PART=1 Clearly define variables in your research; however, many concepts studied in psychology have multiple or ambiguous meanings.

Provide research definitions for psychological terms, such as the following list:

·        Intelligence

·        Socioeconomic status

·        Personality

·        Warmth

·        Happiness

·        Delinquency

·        Depression

·        Aggression

·        Health

·        Overeating

·        Motivation

Discuss how different people in your class may have had different ideas about these definitions–how one variable can be defined in different ways.

PART-2 Pose a variety of good and bad research questions.

Discuss what makes questions good or bad and how the bad ones can be improved. Do the same with hypotheses

PART3-  Read Chapters 1 -5 in the History of Psychology Textbook and comment on at least 1 piece of history that interested you. Respond to one or more of the following prompts in one to two paragraphs:

1.      Provide citation and reference to the chapter you discuss. Describe what you found interesting regarding this topic, and why.

2.      Describe how you will apply that learning in your daily life, including your work life.

PART 4- Read one of the ERRs for this week and discuss one of the articles or vidoes you found interesting and why. week. Respond to one or more of the following prompts in one to two paragraphs

1.      Provide citation and reference to the material(s) you discuss. Describe what you found interesting regarding this topic, and why.

2.      Describe how you will apply that learning in your daily life, including your work life.

3.      Describe what may be unclear to you, and what you would like to learn.

Chapter 1 The Role and Importance of Research

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT IN THIS CHAPTER:

· • Who does research and why

· • How research is defined and what some of its purposes are

· • What a model of scientific inquiry is and how it guides research activities

· • Some of the things that research is and some of the things that it isn’t

· • What researchers do and how they do it

· • The characteristics of good research

· • How a method of scientific inquiry guides research activity

· • The different types of research methods and examples of each

Say Hello to Research!

Walk down the hall in any building on your campus where social and behavioral science professors have their offices in such departments as psychology, education, nursing, sociology, and human development. Do you see any bearded, disheveled, white-coated men wearing rumpled pants and smoking pipes, hunched over their computers and mumbling to themselves? How about disheveled, white-coated women wearing rumpled skirts, smoking pipes, hunched over their computers, and mumbling to themselves?

Researchers hard at work? No. Stereotypes of what scientists look like and do? Yes. What you are more likely to see in the halls of your classroom building or in your adviser’s office are men and women of all ages who are hard at work. They are committed to finding the answer to just another piece of the great puzzle that helps us understand human behavior a little better than the previous generation of scientists.

Like everyone else, these people go to work in the morning, but unlike many others, these researchers have a passion for understanding what they study and for coming as close as possible to finding the “truth.” Although these truths can be elusive and sometimes even unobtainable, researchers work toward discovering them for the satisfaction of answering important questions and then using this new information to help others. Early intervention programs, treatments of psychopathology, new curricula, conflict resolution techniques, effective drug treatment programs, and even changes in policy and law have resulted from evidence collected by researchers. Although not always perfect, each little bit of evidence gained from a new study or a new idea for a study contributes to a vast legacy of knowledge for the next generation of researchers such as yourself.

You may already know and appreciate something about the world of research. The purpose of this book is to provide you with the tools you need to do even more, such as

· • develop an understanding of the research process.

· • prepare yourself to conduct research of your own.

· • learn how to judge the quality of research.

· • learn how to read, search through, and summarize other research.

· • learn the value of research activities conducted online.

· • reveal the mysteries of basic statistics and show you how easily they can be used.

Today, more than ever, decisions are evidence based, and what these researchers do is collect evidence that serves as a basis for informed decisions.

· • measure the behaviors, traits, or attributes that interest you.

· • collect the type of data that relate to your area of interest.

· • use a leading statistical package (SPSS) to analyze data.

· • design research studies that answer the question that you want answered.

· • write the type of research proposal (and a research report) that puts you in control—one that shows you have command of the content of the research as well as the way in which the research should be done.

Sound ambitious? A bit terrifying? Exciting? Maybe those and more, but boring is one thing this research endeavor is not. This statement is especially true when you consider that the work you might be doing in this class, as well as the research proposal that you might write, could hold the key to expanding our knowledge and understanding of human behavior and, indirectly, eventually helping others.

So here you are, beginning what is probably your first course in the area of research methods and wondering about everything from what researchers do to what your topic will be for your thesis. Relax. Thousands of students have been here before you and almost all of them have left with a working knowledge of what research is, how it is done, and what distinguishes a good research project from one that is doomed. Hold on and let’s go. This trip will be exciting.

What Research Is and What It Isn’t

Perhaps it is best to begin by looking at what researchers really do. To do so, why not look at some of the best? Here are some researchers, the awards they have won, and the focus of their work. All of these people started out in a class just like the one you are in, reading a book similar to the one you are reading. Their interest in research and a particular issue continued to grow until it became their life’s work.

The following awards were given in 2009 by the American Psychological Association in recognition of outstanding work.

Research is, among other things, an intensive activity that is based on the work of others and generates new ideas to pursue and questions to answer.

Susan E. Carey from the psychology department at Harvard University was honored for her contributions to the field of cognitive development and developmental psychology. The work that she did early in her career focused on understanding how children learn language, and she coined the term “fast mapping” for how children can learn the meaning of a new word with very little experience with that word.

Nancy E. Adler from the University of California won the Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology for her work in health. Her early research focused on the health behaviors in adolescence, and she explained the incredibly interesting question of why individuals engage in health-damaging behaviors and how their understanding of risk affects their choices.

Finally, one of several Distinguished Scientific Awards for Early Career Contributions to Psychology went to Jennifer A. Richeson from Northwestern University for her work on stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, and inter-group conflict. This focus examined the experiences and behaviors both of members of devalued groups and of members of dominant groups.

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) also gives out awards that recognize important contributions.

The 2009 E. F. Lindquist award was given to Wim J. van der Linden for his contributions to the field of testing and measurement, including optimal test design and adaptive testing. The award is named after E. F. Lindquist, who was a founder of The American College Testing Program, and is given for outstanding applied or theoretical research in the field of testing and measurement.

AERA has an extensive award program including the Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity in Education Research Award, given to Sandra Harding from the University of California–Los Angeles in recognition of her research that helps to advance public understanding of gender and/or sexuality in the education community.

And, as with many other organizations, AERA also offers awards for researchers still early in their careers, such as the Early Career Award won by Michele Moses from the University of Colorado–Boulder and Nell Duke from Michigan State University.

What all these people have in common is that at one time or another during their professional careers, they were active participants in the process of doing research.  Research  is a process through which new knowledge is discovered. A  theory , such as a theory of motivation, or development, or learning, for example, helps us to organize this new information into a coherent body, a set of related ideas that explain events that have occurred and predict events that may happen. Theories are an important part of science. It is at the ground-floor level, however, that the researcher works to get the ball rolling, adding a bit of new insight here and a new speculation there, until these factors come together to form a corpus of knowledge.

High-quality research is characterized by many different attributes, many of which tend to be related to one another and also tend to overlap. High-quality research

· • is based on the work of others,

· • can be replicated,

· • is generalizable to other settings,

· • is based on some logical rationale and tied to theory,

· • is doable,

· • generates new questions or is cyclical in nature,

· • is incremental, and

· • is an apolitical activity that should be undertaken for the betterment of society.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these.

First, research is an activity based on the work of others. No, this does not mean that you copy the work of others (that’s plagiarism), but you always look to the work that has already been done to provide a basis for the subject of your research and how you might conduct your own work. For example, if there have been 200 studies on gender differences in aggression, the results of those studies should not be ignored. You may not want to replicate any one of these studies, but you certainly should take methodologies that were used and the results into consideration when you plan your own research in that area.

A good example of this principle is the tremendous intellectual and scientific effort that went into the creation of the atomic bomb. Hundreds of top scientists from all over the world were organized at different locations in an intense and highly charged effort to combine their knowledge to create this horrible weapon. What was unique about this effort is that it was compressed in time; many people who would probably share each other’s work in any case did so in days rather than months because of the military and political urgency of the times. What was discovered one day literally became the basis for the next day’s experiments (see Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, for the whole story).

Second, while we’re talking about other studies, research is an activity that can be replicated. If someone conducts a research study that examines the relationship between problem-solving ability and musical talent, then the methods and procedures (and results) of the experiment should be replicable with other groups for two reasons. First, one of the hallmarks of any credible scientific finding is that it can be replicated. If you can spin gold from straw, you should be able to do it every time, right? How about using a new method to teach children to read? Or developing early intervention programs that produce similar results when repeated? Second, if the results of an experiment can be replicated, they can serve as a basis for further research in the same area.

