This video is going to be a little introduction into how psychologists do research and how they use the scientific method. Now, most research in psychology begins with a theory, which is an organized system of assumptions and principles that attempts to explain a set of phenomena. Good theories in psychology are theories that are testable, so we should be able to actually do research that supports the theory. They are parsimonious, meaning that they offer the simplest explanation possible, and they are supported by scientific evidence. Typically, the more evidence we have to support the theory, the better that theory is considered to be.
Now, like all scientists, psychologists do research using the scientific method and so they're going to begin the research process by finding some kind of problem or some kind of gap in our current literature or in our current knowledge. Then, once we've figured out what we want to be doing research on, we're going to be creating a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a statement that attempts to predict phenomena. And so, what you're going to see is that theories tend to be quite broad and quite general, whereas the hypothesis is where things tend to get very, very specific. A hypothesis is going to be trying to really specify relationships among variables that can be empirically tested.
So, for example, I might say children with poor self-regulation skills will exhibit more aggression toward their peers compared to children with high self-regulation skills. A very specific and testable statement there. Right? So that is a hypothesis. Now, from there you're going to be designing and conducting a study.
Once that's done, you're going to be analyzing your data and drawing conclusions. Data are just any observations that you got from your study. Typically, data are going to be in numerical form, but they don't have to be. They're not always. That's just what is more common in psychology.
Psychologists analyze data using statistics. So, we're going to be going over just some very basic statistics a little bit later in this chapter to help you be able to better understand and read research. And then finally, one of the most important steps in the scientific method process here is for the psychologist to then publish their findings in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Peer review just means that other credible psychologists in the field have looked at the research, and they have verified that it is indeed good science. Academic journals are basically just outlets that psychologists can publish their findings in.
Different subfields of psychology have different academic journals. There's a ton of them, and they vary in popularity and prestige. Alright. So that is our little introduction to how psychologists do research, and I'll see you guys in our next video. Bye-bye.
