ABSTRACT
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The question on most psychology students' lips as they discover that they have to do 2 years of research methods is ‘Why do we need research methods?’ On the face of it, it might seem like we just like torturing psychology students by making them learn lots of complicated statistics and the like. Actually, that's not the reason: most of us are nice really. The reason is that psychology is a scientific discipline that tries to understand human behaviour by using research to test and develop ideas about what drives our thoughts and behaviours. This chapter attempts to describe the research process in general terms to give you a background as to why we need research methods, and some of the important issues that we need to consider when conducting psychological research. We start by looking at how theories and research are intrinsically linked, before looking at how we can test theories (and why it's important to measure things). We then look at how we can try to identify cause and effect relationships and how we analyse data.
