Empirical Research And Data Are At The Heart Of Psychological Science

Cohen’s paper The Earth is Round (p>0.05) is a critique of null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST). In his article, Cohen presents his arguments about what is wrong with NHST and suggests ways in which researchers can improve their research, as well as the way they report their research. Cohen’s main point is that researchers who use NHST often misinterpret the meaning of p-values and what can be concluded from them (Cohen, 1994). Cohen also shows that the NHST is close to worthless. NHST is a way to show how unlikely a result would be if the null hypothesis were true. A Type I error is where the researcher incorrectly rejects a true null hypothesis and a Type II error is where the researcher incorrectly accepts the false null

American Psychological Association. Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (2015). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association

Dunbar, G. (2005). Evaluating Research Methods in Psychology. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Example; you have a cat and the cat just playing around with a ball and when you

The lesson that is perhaps the most important one we learned this week is the scientific method. The scientific method is not only used in particularly every subsection in science, but allows psychologists to test different ideas about behavior. Pastorino and Doyle-Portillo in the General Psychology textbook describes the scientific method as “ a set of rules for gathering and analyzing information that enables you to test an idea or hypothesis”. (8) All scientists adhere to these standard set of rules in order to be able to better analyze the data and share the results throughout the scientific community. The scientific method consists of a few distinct parts: allow for observation, make a prediction, form a hypothesis, choose a research method/ design an

This paper will review different styles of research design along with how different variables within research can be measured.

The sample for this study consisted of 222 participants who were second year psychology students from the University of Newcastle. All students were participating as part of a course requirement and all had given their consent to participating in the study.

COMMENTS argument is that because the average effect size for published research was equivalent to that of a medium effect, the reviewer 's decision to reject the bogus manuscript under the nonsignificant condition was "reasonable." Further examination of the Haase et al. (1982) article and our own analysis of published research, however, demonstrates that the power of the bogus study was great enough to detect effect sizes that are typical of research published in JCP, which was our intention when we designed the bogus study. First, although the median effect size (if) for all univariate statistical tests, significant and nonsignificant, reported by Haase et al. (1982) was .083, this index was steadily increasing at a rate of approximately .5% per year, so that the projected median if- in 1981 (the year our study was completed) would be .13. Importantly, an r)2 of .13 corresponds to an effect size (/) of .39, which Cohen (1977) designates as a large effect. A further examination of the Haase et al. (1982) data also lends support to our argument. Their analysis examined the strength of association for 11,044 univariate statistical tests derived from only 701 manuscripts; thus, each manuscript reported an average of more than 15 statistical tests. Since statistically significant and

Cullen and Gendreau compare and contrast the many studies on this subject, the meta-analyses conclusions, their strengths, weaknesses, inconsistencies, and the trends that follow the studies

The researchers here described what methods were used to produce comparable groups by analyzing risk of bias, and determined whether blinding was used. The quality assessments were reviewed by 2 authors and the statistical heterogeneity in each meta-analysis was assessed using the T2, I2 and Chi2 statistics. (Mackeen, Berghella &Larsen,

Gravetter and Wallnau (2015) contend that a close relationship exists between hypothesis testing and the use of confidence intervals. For example, all estimates in the range are credible values for the assessing of parameters when a confidence interval of 95% is constructed (Gordon, 2010; Gravetter & Wallnau, 2015; Howell, 2014). In comparison, values outside the interval are rejected and are considered improbable. Howell (2014) contends that if the null hypothesis includes the confidence interval within it, the null hypothesis will not be rejected; however, the null hypothesis will be rejected if the value of the parameter is outside the confidence interval. Bonett and Wright (2014) argue that when planning a multiple regression analysis, it is essential to attain a population size that will support the study and provide narrow confidence intervals. Therefore, the confidence level in this study was constructed at 1-alpha or 95% interval, meaning that the null hypothesis could be rejected at the 0.05

Use of null hypothesis significance testing, while excellent in theory, has its own inherent limitations. Cohen (1994) suggests that the null hypothesis, does not give us the answer to questions we

A debate rages in psychology. It is not one of the usual kind, dwelling on a specific aspect of the mind or a new drug, but a controversy dealing with the very foundations of psychology. The issue is determining how psychologists should treat patients and on what psychologists base their choices. Some feel that they must be empirically-supported treatments, treatments backed by hard data and scientifically supported. Others feel that this standard for treatments is much too confining for the complex field of psychology and that many good treatments cannot be backed by hard data. The American Psychological Association President Task Force on Evidence-Based Treatment came out with a plan for psychology that effectively maintains a high

Drawing on examples from chapters 3, 4 and 8 of Investigating Psychology, examine and assess the extent to which psychological research is of value to society.

At the beginning of this subterm, I had a limited understanding of the proper research methods used within psychology. Despite having previously completed several psychology courses, two being upper level courses, there was still much I needed to learn pertaining to psychology research methods. While this research class has been on only an introductory