Third, good research is generalizable to other settings. This means, for example, that if adolescent boys are found to be particularly susceptible to peer pressure in one setting, then the results would probably stand up (or be generalizable) in a different but related setting. Some research has limited generalizability because it is difficult to replicate the exact conditions under which the research was carried out, but the results of most research can lend at least something to another setting.

Fourth, research is based on some logical rationale and tied to theory. Research ideas do not stand alone merely as interesting questions. Instead, research activity provides answers to questions that help fill in pieces to what can be a large and complicated puzzle. No one could be expected to understand, through one grand research project, the entire process of intellectual development in children, or the reason why adolescents form cliques, or what actually happens during a midlife crisis. All these major areas of research need to be broken into smaller elements, and all these elements need to be tied together with a common theme, which more often than not is some underlying, guiding theory.

Fifth, and by all means, research is doable! Too often, especially for the young or inexperienced scientist (such as yourself), the challenge to come up with a feasible idea is so pressing that almost anything will do as a research topic. Professors sometimes see thesis statements from students such as, “The purpose of this research is to see if the use of drugs can be reduced through exposure to television commercials.” This level of ambiguity and lack of a conceptual framework makes the statement almost useless and certainly not doable. Good research poses a question that can be answered, and then answers it in a timely fashion.

Sixth, research generates new questions or is cyclical in nature. Yes, what goes around comes around. The answers to today’s research questions provide the foundation for research questions that will be asked tomorrow. You will learn more about this process later in this chapter when a method of scientific inquiry is described.

Seventh, research is incremental. No one scientist stands alone; instead, scientists stand on the shoulders of others. Contributions that are made usually take place in small, easily definable chunks. The first study ever done on the development of language did not answer all the questions about language acquisition, nor did the most recent study put the icing on the cake. Rather, all the studies in a particular area come together to produce a body of knowledge that is shared by different researchers and provides the basis for further research. The whole, or all the knowledge about a particular area, is more than the sum of the parts, because each new research advance not only informs us but it also helps us place other findings in a different, often fruitful perspective.

Finally, at its best, research is an apolitical activity that should be undertaken for the betterment of society. I stress “at its best,” because too often various special-interest groups dictate how research funding should be spent. Finding a vaccine for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) should not depend on one’s attitudes toward individual lifestyles. Similarly, whether early intervention programs should be supported is independent of one’s personal or political views. And should research on cloning be abandoned because of its potential misuse? Of course not. It’s how the discovery of new knowledge is used that results in its misuse, not the new knowledge itself.

Although it should be apolitical, research should have as its ultimate goal the betterment of society. Researchers or practitioners do not withhold food from pregnant women to study the effects of malnutrition on children. To examine the stress-nutrition link, researchers do not force adults to eat particular diets that might be unhealthy. These unethical practices would not lead to a greater end, especially because there are other ways to answer such questions without resorting to possibly harmful practices.

If these attributes make for good research, what is bad research? It takes the opposite approach of all the things stated earlier and then some. In sum, bad research is the fishing trip you take looking for something important when it simply is not to be found. It is plagiarizing other people’s work, or falsifying data to prove a point, or misrepresenting information and misleading participants. Unfortunately, there are researchers whose work is characterized by these practices, but they are part of an overall minority.

TEST YOURSELF

Note: At the end of every major heading in each chapter of Exploring Research, we’ll have a few questions for you that we hope will help you understand the content and guide your studying.

Provide an example of how research is incremental in nature and what advantage is this to both future and past researchers?

Think of an example of how knowledge about a certain topic can lead to new questions about that, or a related, topic.

A Model of Scientific Inquiry

In the past 20 years, the public has been exposed to the trials and tribulations of the research process as described through hundreds of books by and about the everyday work of scientists around the world.

Regardless of the specific content of these books, they all have one thing in common. The work was accomplished through adherence to guidelines that allowed these researchers to progress from point A to point Z while remaining confident that they were on the trail of finding (what they hoped was) an adequate answer to the questions they had posed.

“Doing science” means following a model that begins with a question and ends with asking new questions.

Their methods and their conclusions are not helter-skelter because of one important practice: They share the same general philosophy regarding how questions about human behavior should be answered. In addition, for scientists to be able to trust their colleagues, in the sense of having confidence in the results produced by their studies, these scientists must have something in common besides good intentions. As it turns out, what they share is a standard sequence of steps in formulating and answering a question.

When you read in a journal article that Method A is more effective than Method B for improving retention or memory, you can be pretty sure that the steps described next were followed, in one form or another. Because there is agreement about the general method used to answer the question, the results of this comparison of Method A and Method B can be applied to the next study. That study would perhaps investigate variations of Method A and how and why they work. The research efforts of developmental psychologists, gerontologists (specialists in aging), linguists, and experts in higher education all depend on the integrity of the process.

Figure 1.1  shows a set of such steps as part of a model of scientific inquiry. The goal of this model is to find the truth (whatever that means) or, in other words, to use a  scientific method  that results in a reasonable and sound answer to important questions that will further our understanding of human behavior.

An interesting and timely topic, the effects of using social media on adolescents’ social skills, will be used as an example of the different steps followed in this model.

Figure 1.1 The steps in the research process, wherein each step sets the stage for the next.

Asking the Question

Remember the story of The Wizard of Oz? When Dorothy realized her need to get to the Emerald City, she asked Glinda, the good witch, “But where do I begin?” Glinda’s response, “Most people begin at the beginning, my dear,” is the case in almost any scientific endeavor.

Our first and most important step is asking a question (I wonder what would happen if . . . ?) or identifying a need (We have to find a way to . . .) that arises as the result of curiosity, and to which it becomes necessary to find an answer. For example, you might be curious about how the use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook affects relationships between children and their peers. You also might feel an urgency to find out how to use various types of media most effectively for educating children and adults about the dangers of using drugs.

Such questions are informally stated and often are intended as a source of discussion and stimulation about what direction the specific research topic should take. Where do such questions come from? They rarely come from the confines of a classroom or a laboratory. Rather, questions spring (in the fullest sense of the word) from our imagination and our own experiences, enriched by the worlds of science, art, music, and literature. It is no coincidence that many works of fiction (including science fiction) have a basis in fact. The truly creative scientist is always thinking about everything from solutions to existing questions to the next important question to ask. When Louis Pasteur said that chance favors the prepared mind, he was really saying, “Take advantage of all the experiences you can, both in and out of school.” Only then can you be well prepared to recognize the importance of certain events, which will act as a stimulus for more rigorous research activity.

Questions can be as broad as inquiring about the effects of social media on peer groups, or as specific as the relationship between the content of social media transactions and acceptance by peers. Whatever their content or depth of inquiry, questions are the first step in any scientific endeavor.

Identifying the Important Factors

Once the question has been asked, the next step is to identify the factors that have to be examined to answer the question. Such factors might range from the simplest, such as an adolescent’s age or socioeconomic status, to more complicated measures, such as the daily number of face-to-face interactions.

For example, the following list of factors have been investigated over the past 10 years by various researchers who have been interested in the effects of social media:

· • age and gender of the adolescent,

· • ethnicity,

· • level of family education,

· • access to types of social media,

· • number of self-identified close friends,

· • parental attitude toward social media,

· • family configuration,

· • family communication patterns.

And these are only ten of hundreds of factors and associated topics that could be explored. But of all the factors that could be important and that could help us to understand more about the effects of social media, which ones should be selected as a focus?

In general, you should select factors that

· • have not been investigated before,

· • will contribute to the understanding of the question you are asking,

· • are available to investigate,

· • hold some interest for you personally or professionally,

· • lead to another question.

It is hard enough to define the nature of the problem you want to study (see  Chapter 3 ) let alone generate questions that lead to more questions, but once you begin the journey of becoming a scientist, you are a member of an elite group who has the responsibility to contribute to the scientific literature not only by what you do but also by what you see that needs to be done.

Formulating a Hypothesis

When asked what she thought a hypothesis was, a 9-year-old girl said it best: “An educated guess.” A  hypothesis  results when the questions are transformed into statements that express the relationships between variables such as an “if . . . then” statement.

For example, if the question is, “What effects does using Facebook have on the development of friendships?” then the hypothesis could be, adolescents who use Facebook as their primary means of maintaining social contact have fewer close friends. Several characteristics make some hypotheses better than others, and we will talk about those in  Chapter 2 .

For now, you should realize that a hypothesis is an objective extension of the question that was originally posed. Although all questions might not be answerable because of the way in which they are posed—which is fine for the question stage—a good hypothesis poses a question in a testable form. Good questions lead to good hypotheses, which in turn lead to good studies.

Collecting Relevant Information

Hypotheses should posit a clear relationship between different factors, such as a correlation between number of followers on Twitter and quality of social skills. That is the purpose of the hypothesis. Once a hypothesis is formulated, the next step is the collection of information or empirical data that will confirm or refute the hypothesis. So, if you are interested in whether or not participating in social media has an impact on adolescent’s social skills, the kinds of data that will allow the hypothesis to be tested must be collected.

