http://em2904.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/a-testable-hypothesis-is-it-always-enough/#comment-61
a last little bit of work for wendy… :)
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Should psychology be written for the layman or should science be exclusively for scientists?
Should psychology be written for the layman or should science be exclusively for scientists? There are a lot of factors that may influence the answer to this question. For example, availability and understanding, distribution, generalisability and usefulness.
Availability is a big issue for psychologists, there are dedictated scientific journals to certain areas of the brain, certain disorders and aspects of cognition, all of which you must subscribe too if you are interested in the that area of research. Thus, only psychologists or clinicians will receive the information about your studies. So why should they take their time and use effort to write in a way that any one could understand, when the largest bulk of the readers will all have understanding of the scientific area.
These papers and journals will also be available on google scholar or in various university e-journal libraries, which again means they are quite difficult to get hold of, especially as a large percentage of the papers on google scholar you have to pay to access anyway.
However, the research, a large percentage of which applies to everyday people, possibly for ethics sake as much as anything else should be understandable, to allow the participants to understand how and what they did and the final results of the study. The way the results can be generalised to the population may be of great interest to the average person, but they are currently loath to read it as they are aware they may not understand the more technical waffle scientists produce.
It is weird in my belief that the journals and papers are so hard to come by, because the results and ideas they work upon could in theory be very useful in all aspects of life. The general public could make use of the studies on, for example, infant development, treatment of disorders, motivation, memory and recall etc etc.
In conclusion, as much as it may be applicable and useful to everyone in everyday life, the lack of access to the information means that so few people will read it then it may as well be written in the easiest way for academics and professors in that area of research to use, which saves everyone more time and hassle. Before they start making journals easier to read and understand, they should first make them more accessible.
Wendy’s Work…
Is the term “approaching significance” cheating?
Firstly, what is meant by the term approaching significance? It is basically a term used by psychologists who’s results fractionally miss out on being significant. For example, if you received a significance of .058 then it is technically un-significant but by such a small margin that it may well have been significant with just one other participant or without a measuring error. But the question is, is using this phrase cheating?
Well there are reasons why this phrase might be used. For example an experiment that receives results this close to the significance line it only takes a few more results your way to be able to state that your experimental results are significant. With such a minimal difference between the significance line and the received significance then the experimental results must surely be effective (in the case of testing a new drug or treatment.)
However the point still stands that it is not significant. If you bend the level given for significance, where do you stop it. This science needs an immobile line that psychologists need to aim for, if they can move that line one way or the other then many more experiments may be given as significant or insignificant, thus leading to type one and two errors on the researchers behalf.
Also, ‘approaching significance’ leads the idea that the more you test the more likely it is that it will be proved as significant, but this can go both ways, it is always possible that this person received a biased sample for some reason (un-be known to the researcher) and that the more people are experimented on the less and less significant this result is going to become.
In conclusion, this phrase should not be deemed as cheating or as not cheating, if this phrase is needed, surely it is vital that this experiment be replicated? Or keep going with more participants in the same experiment until you reach a significant effect, or the significance gets worse.
Blog Comments.. for Wendy :)
Is there anything that can’t be measured in Psychology?
This is a very interesting and a very difficult question to answer, and depends completely on context and point of view and the approach to the study. Concepts in psychology are often very theoretical. Giving the rise to the term hypothetical construct (Morey, 1991). A construct being a complex psychological concept, an example of which would be intelligence. You cannot just measure intelligence in a simple short questionnaire, it takes a lot of effort and a few different tests measuring different parts of function as intelligence is an umbrella term for many different aspects of the brains functions.
The main difficulties in my view are measuring hypothetical constructs that have no way to be measured. A lot of the time questionnaires resort to self evaluation on a likert scale to measure these. For example, happiness and other personality traits, optimism and pessimism, attraction, these are all measured in self reports, but I think they are all impossible to measure otherwise. How can you measure a persons happiness? There is no one part of the brain that deals with one emotion over another? So its very hard to scientifically test these theories. The downside with a self evaluation is that socially desirable answers may be given in an experimental setting. It is seen that people often give a similar answer of their own happiness to others (often strangers) perceived happiness of themselves (Lyubomirsky & Lepper 1999).
