Learning Goals for Psych 482: Advanced Research Methods for Behavioral Psychology
Tony Greenwald and Yuichi Shoda
Course Overview:The broadest learning goal for Psych 482 is to inculcate students with the most important skills required for successful research careers. These skills fall into three major categories of learning goals:
A. Understanding the methods of conducting research and their conceptual underpinnings
B. Mastering methods of data analysis
C. Effectively communicating research findings
A. Methods of conducting research and their conceptual underpinnings
- Social psychological influences operating in the experimental situation
- Understanding types of validity and their uses (internal, external, construct, etc.)
- Conceptual underpinnings of psychological measurement
- Use of psychophysiological measures
- Stimulus sampling as a basis for generalizability
- Ethical researcher behavior
- Conducting research on the Internet
- Dealing with the Institutional Review Board
B. Methods of data analysis
- Issues of significance testing
- Mediation and moderation
- Effect sizes and statistical power
- Meta-analysis
- Multilevel modeling (hierarchical linear modeling)
- Signal detection analysis
- Analysis of covariance (use of change scores)
- Multiple regression strategies (not in the same year with Ancova)
- Fallibility of data (basics of latent variable modeling)
- Multidimensional scaling
- Item response theory (scale construction)
- Multinomial modeling
- Understanding fixed and random effects
- Cluster analysis methods
C. Communicating research findings
- What makes research important?
- Writing titles
- Writing abstracts
- Writing introductions
- Writing the rest of the article
- Graphic presentation of data
- Critiquing manuscripts and proposals
- Oral presentation (Powerpoint, etc.)
- Poster presentation