For example, you might collect two types of data to test the hypothesis mentioned in the previous paragraph. The first might be the number of friends an adolescent might have. The second might be the quality of those relationships.

An important point about testing hypotheses is that you set out to test them, not to prove them. As a good scientist, you should be intent on collecting data that reveal as much of the truth about the world as is possible and letting the chips fall where they may, whether you agree or disagree with the outcomes. Setting out to prove a hypothesis can place scientists in the unattractive position of biasing the methods for collecting data or the way in which study results are interpreted. If bias occurs, then the entire sequence of steps can fall apart. Besides, there’s really no being “wrong” in science. Not having a hypothesis supported means only that there are additional questions to ask or that those which were asked should be reformulated. That is the beauty of good science—there is always another question to ask on the same topic—one that can shed just a bit more light. And who knows? That bit more light might be the tipping point or just the amount needed to uncover an entirely new and significant finding.

Testing the Hypothesis

Is it enough simply to collect data that relate to the phenomena being studied? Not quite. What if you have finished collecting data and find that adolescents who spend more than 10 hours a week involved in social media have 50% fewer qualitatively “good” relationships with peers than those who spend less than 10 hours? What would your conclusion be?

On one hand, you could say the adolescents who used social media more than 10 hours per week were one-half as sociable as other adolescents or had one-half the quality of relationships of the children who used social media less than 10 hours per week. On the other hand, you might argue that the difference between the two groups of adolescents is too large enough for you to reach any conclusion. You might conclude that in order for a statement about social media use and quality of friendships, you would have to have much greater differences in the quality of relationships.

Say hello to inferential statistics (see  Chapter 8  for more), a set of tools that allows researchers to separate the effects of an isolated factor (such as time spent on Facebook) from differences between groups that might be owing to some other factor or to nothing other than  chance . Yes, luck, fate, destiny, the wheels of fortune, or whatever you want to call what you cannot control, sometimes can be responsible for differences between groups.

For example, what if some of the adolescents participating in your study went to some kind of social function where there was a particularly strong emphasis on social media methods of communicating such as texting. Or, what if one of the adolescents just was afraid to truthfully report how much time he or she spent on Facebook during study time?

The job of all the tools that researchers have at their disposal (and the ones you will learn about throughout Exploring Research) is to help you separate the effects of the factors being studied (such as amount of time spent on Facebook) from other unrelated factors (such as the number of years a family has lived at its current address). What these tools allow researchers to do is assign a probability level to an outcome so that you can decide whether what you see is really due to what you think it is due to or something else which you leave for the next study.

Working with the Hypothesis

Once you have collected the required data and have tested the hypothesis, as a good scientist you can sit down, put up your feet, look intellectual, and examine the results. The results may confirm or refute the hypothesis. In either case, it is off to the races. If the data confirm your hypothesis, then the importance of the factors that were hypothesized to be related and conceptually important were borne out and you can go on your merry way while the next scientific experiment is being planned. If the hypothesis is not confirmed, it may very well be a time for learning something that was not known previously. In the example used earlier, it may mean that involvement in social media has no impact on social skills or social relationships. Although the researcher might be a bit disappointed that the initial hunch (formally called a hypothesis) was not supported, the results of a well-run study always provide valuable information, regardless of the outcome.

Reconsidering the Theory

Finally, it is time to take stock and relate all these research efforts to what guides our work in the first place: theory. Earlier in this chapter, a theory was defined as a set of statements that predict things that will occur in the future and explain things that have occurred in the past. But the very nature of theories is that they can be modified according to the results of research based on the same assumptions on which the theory is based.

For example, a particular approach to understanding the development of children and adults is known as social learning theory, which places special importance on the role of modeling and vicarious, or indirect, learning. According to this theory, exposure to aggressive behavior would lead to aggressive behavior once the environment contains the same kinds of cues and motivation that were present when the initial aggressive model (such as particularly unkind Facebook postings) was observed.

If the hypothesis that observing such models increases lack of civility is confirmed, then another building block, or piece of evidence, has been added to the house called social learning theory. Good scientists are always trying to see what type of brick (new information) fits where, or if it fits at all. In this way, new knowledge can change or modify the way the theory appears and what it has to say about human behavior. Consequently, new questions might be generated from the theory that will help contribute further to the way in which the house is structured.

Asking New Questions

In any case, the last step in this simple model of scientific inquiry is to ask a new question. It might be a simple variation on a theme (Do males use social media in a different way than females?) or a refinement of the original question (How might the use of social media differentially affect the social relationships of males and females?). Whether or not the hypothesis is supported, good research leaves you farther along the trail to answering the original question. You just might be at a different place than you thought or intended to be.

TEST YOURSELF

Hypothesis plays a very important role in scientific research, with one of them being the objective testing of a particular question that a scientist might want to ask. What are some of the factors that might get in the way of the scientist remaining objective and what impact might that have on a fair test of the hypothesis of interest? What is the danger of not being aware of these biases?

Different Types of Research

By now, you have a good idea what research is and how the research process works. Now it is time to turn your attention to a description and examples of different types of research methods and the type of questions posed by them.

The types of research methods that will be discussed differ primarily on three dimensions: (1) the nature of the question asked, (2) the method used to answer it, and (3) the degree of precision the method brings to answering the question. One way in which these methods do not necessarily differ, however, is in the content or the focus of the research.

In other words, if you are interested in the effects of the use of social media on adolescents’ friendships, your research may be experimental, where you artificially restrict access to social media and look at friendship outcomes, or nonexperimental, where you survey a group of adolescents to determine the frequency of use of social media tools.

A summary of the two general categories of research methods (nonexperimental versus experimental), which will be discussed in this volume, is shown in  Table 1.1 . This table illustrates the purpose of each category, the time frame that each encompasses, the degree of control the different method has over competing factors, “code” words that appear in research articles that can tip you off as to the type of research being conducted, and an example of each.  Chapters 9 – 12  discuss in greater detail each of these research methods.

There is one very important point to keep in mind when discussing different methods used in research. As often as not, as research becomes more sophisticated and researchers (like you in the future) become better trained, there will be increased reliance on mixed methods models, where both experimental and nonexperimental methods are combined. Some researchers feel that this type of approach lacks clarity and precision, but others feel it is the best way to look at a phenomenon of interest from a variety of perspectives and thereby be more informative.

Nonexperimental Research

Nonexperimental research  includes a variety of different methods that describe relationships between variables. The important distinction between nonexperimental methods and the others you will learn about later is that nonexperimental research methods do not set out, nor can they test, any causal relationships between variables. For example, if you wanted to survey the social media–using behavior of adolescents, you could do so by having them maintain a diary in which they record what tools they use and for how long.

Nonexperimental research examines the relationship between variables, without any attention to cause-and-effect relationships.

Table 1.1 Summary of research methods covered in exploring research.

	Types of Research
	Nonexperimental	Experimental
	Descriptive	Historical	Correlational	Qualitative	True Experimental	Quasi-experimental
Purpose	Describe the characteristics of an existing phenomenon	Relate events that have occurred in the past to current events	Examine the relationships between variables	To examine human behavior and the social, cultural, and political contexts within which it occurs	To test for true cause-and-effect relationships	To test for causal relationships without having full control
Time frame	Current	Past	Current or past (correlation) Future (prediction)	Current or past	Current	Current or past
Degree of control over factors or precision	None or low	None or low	Low to medium	Moderate to high	High	Moderate to high
Code words to look for in research articles	Describe Interview Review literature	Past Describe	Relationship Related to Associated with Predicts	Case study Evaluation Ethnography Historical Research Survey	Function of Cause of Comparison Between Effects of	Function of Cause of Comparison between Effects of
Example	A survey of dating practices of adolescent girls	An analysis of Freud’s use of hypnosis as it relates to current psychotherapy practices	An investigation that focuses on the relationship between the number of hours of television watching and gradepoint average	A case study analysis of the effectiveness of policies for educating all children	The effect of a preschool language program on the language skills of inner-city children	Gender differences in spatial and verbal abilities

This descriptive study provides information about the content of their online behaviors but tells you little about why they may do what they do. In this type of a research endeavor, you are not trying to understand the motivation for using what online tools are used nor are you trying to manipulate their use or content of the communication or any other outcome. This is nonexperimental in nature because no cause-and-effect relationships of any type are being hypothesized or investigated.

Nonexperimental research methods that will be covered in this volume are descriptive, correlational, and qualitative. Descriptive and correlational methods will be covered in  Chapter 9 , and qualitative methods will be discussed in  Chapter 10 . The following is a brief overview of each.

