Quantitative Research Methods (edX)

This course introduces the elements involved in the design of psychological research. To produce reliable, valid results that can be used to understand psychological processes, researchers must take great care in how they define and measure variables, how they sample groups of individuals from the populations of people or animals that they are interested in, how they control extraneous variables in the research setting, and myriad other factors. Psychologists can choose from an array of research designs, including observational, correlational, experimental, or quasi-experimental methods. And depending on the design, they must consider the many factors that affect the reliability of those observations and the validity of any conclusions that might be drawn from them. This course considers all these and many other aspects of psychological research. A large segment of this course is then devoted to issues related to how psychologists ensure that the research methods they employ are ethical. Everyone would agree that ethical considerations are one of the most important things researchers must think about when they plan their studies, but it’s also one of the most invisible in reports on psychological research. Any article that reports the results of a psychological study provides voluminous details about the methodology, about issues like sampling and validity, for instance, but little if any mention of the relevant ethical issues, even though there are ethical issues in play at every step of the process. Behind all the fascinating research in the psychological literature are rules, regulations, and expectations about how the people or animals we study will be treated, and about how the data we collect will be analyzed and reported. And behind all those standards are more general principles that have been established from grim experience that includes some of the worst things humans have ever done in the name of science, and other missteps that hindsight tells us we don’t want to repeat. In this course, we investigate that history and abstract from it those principles that now guide ethical decisions about how to do research. To what goals do those principles aspire? And what breaches are they meant to keep us from repeating?
This course is part of the Research Methods in Psychology Professional Certificate.

What you'll learn

• Describe the steps of the scientific method.
• Explain how to judge the quality of a source for a literature review.
• Compare and contrast the kinds of research questions scientists ask.
• Specify how variables are defined.
• Explain what it means for an observation to be reliable.
• Compare and contrast the major research designs.
• Compare and contrast forms of validity as they apply to the major research designs.
• Illustrate the history of ethical concerns about scientific research using specific examples.
• Describe purposes served by codes of research ethics.
• Explain the five general Ethical Principles of the APA Ethics Code.
• Describe the issues addressed by the APA Ethical Standards that apply to researchers.
• Explain how IRBs and IACUCs operate.
• Outline the major ethical considerations in planning a research study using nonhuman animals.
• Explain the importance of the three Rs in animal research.
• Explain the protections ethics codes offer for human participants in research.
• Describe the implications of WEIRD participants being overrepresented in psychological research.
• Identify the consequences of the different types of fraud in research.
• Explain how replication and preregistration address the problems of p-hacking and HARKing.
• Apply your knowledge of ethical violations and propose solutions for real-life research.