I find it very hard to believe the validity of the constructs that test these. Does it really measure happiness? Or optimism? What’s to say that the test of happiness isn’t actually testing content, or attraction isn’t testing comfort. Other hypothetical constructs I think would be impossible to measure would be, sense of belonging, awareness, the soul and most personality traits. Im unsure how easily things like these can be tested and called science, it all comes down to the is psychology a science debate again, and I believe these questions, and their answers are more philosophical or sociological than a science in psychology.
Lyubomirsky, S. & Lepper, H. S. (1999). A Measure of Subjective Happiness: Preliminary Reliability and Construct Validation. Social Indicators Research. Vol 46, (2). 137-155, DOI: 10.1023/A:1006824100041
Morey, L. C. (1991). Classification of mental disorder as a collection of hypothetical constructs. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol 100(3), 289-293. doi: 10.1037/0021-843X.100.3.289.
work for my TA :)
Types of reliability.
Reliability is defined as the consistency of the scores of a test. An experiment is deemed reliable if you are able to repeat it many times and get the same results. There are many types of reliability, the main ones being, inter rater, test-retest, parallel forms (external) and internal reliability. Inter-rater reliability is when there are multiple researchers, who all measure the same construct. They may all be given the same training and at the end they compare the scores, with the average score being used as the final result. This is often used if there are large groups of people with an easy ratings scale, or if many things are happening at once so something wont be missed. This is used in Savage-rumbaugh (1986) when studying Kanzi the chimp using a lexigram. Test re-test reliability is where the same group of participants will undertake the same test on multiple occasions with the aim of receiving the same results over and over again from the same participant. This isn’t very commonly used as factors such as becoming accustomed to the test can influence results. It also isn’t used often as most tests that test in the same way twice or more and usually actually looking for a change in the results, with the training or, often used in medical experiments, the drug being the factor that they will hope will influence the score. Parallel forms reliability (or external reliability) is when the test that you are running, say on IQ, correlates its results strongly with another measure of IQ. For example if your IQ test measured someone’s IQ as 80 and three others measured it at 130 then its not very high in external reliability whereas if all four measured it at 130 then its got very high external reliability. Internal reliability is to measure whether different questions on the same test measure the same thing, back to the IQ test example you would use this measure to investigate whether all thirty questions are testing the same construct. Used to assess the consistency of results across items within a test, this can identify any questions that will become confounding variables.
Happy Christmas Julie xD
Does the need for documented ethics procedures hinder research progress?
All research in the modern age cannot be done unless they have full ethical approval from a bored of ethics directors. Each learning institution and medical school will have their own specified ethics coordinators who will accept work proposals and decide basing the study on a set list of pre-approved guidelines. Each country has their own psychology directors board, in Britain’s case it’s the BPS (British Psychological Society) who determine these guidelines but the WHO (world health organization) initially oversee all guidelines from different countries to make sure that no country is allowing outrageous studies to be undertaken.
But the question is, without these guidelines, would our knowledge of psychology be anywhere near as in depth? I think so. We all have our preconceptions of what makes a study unethical, but are they correct. I have always believed the infamous Milgram study to have been highly unethical, tricking patients into believing that they are electrocuting someone to a level where fatal harm could be caused, but upon reflection, this study was ethical at the time, and may even be passed by some ethics boards today. All that has changed is our conception of what is ethical and our actual knowledge of the experiment.
It has always been reported that the experiment is shocking and horrible, but it in fact passed multiple ethical screenings, and all that was horrible about it was the results that were uncovered. It was just another piece of exaggeration in the news that seems to have stuck and become ‘common knowledge’.
In fact there was nothing unethical about the study except from the deception, but then nearly all experiments both new and old have some level of deception, other wise you will not know if the results are because of the general affect being searched for or because of investigator effects.
Because of this, I believe that as annoying as having to gain ethical procedure is, it is not standing in the way of scientific discovery, just simply stopping the pointless butchery or harm of dozens.
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