Descriptive Research

Descriptive research  describes the characteristics of an existing phenomenon. The every 10-year U.S. Census is an example of descriptive research as is any survey that assesses the current status of anything from the number of faucets in a house to the number of adults over 60 years of age who have grandchildren.

Descriptive research focuses on events that occur in the present.

What can be done with this information? First, it provides a broad picture of a phenomenon you might be interested in exploring. For example, if you are interested in learning more about the reading process in children, you might want to consult The Reading Report Card (at  http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/ ). This annual publication summarizes information about the reading achievement of children ages 9, 13, and 17 years. Or you might want to consult a publication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (at  http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/ ), to determine the current incidence of measles cases in the Midwest, or the Bureau of Labor Statistics (at  http://www.bls.gov/ ) to determine the current unemployment rate and the number of working single parents who have children under age 5 (about 60%). If you want to know it, there is a place to find it. Descriptive research demands this type of information.

In another example, Eleanor Hanna, Hsiao-ye Yi, Mary Dufour, and Christine Whitmore ( 2001 ) examined the relationship of early smoking to alcohol use, depression, and drug use in adolescence. They used descriptive statistics and other statistical techniques to find that in comparison with those who never smoked, or those who simply experimented, early smokers were those most likely to use alcohol and other drugs as well as have school problems and early sexual experiences culminating in pregnancy.

Descriptive research can stand on its own, but it can also serve as a basis for other types of research in that a group’s characteristics often need to be described before the meaningfulness of any differences can be addressed. And almost always descriptive data is collected but as the first step of many on the way to a more complex study. Want to describe an outcome? Learn about descriptive techniques.

Correlational Research

Descriptive and  historical research  provide a picture of events that are currently happening or have occurred in the past. Researchers often want to go beyond mere description and begin discussing the relationship that certain events might have to one another. The most likely type of research to answer questions about the relationship among variables or events is called correlational research.

What  correlational research  does, which neither descriptive nor historical research does, is to provide some indication as to how two or more things are related to one another or, in effect, what they share or have in common, or how well a specific outcome might be predicted by one or more pieces of information.

Correlational research examines the relationship between variables.

Correlational research uses a numerical index called the  correlation coefficient  (see  Chapter 9  for a complete discussion) as a measure of the strength of this relationship. Most correlational studies report such an index when available.

If you were interested in finding out the relationship between the number of hours that first-year students spend studying and their gradepoint averages, then you would be doing correlational research, because you are interested in the relationship between these two variables. If you were interested in finding out the best set of predictors of success in graduate school, you would be doing a type of correlational research that includes prediction.

For example, in a study of culture, obesity stereotypes, self-esteem, and the “thin ideal,” Klaczynski, Goold, and Mudry ( 2004 ) examined the relationships among negative stereotypes of obesity, and other variables such as perceptions of the causes of obesity and of control over weight and self-esteem. They found a negative correlation between beliefs in control over one’s weight and self-esteem.

One of the most important points about correlational research is that while it examines relationships between variables, it in no way implies that one causes changes in the other. In other words, correlation and prediction examine associations but not causal relationships, wherein a change in one factor directly influences a change in another.

For example, it is a well-established fact that as the crime rate in a community increases, so does the level of ice cream consumption! What’s going on? Certainly, no rational person would conclude that the two are causally related such that if ice cream were banned, no more crimes would occur. Rather, another variable, temperature, better explains the increased ice cream consumption and the increased crime rate (both rise when it gets warm). It might seem ridiculous that people would identify causality just because events are related, but you do not have to read far in the daily newspaper to discover that politicians can reach just such unwise conclusions.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research  methods (see  Chapter 10 ) are placed in this general category of nonexperimental methods because they do not directly test for cause and effect and, for the most part, follow an entirely different paradigm than the experimental model.

Qualitative research studies phenomena within the social and cultural context in which they occur.

The general purpose of qualitative research methods is to examine human behavior in the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they occur. This is done through a variety of tools, such as interviews, historical methods, case studies, and ethnography, and it usually results in qualitative (or nonnumerical) primary data. In other words, the qualitative researcher is more (but not only) interested in the contents of an interviewee’s speech than in the number of times (frequency) a particular comment is made.

Qualitative research is relatively new to the social and behavioral sciences and, to a large extent, its increasing popularity is due to a degree of dissatisfaction with other available research methods. Some scientists feel that the traditional experimental model is too restrictive and narrow, preventing underlying and important factors and relationships from being revealed. What’s so valuable about this set of tools is that it allows you to answer a whole new set of questions in a whole new way.

Experimental Research

You already know that correlational research can help to establish the presence of a relationship among variables, but it does not provide any reason to believe that variables are causally related to one another. How does one find out if characteristics, behaviors, or events are related in such a way that the relationship is a causal one? Two types of research can answer that question: true experimental research and quasi-experimental research.

Experimental research examines the cause-and-effect relationship between variables.

True Experimental Research

In the  true experimental research method , participants are assigned to groups based on some criterion, often called the treatment variable or treatment condition. For example, let us say that you are interested in comparing the effects of two different techniques for reducing obsessive-compulsive behavior in adults. The first technique includes behavioral therapy, and the second one does not. Once adults are assigned to groups and the programs are completed, you will want to look for any differences between the two groups with regard to the effects of the therapy on the frequency of obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Because the nature of the groups is determined by the researcher, the researcher has complete control over the factors to which the adults are exposed.

True experimental research examines direct cause-and-effect relationships.

This is the ideal model for establishing a cause-and-effect relationship because the researcher has clearly defined the possible cause (if indeed it results in some effect) and can keep very close tabs on what is happening. Most important, however, the researcher has complete control over the treatment.

In a quasi-experimental study, the researcher does not have such a high degree of control because people have already been indirectly assigned to those groups (e.g., social class, type of abuse, gender, and type of injury) for which you are testing the effects.

The distinction between experimental and other methods of research boils down to a matter of control. True experimental research designs (discussed in  Chapter 11 ) isolate and control all the factors that could be responsible for any effects except the one of most interest.

For example, Fleming, Klein, and Corter ( 1992 ) examined the effects of participation in a social support group on depression, maternal attitudes, and behavior in new mothers. As part of the experimental design, the researchers divided 142 mothers into three groups. Group 1 received the intervention, Group 2 received the no-intervention condition, and Group 3 received a special group-by-mail intervention. The key point here is the manipulation (the key word in experimental designs) of the condition for each of the three groups. This research is true experimental because the researchers determined the nature of the treatment and who is assigned to each group. As you will learn, in a quasi-experimental study, the researcher has no control over the origin of group membership (male or female, black or white, etc.). The primary difference between quasi-experimental and true experimental research is that in the former, subjects are preassigned to groups. It’s that simple.

Quasi-Experimental Research

In  quasi-experimental research , participants are preassigned to groups based on some predetermined characteristic or quality. Differences in gender, race, age, grade in school, neighborhood of residence, type of job, and even experiences are examples. These group assignments have already taken place before the experiment begins, and the researcher has no control over who is assigned to which group.

Quasi-experimental studies also focus on cause and effect, but they use preassigned groups.

Let us say that you are interested in examining voting patterns as a function of neighborhood. You cannot change the neighborhood people live in, but you can use the quasi-experimental method to establish a causal link between residence and voting patterns. In other words, if you find that voting pattern and residence are related, then you can say with some degree of confidence (but not as much as with an experimental study) that there is a causal relationship between where one resides and how one votes.

The most important use of the quasi-experimental method occurs where researchers cannot, in good conscience, assign people to groups and test the effects of group membership on some other outcome. For example, researchers who are interested in reducing the impact of child abuse cannot “create” groups of abusers, but rather have to look at already established groups of people who are abusive. That’s exactly what Mark Chaffin and his colleagues ( 2004 ) did when they assigned already (and that’s the key word) physically abusive parents to one of three intervention conditions. They found a reduction in abusive behavior by parents who were assigned to parent–child interaction therapy.

Quasi-experimental research is also called post hoc, or after the fact, research because the actual research takes place after the assignment of groups (e.g., abusive versus nonabusive, employed versus unemployed, malnourished versus nonmalnourished, and male versus female). Because assignment has already taken place, the researcher has a high degree, but not the highest degree, of control over the cause of whatever effects are being examined. For the highest degree of control to occur, the true experimental model must be followed.

Another phrase for quasi-experimental research is post-hoc, or after the fact.

TEST YOURSELF

We have briefly defined and discussed the different research methods that you will learn about later in Exploring Research in much greater detail. For now, answer this question. What determines the research method that a scientist should use to answer a question or test a hypothesis? Which research method described here best lends itself to questions you want answered?

What Research Method to Use When?

