Chapter 2 Where to Start
INTERNET -Although it is incredibly easy to search (just type something in a dialog box and press the Enter key), you can improve the quality of your searches by learning
(1) the differences in the way each service finds and stores information; (2) advanced search rules, including how to make searches more narrow and how to find exact phrases (3) ways to critically evaluate the quality of the information that you fi nd.
Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).
- Both allow you to search through citation information such as the name of the author or article title
"key article" method steps
-first identify a key article on your topic that is particularly relevant to your interests. Choose an article that was published sufficiently long ago to allow time for subsequent related research to be conducted and reported. You can then search for the subsequent articles that cited the key art
The abstract
-is a summary of the research report and typically runs no more than 120 words in length. - It includes information about the hypothesis, the procedure, and the broad pattern of results
PsycARTICLES
A computerized database for searching the psychological literature that contains the full text of the original publication.
the people who help researchers understand the dynamics of particular cultural and organizational settings—this term originated in anthropological and sociological research, and is now being used by psychologists as well
Informants
psychologist Michael Lynn
He has looked at factors that increase tips, such as posture, touching, and phrases written on a check, and his research has had an impact on the hotel and restaurant industry.
The most widely available information resource is the wealth of material that is available on the
Internet
EXAMPLE, it is possible that the search will include articles on child predators. To exclude the term child from the results of the search, the following adjustment can be made:
Internet AND (romance OR dating OR love) NOT child
Two related search resources are the
Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).
EXAMPLE The case of a student who decided to do a paper on the topic of road rage.
She wanted to know what might cause drivers to become so angry at other drivers that they become physically aggressive. A search on the term road rage led to a number of interesting articles. However, when looking at the output from the search, she noticed that the major keywords included driving behavior and anger but not road rage. She had only found articles that included the term road rage in the title or abstract. This term has become popular, but it may not be used in many academic studies of the topic. She then expanded the search to include driving AND anger. The new search yielded many articles not found in the original search.
"wildcard" asterisk (*)
The asterisk stands for any set of letters in a word and so it can expand your search.
Winograd and Soloway (1986)
Their research demonstrated that people are likely to forget where something is placed when two conditions are present: (1) The location where the object is placed is judged to be highly memorable and (2) the location is considered a very unlikely place for the object.
PsycBOOKS
a database of full-text books and book chapters
The universe for Google Scholar includes the entire Internet. This can be both
a strength and a weakness
classical conditioning
a type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events
Generally, little information is_____________ from the Discussion section of the paper.
abstracted
LexisNexis Academic and Factiva
allow you to search general media resources such as newspapers
When you do a search using Google Scholar, you find
articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions from a wide range of sources, including academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other websites.
In the case of facilitated communication, Montee, Miltenberger, and Wittrock (1995) noted that the facilitator might have been
unintentionally guiding the child's fingers to type meaningful sentences.
You also need to make sure that you carefully record the search service and search terms you used, the dates of your search, and the exact location of any websites that you will be using in your research;; this information will be
useful as you provide documentation in the papers that you prepare.
common sense
—the things we all believe to be true
Suppose you want to restrict the distraction in TITLE search to studies that also examined cell phones. You can do this by asking for (distraction in TITLE) AND (cell phone). The AND forces
both conditions to be true for an article to be included. T
Researchers also make specific predictions concerning the outcome of research: where a research question is ____________and a hypothesis is more _________
broad , specific
EXAMPLE Consider the word romance in the search above—.
by using roman*, the search will expand to include both romance and romantic.
A reference librarian
can help you use these and other resources available to you. (database resources)
Ivan Pavlov is best known for discovering what is called
classical conditioning
One source of ideas that can be tested is the body of knowledge called
common sense
Five sources of ideas:
common sense; observation of the world around us; theories; past research; practical problems
Conducting research to test commonsense ideas often forces us to go beyond a
commonsense theory of behavior
Once a hypothesis is proposed, data must be gathered and evaluated in terms of whether the evidence is
consistent or inconsistent with the hypothesis
A scientific theory is grounded in actual data from prior research as well as numerous hypotheses that are
consistent with the theory
A theory
consists of a systematic body of ideas about a particular topic or phenomenon.
Becoming familiar with a body of research on a topic is perhaps the best way to
generate ideas for new research.
When conducting a search, you might want to focus on finding review articles. Adding review as a search term in the title of the article will
generate review articles in your results.
Loftus (1979)
has shown that memories are easily reconstructed and reinterpreted. In one study, participants watched a film of an automobile accident and later were asked to tell what they saw in the film. Loftus found that participants' memories were influenced by the way they were questioned. For example, participants who were asked whether they saw "the" broken headlight were more likely to answer yes than were participants who were asked whether they saw "a" broken headlight. Results such as these have required a more complex theory of how long-term memory operates.
Most psychology journals specialize in one or two areas of
human or animal behavior.
A good research question identifies the topic of inquiry specifically enough so that
hypotheses and predictions can be made
A __________ is also a question; it makes a statement about something that may be true. They are directly testable whereas a research question may not be.
hypothesis
Researchers use research questions to
identify and describe the broad topic that they are investigating, and then conduct research in order to answer their research questions.
Psychologists have theories relating to human behavior including
learning, memory, and personality, for example.
