generally, you
will need to gain permission to conduct any type of testing with human
participants by submitting the details of your experiment to your school's
Institutional Review Board, sometimes referred to as the 'Human Subjects
Committee.'
After you have gained approval from your academic
institution's IRB, you will need to presentinformed consent forms to each of
your participants. This form offers information on the study, the data that
will be gathered, and how the results will be used. The form also gives
participants the option to withdraw from the study at any point in time.
Once this step has been completed, you can begin
administering your testing procedures and collecting the data.
Step
9: Analyze the Results
9. Analyze the Results
The next step is
to analyze the data that you collected during your psychology experiment.
After collecting your data, it is time to analyze the
results of your experiment. Researchers utilize statistics to determine if the
results of the study support the original hypothesis and to determine if the
results are statistically significant. Statistical significance means that the
results of the study are unlikely to have occurred simply by chance.
The types of statistical methods you use to analyze your
data depend largely on the type of data that you collected. If you are using a
random sample of a larger population, you will need to utilize inferential
statistics. These statistical methods make inferences about how the results
relate to the population at large. Because you are making inferences based upon
a sample, it has to be assumed that there will be a certain margin of error.
10.
Write Up and Share Your Results
The final step in
conducting your psychology experiment is to communicate your results. Learn
more about the structure of a psychology paper and find tips for writing each
section.
Your final task in conducting a psychology experiment is
to communicate your results. By sharing your experiment with the scientific
community, you are contributing to the knowledge base on that particular topic.
One of the most common ways to share research results is to publish the study
in a peer-reviewed professional journal. Other methods include sharing results
at conferences, in book chapters, or in academic presentations.
In your case, it is likely that your class instructor
will expect a formal write-up of your experiment in the same format required in
a professional journal article or lab report:
• Title
Page
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Method
• Results
• Discussion
• References
• Tables
and Figures
Follow the Above rules and if you have any doubts ask
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