This is a beginning course and no one would expect you to be able to identify what type of research method was used in a particular study—at least not yet. You may have a very good idea if you understand what you just read about nonexperimental and  experimental research methods , but it takes some experience to become really good at the identification process.

So, here is a little jump start in the form of a “cheat” sheet (shown in  Figure 1.2 ). This is not a substitute for learning how to distinguish nonexperimental from experimental  research designs —it’s just a good way to get started and a bit of a help when you need it. Note that an alternative to any nonexperimental method is a qualitative approach (which is not shown in  Figure 1.2 ).

Basic Research Versus Applied Research

Sometimes in the research world, distinctions must be made not only about the type of research but also about the most general category into which the implications or utility of the research might fall. This is where the distinction between basic and applied research comes in. But beware! This distinction is sometimes used as a convenient way to classify research activity rather than to shed light on the intent or purpose of the researcher and the importance of the study.

The most basic distinction between the two types of research is that  basic research  (sometimes called pure research) is research that has no immediate application at the time it is completed, whereas  applied research  does. If this appears to be a somewhat ambiguous distinction, it is, because almost all basic research eventually results in some worthwhile application over the long term. In fact, the once easy distinction between the two is slowly disappearing.

Both basic and applied research are critical parts of studying and understanding a wide range of phenomena.

Figure 1.2 Research design “cheat” sheet.

For example, for every dollar spent on the basic research that supported the lunar missions during the 1960s and 1970s, $6 were returned in economic impact. Data from basic research that hypothesizes a relationship between Alzheimer’s disease in older people and Down’s syndrome (a genetic disorder) in younger people could eventually prove to be the critical finding that leads to a cure for both conditions. Another example: Who cares if some children have a more difficult time than others do in distinguishing between two very similar stimuli? You do, if you want to teach these children how to read. Many different reading programs have grown directly from such basic research efforts.

Never judge the quality of either the finished product or the worth of supporting a research project by branding it as basic or applied research. Rather, look closely at its content and judge it on its merit. This approach obviously has been used, because more and more reports about basic research (at one time beyond the interests of everyday practitioners) appear in such practitioner-oriented professional journals as Phi Delta Kappan and the APA Monitor, as well as the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Science News, and American Scientist. And the results of applied research are those that policy makers look to when formulating position papers.

TEST YOURSELF

Why are both basic and applied research essential to the scientific community as well as to the public community that it serves? What do you think an educated or informed citizen should know about how the research process works? What five questions might he or she be able to answer?

Summary

Great! You have finished the first chapter of Exploring Research, and hopefully you now have a good idea about what research is (and isn’t), what the purpose of research is, and some of the different ways in which research can be carried out. With this new information under your belt, let’s turn to the next chapter, which focuses on some “researchese,” or the language used by researchers, and how these new terms fit together with what you have learned here.

Exercises

1 .

The process of research never stands independently from the content of the research. As a student new to the field of research, and perhaps even to your own discipline (such as education, psychology, sociology, or nursing), answer the following questions:

· (a)What areas within your discipline especially interest you?

· (b)Who are some of the outstanding researchers in your field, and what is the focus of their work?

· (c)Of the different types of research described and discussed in this chapter, which one do you think best fits the type of research that is done in your discipline?

2 .

At this point in your studies, what do you find most intimidating about the research process? What is one thing you could do to make this part of the research process a little bit easier or more comfortable? In which part of conducting research are you most confident?

3 .

How do the terms “hypothesis” and “theory” differ in meaning?

4 .

Visit your college or university library and locate an article from a professional journal that describes a research study. Access it online, or as a hard copy. From the description of how scientific inquiry takes place (which you read about in this chapter), answer the following:

· (a)What is the primary question posed by the study?

· (b)What important factors are identified?

· (c)Is there a hypothesis stated? If so, what is it?

· (d)Describe how the information was collected.

· (e)How do the results of the study affect the original hypothesis?

5 .

Interview an active researcher on your campus and ask about this person’s research activities, including:

· (a)The focus of this person’s research interests.

· (b)Why this individual is interested in this area.

· (c)What the most exciting part of the research is.

· (d)What the least exciting part of the research is.

· (e)What impact the results of the research might have on this individual’s particular discipline.

· (f)What studies this individual would like to see as follow-up studies to the research.

6 .

Select a discipline within the social and behavioral sciences, such as child development, social psychology, higher education, or health psychology. For the discipline you select, find a representative study that is quasi-experimental or experimental in nature. Write a one-paragraph description of the study. Do the same for a historical study.

7 .

This chapter contains several examples of preassigned groups used in quasi-experimental research (e.g., groups based on preassignment such as gender, race, grade in school, etc.). Name three more examples of preassigned groups appropriate for quasi-experimental research.

8 .

Research questions come from imagination and can be enriched by science, art, music, and literature. Identify a book you have read or a television show or movie you have watched. What kind of research question can you pull from this work? Here are some examples to get you started:

“Pride and Prejudice” (Jane Austen): In what ways do perceptions of social status relate to choices in a relationship partner?

“Clueless” (Amy Heckerling): How does an intervention involving vocabulary lessons, a new wardrobe, and instructions on which social groups to befriend affect ratings of popularity from fellow high school students?

9 .

Find a normal part of your daily routine about which to ask an “I wonder if . . . ” question. For example, “I wonder if the amount of text messaging in the hour before bedtime affects the amount of time needed to fall asleep in adolescents.”

10 .

In a fictitious correlational study, the results showed that age was related to strength, that is, as children get older, their strength increases. What is the problem with the statements that increased strength is caused by increasing age, or that the stronger you get the older you get?

11 .

Write down your definition of science. How would your definition of science differ from a student’s in a similar class 25 years ago? How would your definition differ from that put forth by a physical (e.g., physics, chemistry) scientist, if it differs at all?

12 .

When trying to decide which scientific method to use when exploring a question, what is the best rule of thumb to go by?

13 .

Look for examples of editorials or research articles that present correlational evidence. Do the authors infer a cause-and-effect relationship in the correlation? Why might it be difficult for even seasoned researchers to avoid making this mistake?

14 .

Research often replicates findings made by others. What is the value in this process?

15 .

We live in a very complex world just filled with economic and social challenges. How can the research process help us solve or better understand some of those problems and issues?

16 .

Identify five attributes that characterize high-quality research.

17 .

A researcher who hypothesized that 6-year-old children of nonworking mothers have more advanced reading skills than those of 6-year-old children of working mothers found insignificant results. Based on this information and what you have learned about the field of research, answer the following questions:

· (a)What is a new research question the researcher could ask?

· (b)What is one step in between examining the results and asking the new research question that might point the researcher in the right direction?

18 .

Two characteristics of high-quality research are generalizability and the ability to contribute to the betterment of society. In other words, results from high-quality research, particularly applied research, can provide a meaningful answer to the question, “So What?” Read a research article and describe in one or two sentences how the research addresses the “So What?” question.

19 .

Explain the difference between historical, correlational, and quasi-experimental research.

20 .

Here’s the question . . .

What is the difference between achievement scores for a group of children born in

Peoria and a group born in Croatia?

Use  Figure 1.2  to determine the method you should use.

Online. . .

Professional Organizations

Because someday you’ll be a professional, there’s no time like the present to get information about some professional societies and join as a student—it will never be cheaper. Here are some of the largest organizations and their Internet addresses:

· • American Anthropology Association at  http://www.aaanet.org/

· • American Educational Research Association at  http://www.aera.net/

· • American Medical Association at  http://www.ama-assn.org/

· • American Psychological Association at  http://www.apa.org/

· • American Public Health Association at  http://www.apha.org/

· • National Association for the Education of Young Children at  http://www.naeyc.org/

· • American Nurses Association at  www.nursingworld.org/

· • American Association for the Advancement of Science at  www.aaas.org/

· • American Statistical Association at  http://www.amstat.org

· • American Psychiatric Association at  http://www.psych.org

· • American Pharmacists Association at  http://www.pharmacist.com

· • Council for Exceptional Children at  http://www.cec.sped.org

CHAPTER 1 ORIGINS OF A SCIENCE OF MIND

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Since it is the understanding that sets man above the rest of sensible beings, and gives him all the advantage and dominion which he has over them; it is certainly a subject, even for its nobleness, worth our labour to inquire into.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690

INTRODUCTION

The discipline of Psychology, the history of which we explore in the following pages, did not exist before the mid- to late 19th century. Thus, to begin our history, we have to understand the intellectual and practical developments that made the emergence of such a field possible. As we discuss in this and the next chapter, at least four strands of thought and practice were important for the emergence of Psychology by the end of the 19th century: philosophy, physiology, evolution by natural selection, and creation of a psychological sensibility through everyday practices. Taken together, these four strands made possible both the science and the profession of Psychology, which Graham Richards has termed “big P” Psychology to differentiate the discipline from its subject matter, “little p” psychology (Richards, 2002). The latter includes the everyday psychology that people have used, and continue to use, to make sense of their lives.

