Doing Collaborative Research in Psychology offers an engaging journey through the process of conducting research in psychology. Using an innovative team-based approach, this hands-on guide will assist undergraduates with their research—in their courses and in collaboration with faculty or graduate student mentors. The focus on this team-based approach reflects the collaborative nature of research methods and experimental psychology. Students learn how to work as a team, generate creative research ideas, design and pilot studies, recruit participants, collect and analyze data, write up results in APA style, and prepare and give formal research presentations. Students also learn practical ways in which they can promote their research skills as they apply to jobs or graduate school. A unique feature to this book is the ability to read chapters of the text either sequentially or separately, which allows the instructor or research mentor the flexibility to assign those chapters most relevant to the current state of the research project.

Experimental Design

Experimental design

Seven Lessons (Plus or Minus Two)

  • Avoid complex designs. You will be rewarded with happy participants (who provide better data), manageable analyses, and a focused test of your team's hypothesis.
  • Work as a team to design a strong experiment. Consider multiple perspectives, refrain from putting any single idea on a pedestal, and be willing to compromise.
  • Minimize unwanted effects by using random assignment and carefully attending to and controlling for extraneous variables that might interfere with your results.
  • Select your measures with care, because no matter how strong your independent variable may be, your team will not find an effect if the dependent variable is weak or inappropriate.
  • Evaluating whether a variable such as age or personality influences the strength of the ...
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