Articles that summarize the research in a particular area are also useful; these are known as
literature reviews
serendipity
luck, finding good things without looking for them
Observations of personal and social events can provide
many ideas for research
Second, theories generate new knowledge by focusing our thinking so that we notice
new aspects of behavior—theories guide our observations of the world
. It may turn out that one or more of the articles might become
new key articles for further searches
A fourth source of ideas is
past research
When the results of a study confirm a prediction, the hypothesis is only supported, not _________
proven
The result of curiosity is a
question
If the prediction is not confirmed, the researcher will either
reject the hypothesis or conduct further research using different methods to study the hypothesis.
The individuals who take part in survey research are usually called
respondents
PsycINFO will depend on your library website. Your most important task is to specify the
search terms that you want the database to use.
The parentheses are used to
separate different parts of your search specification and are useful when your searches become increasingly complicated.
Google Scholar is a
specialized scholarly search engine
First, theories organize and explain a variety of
specific facts or descriptions of behavior
An equivalent term for participants in psychological research is
subjects
Testing a commonsense idea can be valuable because
such notions do not always turn out to be correct, or research may show that the real world is much more complicated than our commonsense ideas would have it.
Each year, the Annual Review of Psychology publishes articles that
summarize recent developments in various areas of psychology.
If a prediction is confirmed by the results of the study, the hypothesis is
supported
Slater and Henry (2013)
surveyed middle-school students about their access to music related content in various media sources and discovered that increasing exposure to popular music was a risk factor for starting to use alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana
The Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). are usually accessed together by using
the Web of Science computer database
In the case of Google Scholar, search output is ranked by
the contents of the article (i.e., did the article contain the keywords that were used in the search?) along with an article's overall prominence based on author, journal, and how often it is cited in other articles.
In the Introduction section
the researcher outlines the problem that has been investigated
Your PsycINFO search screen will allow you to limit
the search to one fi eld, such as the title of the article.
The "Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms" lists all
the standard terms that are used to index the abstracts, and it can be accessed directly with most PsycINFO systems.
Much research in the behavioral sciences tests
theories of behavior
The Nature of Journals
In these journals, researchers publish the results of their investigations. After a research project has been completed, the study is written as a report, which then may be submitted to the editor of an appropriate journal. The editor solicits reviews from other scientists in the same field and then decides whether the report is to be accepted for publication. (This is the process of peer review described in Chapter 1.) Because each journal has a limited amount of space and receives many more papers than it has room to publish, most papers are rejected. Those that are accepted are published about a year later, although sometimes online editions are published more quickly
Pavlov did not set out to discover classical conditioning. Instead, he was studying the
digestive system in dogs by measuring their salivation when given food
Research articles usually have five sections:
(1) an abstract, such as the ones found in PsycINFO (2) an Introduction that explains the problem under investigation and the specific hypotheses being tested (3) a Method section that describes in detail the exact procedures used in the study (4) a Results section in which the fi ndings are presented (5) a Discussion section in which the researcher may speculate on the broader implications of the results, propose alternative explanations for the results, discuss reasons that a particular hypothesis may not have been supported by the data, and/or make suggestions for further research on the problem
From the perspective of attachment theory, the amount of attachment will be related to the distress
experienced by an instance of emotional infidelity.
literature reviews are another good way to
explore past research
The digital object identifi er (DOI) is particularly helpful in
finding full-text sources of the article and is now provided with other publication information when journal articles are referenced.
Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI).
includes social and behavioral sciences such as sociology and criminal justice
hypothesis
is a tentative idea or question that is waiting for evidence to support or refute it.
The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, 2010) allows the use of either
participants or subjects when describing humans who take part in psychological research
A scientific theory consists of much more than a simple
"idea."
The most important feature of both resources(SCI and SSCI) is the ability to use the
"key article" method
It is also possible to specify a _______________ in order to find all articles written by or citing a particular person after a given date
"key person"
The American Psychological Association maintains several databases in addition to PsycINFO. These include
-PsycARTICLES -PsycBOOKS -Sociological Abstracts - PubMed -ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) .-LexisNexis Academic -Factiva
Most PsycINFO systems have advanced search screens that enable you to use the
Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT.
Why is it a strength and weakness ?
EXAMPLE If your topic is broad—for example, if you were interested in doing a search for depression or ADHD or color perception—Google Scholar would generate many more hits than would PsycINFO. Indeed, many of those hits would not be from the scientific literature. On the other hand, if you have a narrow search (e.g., adult ADHD treatment; color perception and reading speed), then Google Scholar would generate a set of results more closely aligned with your intentions.
Example of "key article" process
Fleming, M., & Rickwood, D. (2001). Eff ects of violent versus nonviolent video games on children's arousal, aggressive mood, and positive mood.
-ranks the output of a Google Scholar search
Google Scholar
Science Citation Index (SCI)
Includes biology, chemistry, biomedicine, and pharmacology
How do you know what words to type in the search box?
Most commonly, you will want to use standard psychological terms.
The abstracts are brief summaries of articles in psychology and related disciplines indexed by topic area. Today, the abstracts are maintained in a computer database called
PsycINFO, which is accessed via the Internet and is updated weekly
The American Psychological Association began the monthly publication of
Psychological Abstracts, or Psych Abstracts, in 1927.
The journal _______________________ publishes reviews of the literature in various topic areas in psychology.
Psychological Bulletin
Research is also stimulated by practical problems that can have
immediate applications
prediction
is a guess at the outcome of a hypothesis
The Method section
is divided into subsections, with the number of subsections determined by the author and dependent on the complexity of the research design