The last strand, the creation of a psychological sensibility, is explained and elaborated in the next chapter. In this chapter, we unravel the first three strands by introducing you to basic ideas from the work of philosophers René Descartes and John Locke, the development of an experimental approach to understanding the relation between mind or brain and behavior in 19th-century physiology, and Charles Darwin’s work on evolution and how it included humans within the domain of natural laws.

We take as our point of departure the early modern period, that is, from the 17th century on, as the appropriate time to begin our analyses of the events that made possible the relatively recent emergence of Psychology. In terms of place, we begin with events and people in England and western Europe. This is not to claim that people in no other place or time wrote or thought psychologically about life; as we argue in later chapters, a background of thought relevant to psychology in other cultures came to the fore nearer our own time. Rather, our aim is both pragmatic and historiographical. We are pragmatic because space is limited. Our historiographic rationale is that we think a sound argument can be made that the psychological sensibility characterizing our own time is of relatively recent origin, dating from changes in human experience and human society that were first directly noticeable in the early modern period in England and Europe, and then exacerbated by rapid social changes brought on by such macroscale events as the Industrial Revolution and the spread of Protestant religious beliefs and practices.

Lastly, we think it is useful to consider events and contributions to the development of a psychological sensibility from both elites—that is, those of the upper classes who had access to resources, education, and the power to disseminate their views—and everyday people. It is more usual in a textbook to consider only the contributions of elites, typically philosophers or “men of science”; this chapter focuses on such contributions. The next chapter examines changes in everyday life that many people encountered and incorporated to make meaning in their lives. If, as we suggested in the introduction of this book, Psychology emerged from ways of living, then it follows that we should ask questions about when and how changes in everyday life occurred. While a full set of answers is not possible, since no complete record exists of how people lived and acted in earlier periods, we can provide at least a partial description and analysis based on extant records and writing. While we have an extensive record of philosophical thought from the early modern era, which we draw on in this chapter, in the next chapter we use what is available in the historical record to suggest how nonelites contributed to the emergence of practices that are also part of the lineage that led to the emergence of Psychology.

PHILOSOPHY: DESCARTES AND LOCKE AS EXEMPLARS

The gradual emergence of thought about man in naturalistic terms occurred, paradoxically, in the context of faith, both Protestant and Catholic. Religion and conflicts about correct beliefs and the proper conduct of daily life provided a background for this thinking that held both promise and threat. Nations went to war, and humans lost their livelihoods and often their lives over these matters. Both Descartes and Locke were profoundly affected by this context of religious and political strife, and each attempted to find ways to restore certainty of knowledge and order in civil society. Importantly, their thought also contributed to the eventual emergence of Psychology.

If any one word could characterize the 17th century in England and Europe, it might well be “uncertainty.” The modern nation-state was emerging, and war among nations was endemic. Civil strife that led to civil war in England brought horrors nearly unimaginable that left their marks for generations afterward. The English civil war was directly related to religious beliefs and practices, but religion was also an important factor in changes elsewhere in Europe as the new orientation to personal faith and religious practice introduced by Martin Luther (1483–1546) in the 16th century spread unevenly across the continent. Families, as well as nations, were often divided over questions of faith, whether to follow the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church or one of the new Protestant faiths. When these faiths were linked to the power of the state, many people were persecuted and killed for their beliefs and many fled to other countries. So, on both the national and the personal levels, it was a time of uncertainty as the fabric of life was rewoven in a period of intense social upheaval.

Although no one event sparked the changes in the structure of life and thought in Europe, the assassination of the king of France, Henri IV (Henry of Navarre), in 1610, was crucial in that it made salient the need to find a new foundation for civil society. Henri IV was tolerant of religious diversity and provided guarantees for the civil rights of religious minorities, who were primarily Protestant. Powerful Catholics feared that he secretly planned to weaken Catholicism, and they arranged to have him killed. His assassination was a rejection of religious tolerance. Given the tensions between faiths across Europe and the high political stakes involved, Henri’s assassination was taken as evidence that only force could resolve religious disputes. In 1618, the Thirty Years’ War began that involved most states of Europe and led to widespread devastation and a marked reduction in population. Among the elites, those with time to reflect and write, a pressing concern became how we can find certainty for knowledge and living that religion seemingly failed to provide.

Not only was there religious conflict, but the challenges to orthodox understanding of the natural world by Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) seemed to shake the foundations of knowledge laid down by Aristotle and his 13th-century Christian interpreter, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). The calls by Sir Francis Bacon around the beginning of the 17th century for a science based on observation of the world and the collection of those observations into a coherent framework through inductive reasoning was also a challenge to orthodox thinkers. This context for the new philosophies placed the study of man within a naturalistic framework. While several philosophers were prominent, we have chosen two, Descartes and Locke, as our exemplars of the new natural philosophy. What linked these two preeminent thinkers was their quest to find a certainty that could underpin civil life.

René Descartes (1596–1650)

Descartes was 22 years old when the Thirty Years’ War began. Descartes’s mother died when he was young. He lived with his grandparents and his two older siblings because his father, a lawyer, worked some distance away. A precocious child, at age 8 he was placed in the Collège at La Flèche, a Jesuit school. When he graduated at age 16, he had probably received as excellent an education as was available at the time. He was schooled in the Aristotelian beliefs, for example, about the organic soul and the intellective soul. Only humans were blessed with the latter and its chief characteristic, reason.

Two cautions are needed as we proceed. First, Descartes was not a psychologist, nor was he a protopsychologist. He was a philosopher concerned with placing knowledge on a sure foundation and from that foundation constructing knowledge about how the Creation worked, including the human brain and body. Descartes’s worry about the certainty of knowledge was with him even as he finished school. What compounded this worry was the state of his world as a young man. As the long period of conflict that became the Thirty Years’ War continued, Descartes, along with other thoughtful people, perceived that the underpinnings of society were inadequate to support an enduring civil society. This, combined with the disputatiousness and inconclusive arguments of the leading philosophers and theologians of the day, led Descartes to seek a way to have certain knowledge.

His search led him to the method of doubt. Descartes decided to accept only those things that were so clear and distinct to him that there could be no possibility of doubt. As he later wrote, “Immediately I noticed that while I was trying thus to think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something” (cited in R. Smith, 1997, p. 129). This led him to the famous phrase, cogito ergo sum, “I am thinking, therefore I exist.” For Descartes, the rational soul, the I, was central. From that point, then, an argument was made for the existence of God and God’s perfection as expressed in natural law. These indubitable facts, Descartes argued, were the foundation stones that made certainty of knowledge possible.

Second, Descartes was very much a person of his culture, time, and place. That is, he was a Catholic who sought avidly to keep his work within the bounds of orthodox belief. His adherence to Catholicism can be seen in his insistence that the mind is immaterial and the province of God. This meant that the soul (mind) is entirely distinct from the body. The soul is the seat of reason and directly amenable to divine influence; it cannot be reduced to materiality or explained in terms of mechanics. However, the implication of this is that all that is not soul can be examined in terms of mechanics and is amenable to explanations based in natural law. Descartes proposed that many functions previously considered to be mental and immaterial should be considered properties of the body. These included memory, perception, imagination, dreaming, and feelings; all of these were properties of the body and so could potentially be understood in naturalistic terms. This is the basis of what came to be referred to as the mind–body split or mind–body dualism.

To explain these functions, Descartes relied on an understanding of mechanics derived partly from then-recent discoveries in medicine—William Harvey’s (1578–1657) articulation of the heart as a pump for the blood—and from the artists and craftsmen of his time who had refined automata. Automata are self-moving mechanical objects, such as robots. Evidence shows that automata date from early in Chinese history, but they had been refined and made newly popular in the 16th and 17th centuries. The word “automaton” was coined in the early 17th century. Some automata that Descartes would have been familiar with included dolls that seemed to play musical instruments or enact a play. He also knew the royal gardens at St. Germain-en-Laye, outside Paris. There, using hydraulic pressure activated when visitors stepped on hidden plates, statues would move seemingly on their own. Descartes used the principle of this mechanical movement as a generative metaphor for understanding the functions of the body, including memory and other properties of the nervous system. He supposed that the cavities in the brain, the ventricles, were filled with animal spirits, which could flow through (hollow) nerves to effect bodily movement, just as the water filled the pipes at St. Germain and caused the statues to move.

FIGURE 1.1 René Descartes

Still, the question remained as to how the body and soul interact. Descartes proposed the pineal gland in the center of the brain. The pineal gland, Descartes supposed, could both receive impressions of the body via the animal spirits and transmit motions to the body. This had the effect of reserving the soul as the seat of reason and the special province of divine influence. This approach fit with both the teachings of the Catholic Church and the new mechanical philosophy.

