Epilogue: Limitations of Scientific Research

I thought that this final section of the book was very well written and helped remind myself that although Psychology has many obstacles ahead of itself, being the newly formed science field that it is, it is still worth studying. One question I had was why there aren't more regulations in place to keep psychology more accountable to itself as a field, instead of allowing it to become heavily subject to those who are in power? Or is this just a naive idea, because of the fact that any people(s) in power are subject to bias, agenda, and any other humanizing characteristic?

Chapter 13, 14: Single-Subject and Quasi Experiments

The readings were a lot easier to comprehend as compared to the previous assignment. Mapping time-lag effects seems to have many different ways of mapping out the function and parameter of the subjects. I was wondering if there was a way of choosing the best combination of function and parameter(s) in cross-sectional longitudinal studies? Or, maybe, a set of guidelines that may aide us in determining which may be better in certain situations.

Chapters 11-12: True Experiment Design

The reading assignment for this class session was the most difficult to date. The difficulty comes from amount of new material presented all at once. The area of confusion I had was making sense of order effect and sequence effect..The concept of sequence, if I understand it correctly is that the the interaction of the conditions themselves affects subject's performance.In contrast, order effect is a change in a subject's performance based on the ordinal position of the conditions. In summary, sequence effect is due to a specific reason, not just based on order, that has an effect on outcome.

Chapter 2: Developing a Research Question

This chapter was fairly clear and straightforward. The only thing I felt they may have skimmed over is other methods of finding a topic for a research question. Although the author offered a few tips, like asking one's instructor or by simply choosing a topic of interest to the researcher, I'm sure there has to be other, more concrete examples of developing a question for research. I have noticed in the discussion section of research papers there are always suggestions for topics for further research.

Chapters 4 & 6, Appendix A

Data reduction stuck out to me as a very important topic of interest.I had to question if whether the researcher has to narrow his focus while conducting his research in order to organize their data effectively. I wonder if information can get lost by putting on these blinders. I have heard of times when unexpected relationships were found during research that was a surprise to those involved. Does this mean that one must be as detailed as possible when organizing data collected during observation.

Chapter 10: Non-experimental Research, Part 2: Survey Research

Surveying, although the most familiar method of research, seems to have its fair share of flaws. I wonder if that even with the use of a pilot survey, would the questions' wording and order can really be free of some bias. One concept that seemed a bit confusing was that of stratified sampling. If a sample is chosen at a truly random sample, wouldn't the chances of varying groups to be represented already fall into place? For instance, if I was to sample all psychology undergraduates, wouldn't I likely end up with all minority, disciplines, and/or any other variable anyways?

When choosing the sequence of questions, would it be too inefficient and costly to possible administer the survey in a fashion close to the Latin Square method? If each question had an equal chance of order and placement, would that even out the effect of sequence?

Chapter 9: Non-experimental Research, Part1: Observational, Archival, and Case-Study Research

The method of non-experimental research that left me piqued was participant-observer research. I wonder about the ethical concerns that arise when a researcher joins a group with a false identity. I would think that as long as the researcher omits any identifying data and doesn't partake in any action(s) that are illegal than what is the problem? I'm sure that there are many deviant groups that exist that can offer much insight in human nature that may be otherwise overlooked if psychologist could be given clearance from the IRB.