Description
Research Methods in Psychology: Evaluating a World of Information, 4th Edition (Morling)
Most psychology majors will never run a laboratory study. Nearly all of them will spend their lives reading claims that are supposedly backed by research. Morling built her text around that asymmetry, and it has become the leading research methods book by taking the consumer of research as seriously as the producer.
The result is a course that develops genuine critical-thinking skill: students learn to ask what kind of claim is being made, what design would support it, and whether the study in front of them actually delivers.
The Framework
- Three kinds of claim — frequency, association and causal — and the different evidence each one requires.
- Four big validities — construct, external, statistical and internal — used as a consistent interrogation tool throughout.
- Measurement — operational definitions, reliability and validity of measures.
- Design — surveys and observation, correlational studies, simple and multivariate experiments, quasi-experiments and small-N designs.
- Statistics in service of interpretation — what results mean rather than how to grind them out.
- Ethics in psychological research.
- Replication and generalisation — including the field’s own reckoning with reproducibility.
Why Students Get On With It
- Examples drawn from popular media, so the skill transfers immediately outside the classroom.
- A repeated analytical framework rather than a parade of unconnected designs.
- Written to be read, which is not the norm in this corner of the syllabus.
Who It Is For
- Undergraduate psychology students taking research methods.
- Sociology, education, nursing and criminal justice students needing the same skills.
- Graduate students revisiting design and validity before a thesis.
- Anyone who wants to read science journalism sceptically and well.
Book Details
- Title: Research Methods in Psychology: Evaluating a World of Information
- Author: Beth Morling
- Edition: Fourth Edition
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
- Publication date: December 1, 2020
- Format: Paperback, 672 pages
- ISBN-13: 978-0393536263
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