What is important about Descartes for the later development of both a psychological sensibility and the discipline of Psychology is that his work was critical for the transition to understanding humans in terms of natural law from the older conceptions that placed man at the apex of creation, a “little lower than the angels,” as the biblical psalmist had it. That is, his work was critical for a new articulation of man that placed his attributes firmly in the natural world, with what was increasingly referred to as human nature. His writings became a point of departure for many later writers who responded to his work, not always sympathetically. What emerged from his contributions was a legacy that led toward an understanding of man as fully part of nature.

John Locke (1632–1704)

How do we gain knowledge? For Locke, this was a fundamental question to which the answer was human experience. In proposing that human knowledge comes through sense experience, Locke laid the foundation for both empirical philosophy and, much later, the human sciences, including Psychology. As with Descartes, however, Locke was not a protopsychologist, nor did he seek to establish a discipline of Psychology. Locke was concerned with finding a basis for civil society that would diminish the likelihood of incessant conflict and loss of human life. For Locke, the way to do so was through helping people form clear and distinct ideas, free of the excesses of political and religious enthusiasms. Locke’s desire to find a new, less conflictual basis for human society is understandable given the political and religious context of his life.

When Locke was only 10 years old, the first English Civil War began, with the usual horrors that such wars bring. For the next 19 years, until the restoration of the monarchy in 1661, the British Isles were in near-constant conflict—political, military, or both. Religious differences were the contextual surround for the war, but political machinations between the king and Parliament were central. When King Charles I was captured and then beheaded, it marked perhaps the passing of an age in which it was thought that the monarch was God’s representative on earth. The viciousness on both sides of the war must have brought great distress to Locke. When Charles II was crowned and the monarchy restored in 1661, Locke was still a young man, making his primary living as a tutor and adviser to the Earl of Shaftesbury. Locke was engaged with the politics of his age and was drawn into the political intrigues of the time. For a period in the 1680s, Locke had to leave England and live in Holland. He was there when the Glorious Revolution occurred, which deposed King James, brought William and Mary to the throne of England, and led to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy with enhanced power for the English Parliament.

Given these events, we can understand why Locke became so committed to finding a new basis for society. His ideas developed from the 1660s to the publication of his major work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in 1690. The Essay is remarkable in many ways, but especially noteworthy is Locke’s use of mind rather than soul. In doing so, he deliberately changed the terms of the debate about human knowledge. Descartes had reserved reason as an attribute of the soul, thus always leaving a space for the operation of divine influence, especially in regard to innate ideas given by God. Locke rejected the notion of innate ideas, such as God, although he did argue that humans have an innate power to reflect on their experiences. Instead of innate ideas, Locke argued that all ideas come through experience. That is, at birth our minds are a tabula rasa (blank slate) on which sensory experiences are inscribed. The contents of the mind are those ideas that come from experiences.

FIGURE 1.2 John Locke

Knowledge, then, is a matter of the mind gathering experiences, or ideas, from the material world. Locke proposed a way in which we could understand how ideas could move from simple to complex through association. In doing so, Locke seemed to offer a model of mental life that corresponded to Sir Isaac Newton’s model of the mechanical basis of the physical world. Newton’s Principia Mathematica was published in 1687, 3 years before Locke’s Essay, and in some ways Locke’s work echoes that of Newton. Just as Newton had proposed a model of how complex substances are due to the combination of less complex materials, so Locke’s model suggested that complex ideas form from combinations of simple ideas, a position that became known as associationism. As he wrote, “As simple ideas are observed to exist in several combinations united together, so the mind has a power to consider several of them united together as one idea; and that not only as they are united in external objects, but as itself has joined them together. Ideas thus made up of several simple ones put together, I call complex; such as are beauty, gratitude, a man, an army, the universe” (Locke, 1690, p. 159). Why is this so important for us today? First, Locke, like Newton, made human experience central to knowledge. This led to subsequent emphases by philosophers on what was later called epistemology, the study of the way we know. And it placed a premium on empiricism, that is, knowledge gained through the senses, which came to characterize British philosophy and led to later developments that were crucial for a discipline of Psychology.

Beyond this, Locke’s work made individual experience gained in the material world highly important. In the political and religious context of his time, this generated great debate, with some even labeling Locke an atheist. But the practical result was the privileging of the empirical world, thus strengthening arguments for natural religion and for a society predicated upon human experience. It is this emphasis on human experience that is arguably Locke’s greatest contribution and one that had the greatest import for later developments in political and scientific, including psychological, realms.

The Legacy of Descartes and Locke for Psychology

The time from the publication of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 to the early years of the 19th century is often called the “long” 18th century. Some scholars and texts have referred to it as the Age of Enlightenment or Age of Reason. Many people contributed to the debates about intellectual and practical issues that were conducted among educated people and were central to changes in governance and the way humans in Europe related to one another. The legacy of Descartes and Locke found in these contributions and debates is that now such issues about man are framed as part of nature and that the right way to understand and discuss them is in terms of human nature. This is not to say that religious beliefs and creeds played no part in these discussions. Especially in the case of Descartes, the relationship of this new thinking to religious belief was much pondered. The outcome, however, was that man was increasingly seen as part of nature and was to be understood in terms of the natural world.

PHYSIOLOGY AND MEDICINE: THE SEARCH FOR MATERIAL EXPLANATIONS OF HUMAN NATURE

While philosophers and educated people engaged with notions of man as part of nature, efforts were also made to systematically explore what this would mean in terms of the functions of the human body, including the brain. The term “experiment” or “experimental” came into vogue to express this systematic exploration. By the end of the 19th century, the experiment became the method of discerning truth and the laboratory became the place where truth, through experimentation, was discovered. In terms of the human nervous system, this was a long and circuitous route with many points of contention and debate. The legacy of Descartes to this debate was that the higher mental powers—rationality, purposiveness, and so on—remained the province of divine influence. So while the functions of the body, including the “lower” centers of the brain and the nervous system, could be understood in naturalistic or mechanical terms, the higher powers, including the cerebrum, were off limits. The effort to extend naturalistic explanation to the higher mental powers—indeed, to equate the brain and the mind—became a major debate in the 19th century. Perhaps not surprisingly, medicine was an arena where this work first occurred.

Medicine and Naturalistic Explanation

Harvey had described the circulation of the blood in 1628, demonstrating empirically that circulation of the blood is due to the action of the heart, thus potentially understandable in naturalistic terms. After Locke, in the 18th century, physicians began to describe the actions of the mind in physiological terms, thus opening the door to experimentation as a way to potentially demonstrate this. The British physician David Hartley in his Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations(1749), employed Newton’s suggestion that vibrations in nervous tissue could be responsible for some visual effects to develop a physiology of the nervous system predicated on association of ideas that could account for relations between mind and body. However, it should be noted that Hartley’s aim was religious, to inspire his fellow man to pursue God’s design for humans.

The experimentation and writing of the 18th-century British physicians Robert Whytt (1714–1766) and William Cullen (1794–1878) both facilitated the public’s understanding that mind and brain were intimately connected and offered a way to elide the old mind–body dualism that bedeviled research on mental processes. Whytt suggested in his 1751 book On the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions of Animals that an organism’s response to stimuli involved the action of volition, a function of the higher mental powers, but this volitional response was not necessarily conscious. Whytt called this the principle of sentience, whose main function was the preservation of life and the unity of the organism. Before Whytt, only two kinds of action were thought possible: voluntary (rational) and physical (mechanical). Whytt’s work proposed a third action, the action of stimuli on the organism. Thus, stimulated motion was best viewed as occurring on a continuum between voluntary and automatic, rather than as in absolute categories of free will or mechanism, and depended on the conditions necessary for preservation. The result of this stimulated motion was always to preserve the organism; thus, self-regulation was the effect. This implied the importance of function and offered an alternative to Cartesian dualism in understanding the relation of mind and body.

Why was this important for the later development of psychology? Whytt argued that the effect of a stimulus did not depend on whether it was a physical or mental event. The importance of the stimulus lay in its function. A mental event could function as a stimulus, just as a physical event could. This implied that the mind was intimately involved in bodily actions, not categorically separate as Cartesian dualism suggested. If mental and physical events were functionally equivalent, then perhaps psychological topics could be investigated without being bound by the old categories of Cartesian dualism. This, in fact, is what began to occur.

Cullen, who succeeded Whytt at the University of Edinburgh, advanced Whytt’s work with an even greater emphasis on function and the role of stimulated motion as a self-regulatory principle. Cullen replaced Whytt’s principle of sentience with the concept of energy as the vital principle. Energy was quantifiable, and the measure of excitation in the organism was possible. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887), who is discussed in  Chapter 3 , drew upon this work for his later development of psychophysiology. The impact of the work of Whytt and Cullen has not often been noted in histories of psychology because of their affiliation with medicine, but their work was crucial in that they provided a language and a group of principles that placed the role of the nervous system front and center in understanding how the mind and body are related.

