ABSTRACT
Route map
In the last chapter we saw the importance of collecting data to inform theories and to try to explain human behaviour. This chapter looks at how we conduct research. We begin by looking at a very important aspect of research: ethics. We overview some important issues to consider in conducting ethical research such as informing people about what you're doing, deceiving people, debriefing participants, confidentiality and the right to withdraw from the experiment. We then turn our attention to experimental designs. We learnt a bit about cause and effect in the previous chapter and we build on this to find out why control conditions and randomisation are important in experimental research. We then look at different ways to measure and manipulate variables and overview some commonly used experimental designs. We then turn our attention to non-experimental designs before considering how we actually find people to test.
