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What are the main methods of investigation available to psychologists? Drawing on evidence from studies, what are the advantages and disadvantages of these methods?
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| Submitted: Sun Dec 15 2002
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What are the main methods of investigation available to psychologists? Drawing on evidence from studies, what are the advantages and disadvantages of these methods? There are three main methods of investigation which psychologists use. This essay will describe these methods: experiments; surveys; and observations; together with a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of each. The first means of investigation is the experimental approach. An experiment is an empirical study where the researcher makes things happen by manipulating a factor, referred as the independent variable, and records the effect on another variable, known as the dependent variable. The experimenter deliberately intervenes in order to see what impact their intervention has on the outcome. In psychology, the main form of experiment tends to be controlled experiments, where there is a control group, which acts as a baseline in comparison with the experimental group. An important feature of a controlled experiment is the random allocation...
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