SAGE Journal Articles
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This report reflects on the current provision of qualitative research methods within a UK psychology department’s teaching programs. It considers how this has contributed to the poor integration of qualitative research methods into undergraduate teaching and also considers how some key conceptual issues need to be addressed in order to facilitate student engagement with qualitative research methods. Furthermore, it sets out the authors’ plans to create a pragmatic approach to research methods teaching, by readdressing what they want their students to learn and how they deliver it. The authors suggest that students should be engaging with the criticisms and conceptual challenges faced by both paradigms. This is done with the overall aim of eventually creating a research methods teaching program that focuses on creating pragmatic researchers able to use a variety of methods, regardless of whether they be quantitative or qualitative.
Questions to Consider
1. Discuss some of the key conceptual issues the authors posit that need to be addressed in order to facilitate student engagement with qualitative research methods.
Cognitive Domain: Comprehension
Difficulty Level: Medium
2. How does a better understanding of the three epistemological questions help students better appropriate research methodology for their own research? What are these three epistemological questions?
Cognitive Domain: Comprehension
Difficulty Level: Medium
3. What do the authors recommend to rectify the underrepresentation of QlRM in RM teaching?
Cognitive Domain: Comprehension
Difficulty Level: Medium
Paradigm-oriented research strategies in experimental psychology have strengths and limitations. On the one hand, experimental paradigms play a crucial epistemic and heuristic role in basic psychological research. On the other hand, empirical research is often limited to the observed effects in a certain paradigm, and theoretical models are frequently tied to the particular features of the given paradigm. A paradigm-driven research strategy therefore jeopardizes the pursuit of research questions and theoretical models that go beyond a specific paradigm. As one example of a more integrative approach, recent research on illusory and spurious correlations has attempted to overcome the limitations of paradigm-specific models in the context of biased contingency perception and social stereotyping. Last but not least, the use of statistical models for the analysis of elementary cognitive functions is a means toward a more integrative terminology and theoretical perspective across different experimental paradigms and research domains.
Question to Consider
1. Define and explain paradigm-oriented research strategies in experimental psychology and discuss the strengths and limitations.
Cognitive Domain: Comprehension, Analysis
Difficulty Level: Medium
2. How does paradigm-driven research strategy jeopardize the pursuit of research questions and theoretical models that go beyond a specific paradigm? Explain.
Cognitive Domain: Comprehension, Knowledge
Difficulty Level: Hard
3. Discuss and illustrate one way to avoid a paradigm-specific focus in psychological theorizing.
Cognitive Domain: Knowledge, Application
Difficulty Level: Hard
Ever since Freud, the couch has been viewed as an important – some would argue essential – component of psychoanalysis. Although many theoretical papers and case reports have addressed the use of the couch in psychoanalysis, no empirical study has investigated its effect on psychoanalytic process or outcome. After a review of the literature, a number of research designs are proposed that might be used in such an investigation. Finally, preliminary empirical data are presented from archived audiotapes of two psychoanalyses: one in which the patient switched from lying down to sitting up, and one in which the opposite occurred. The aim is to stimulate research-oriented psychoanalysts to undertake empirical investigations of the theoretical concepts underlying the use of the couch and, more generally, to present a specific example of research as a paradigm for a broader research agenda for empirical investigation of the key theoretical ideas underlying psychoanalysis.
Questions to Consider
1. The authors mention finding only two published empirical studies and a survey of clinicians; how helpful were these? Explain.
Cognitive Domain: Comprehension
Difficulty Level: Medium
2. Explain the research methods used in two published empirical studies the authors discuss.
Cognitive Domain: Comprehension
Difficulty Level: Medium
3. Discuss at least 3 of the 6 proposed research designs used to investigate the use of the couch in psychoanalysis.
Cognitive Domain: Comprehension
Difficulty Level: Medium
This study analyzed the magnitude of experimental intervention outcomes as a function of violations in internal and external validity for studies that included students with learning disabilities. The results indicated that treatment outcomes were significantly affected by the following violations: teacher effects, establishing criterion levels of instructional performance, reliance on experimental measures, using different measures between pretest and posttest, using a sample heterogenous in age, and using incorrect units of analysis. Furthermore, the underreporting of information related to ethnicity, locale of the study, psychometric data, and teacher applications positively inflated the magnitude of treatment outcomes. A weighted hierarchical regression analysis revealed that composite scores of the aforementioned high-risk variables accounted for 16% of the total variance in effect size. The implications for interpreting intervention research to practice are discussed.
Questions to Consider
1. Why is the topic of internal validity important when considering treatment options for students with learning disabilities?
Learning Objective: Internal validity
Cognitive Domain: Evaluation
Difficulty Level: Medium
2. The authors identify random assignment as one of the threats to the internal validity of evaluating treatment outcomes. Random assignment helps: (a) insure that sample sizes are equal, (b) control for potential confounds, (c) introduce extraneous variables, (d) create a block design.
Learning Objective: Random assignment
Cognitive Domain: Application
Difficulty Level: Medium
3. On p. 222, the authors state that they excluded studies with no control condition. The likely reason for this is: (a) that a control group offers a baseline, (b) control groups are not really needed, (c) with no control group there is no random assignment, (d) they could not find the appropriate papers.
Learning Objective: Control group
Cognitive Domain: Comprehension
Difficulty Level: Hard
The interaction between interviewer and respondent is one of the most significant sources to interviewer bias, with respondents often answering questions in a way they think is socially desirable. This bias, called the social desirability bias, has been studied in a variety of context and found to influence the validity of data collected. In this study, we examine whether the national identity of an interviewer will bias results in a survey on tourist destinations when there is a match between interviewer nationality and target destination. In a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment, the main finding is that respondents will evaluate more positively an advertisement, the attractiveness, and the people from a country if interviewed by someone from that country compared to being interviewed by someone not from the target country. Our results imply that the practice of interviewing tourists while being at a destination, by a local or domestic interviewer, is a situation severely prone to biased results. Theoretical and managerial implications are offered based on these findings.
Questions to Consider
1. The study results indicate that being interviewed by a native at the tourist site introduces bias. What are some of the ways that the tourism industry could reduce social desirability bias?
Learning Objective: Social desirability response bias
Cognitive Domain: Application
Difficulty Level: Easy
2. Dahlgren and Hansen identify all of the following as sources of interviewer effects except: (a) facial expressions, (b) interviewer race, (c) interview location, (d) interviewer sex.
Learning Objective: Interviewer effects
Cognitive Domain: Comprehension
Difficulty Level: Medium
3. Self-deception positivity is described as (a) being caused by high pressure situations, (b) a dispositional tendency to respond too positively, (c) the same as impression management, (d) having no basis in reality.
Learning Objective: Social desirability response bias
Cognitive Domain: Knowledge
Difficulty Level: Medium