Relatedly, the work of Whytt and Cullen was part of a broader movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries toward emphasizing the importance of understanding the relation between the organism and the environment in terms of self-regulation. The latter principle came to the fore by the end of the 18th century in several fields, the political economy of Adam Smith (1723–1790) being a prime example with its invisible hand as the regulator of the market (see  Chapter 2 ). Here, again, we see the relation between technology and science in terms of guiding or generative metaphors. In the 17th century, we saw how Descartes drew upon the popular technology behind automata to explain how the body works. In the 18th century, the idea of a governor or self-regulator as found in the new steam engines of James Watt was employed to explain how the organism engaged in self-regulation via feedback loops between mental–physical events and their stimulation of the organism.

In Europe in this period, several physicians investigated the relationships among mind, brain, and body. Perhaps most notable was Albrecht von Haller, whose experiment-based theories suggested a way for the mind to act on the body through the nervous system. By the end of the 18th century, the Austrian physician and anatomist Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) had begun to argue that the brain was the organ of mind and that its faculties were empirically demonstrable. Gall was a major figure in what became a nearly century-long debate over the extent to which mental abilities, or the functions of the brain and nervous system, could be understood in naturalistic terms. An implication of this was the question of whether a soul or some higher power was needed to account for the most complex mental abilities, including the will. Some investigators sought to avoid the theological debate by contending that mechanical processes only extended as far as the subcortex. The cortex was reserved for the divine influence of some higher natural law. Gall’s work called that contention into question.

Gall was born in Germany and settled in Vienna, where he received his medical degree. In Vienna he made his first scientific contributions when he demonstrated that two types of substance were found in the brain: gray matter (the cell bodies of nerve cells) and white matter (sub-cortical brain areas containing nerve cell axons). He also showed that the two hemispheres of the brain were connected by commissures. However, what Gall became known for was his organology, later renamed phrenology by some of his followers. Organology was Gall’s method of discerning mental abilities by reading the bumps on someone’s skull. Gall said that these ideas began when he was a schoolboy and noticed that some of his classmates who performed better on memory tasks than he did had bulging eyes. In his adult career, Gall further developed this schoolboy insight.

FIGURE 1.3 Franz Joseph Gall

The brain, Gall argued, was composed of distinct parts, each of which had a function. Furthermore, the size of each of these parts, as observable through the examination of the skull, reflected the strength of the assigned function. Gall was not the first person to suggest that mental abilities or functions might occur at specific locales (the idea can be found in ancient medical texts), but his contention that the brain was the organ of mind and its workings could be understood entirely by empirical means did create controversy. First, it circumvented the duality of mind and body proposed by Descartes. Gall argued that all mental functions, including the higher powers reserved by Descartes as the province of divine influence, could be understood as the workings of the brain. In that sense, Gall was engaging in a philosophical argument, one that had important implications for future research. How was knowledge organized? Was it just a collection of sense impressions? Gall argued that there had to be a physical, innate foundation for organizing the knowledge that came to us through our senses. Unlike the followers of Descartes, Gall’s point was that there was no division of mind and body and no need to reserve higher mental functions for the providence of God.

Second, the search for a materialist basis for mind proved extremely important, although controversial. Perhaps the controversy helped make it important. Gall insisted that an empirical approach to the question of brain function was crucial. While Descartes had split the mind and body and set the terms for discussion of mental faculties, his approach was philosophical. As we have seen in the cases of Whytt and Cullen, investigators were increasingly seeking to account for mental abilities in terms of bodily processes. These investigators were relying on empirical rather than purely rational or philosophical methods. Their efforts were strongly resisted by some who felt they needed to allow for higher processes in terms of mental faculties that were uniquely human, for example, the will and the intellect.

But the movement begun by Descartes and Locke to study man as part of nature, to find natural laws to account for human mind and behavior, had already reset the agenda or the terms for what counted as fact. By the end of the 19th century, the investigation of the nervous system—of mind and brain—was firmly on the empirical and experimental basis on which Gall had insisted. Even those who sought to retain Descartes’s division of mind and body were constrained to provide evidence gathered empirically and experimentally.

Jean-Pierre-Marie Flourens (1794–1867), a physiologist and member of the French medical and scientific establishment, was firmly committed to the Cartesian position that reserved the mind’s higher faculties as the province of divine influence. He reacted strongly to what he perceived as Gall’s materialist arguments. Flourens sought to discredit Gall and his followers by showing experimentally that no division of cerebral function existed. Using birds and a few mammalian species, Flourens systematically removed or ablated parts of the brain and then observed what happened when the animal recovered. He found no specific losses of function but rather general losses across several functions. He argued that this preserved the unity of the soul. What some critics, including Gall, pointed out was that Flourens had not been discriminate enough in carefully removing portions of the brain but had cut across several possibly distinct areas. Nevertheless, Flourens carried the day, at least among the medical and scientific establishment, because of the prestige of his social position, the compatibility of his findings with the established medical and philosophical views, and the usefulness of his results in discrediting the basis of what was now being called phrenology, which had become part of a social movement perceived as radical and antiestablishment (more on this in  Chapter 2 ). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Flourens’s use of the experimental method fit with what was becoming the scientific norm for establishing fact—man could be understood in naturalistic terms as long as the investigation was experimental and laboratory based.

FIGURE 1.4 Jean-Pierre-Marie Flourens

Flourens’s championship of the unity of soul and mind and discounting of the localization of brain functions was the received view in French medicine and physiology for many years. There were dissenters such as the respected physiologist Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796–1881), who collected more than 100 clinical cases that he suggested supported localization of function. Bouillaud argued especially that language must be localized somewhere in the frontal lobes of the brain. It was the work of Paul Broca (1824–1880), however, that firmly established localization of articulate language through the case of Monsieur Leborgne, who had lost his ability to speak. Before the case of LeBorgne, Broca had already established himself as a respected scientist. Like many other scientists of his day, he was influenced by scientists elsewhere in Europe, principally Germany, who were arguing that it was necessary to break phenomena down to their most essential elements to study them. Broca thought that perhaps the best way to understand the complexity of the nervous system was to look at the building blocks of mental activity; localization of function potentially offered a way to do this. Recent mapping of the surface of the cerebrum showed its diversity of form, and Broca argued that a law of physiology was that structure or form and function were related. Thus, different parts of the cortex may have different functions. When LeBorgne died, six days after coming under Broca’s care, an autopsy revealed damage to the rear portion of the left frontal lobe. Other cases soon were found where damage to the same area, second or third frontal convolution of the frontal lobe, was found with attendant loss of speech. While these findings did not settle the debate conclusively, they did sway medical and scientific opinion toward an acceptance of some sort of localization of function.

After Broca’s work became widely known, other investigators began providing support for localization of cerebral function, thus extending naturalistic explanations to the highest levels of the nervous system. In Germany, two physicians, anatomist Gustav Fritsch (1837–1927) and psychiatrist Eduard Hitzig (1839–1907), used recent improvements in the control of electricity to stimulate what is now called the motor cortex of a dog. They found five sites that, when electrically stimulated, resulted in distinctive movements—on the opposite side of the body. Flourens had argued that the cortex had nothing to do with movement or motor control. Fritsch and Hitzig understood their work as directly contributing support to cerebral localization. Perhaps paradoxically to 21st-century students, Fritsch and Hitzig were, like Flourens, committed to a Cartesian model of divine influence on higher centers of the brain and so restricted their conclusions on localization of motor control to motor centers and reserved other parts of the cortex for the higher mental powers.

David Ferrier (1843–1928) had no such compunctions. Ferrier, later knighted, built on the work of Gall and John Hughlings Jackson, a fellow neurologist, to demonstrate experimentally the wide extent of cerebral localization. Where Fritsch and Hitzig had found five areas of motor control, Ferrier found 15. His experimental animals included fish, birds, amphibians, monkeys, and chimpanzees. Ferrier quite self-consciously referred to his work as “scientific phrenology.” The title of his book summarizing his work on localization was The Functions of the Brain, and he dedicated it to Gall. Gall had predicted 50 years earlier, in his book On the Functions of the Brain, that someone would scientifically validate his insights in the next 50 years! Together with work in sensory–motor physiology, covered in the next section, this work on localization of function helped make a science of Psychology possible.

Research in the Physiology of the Nervous System

The discovery of the distinction between sensory and motor nerves, made independently by Charles Bell (1774–1842) in 1811 and François Magendie (1783–1855) in 1822, helped create the conditions for the exploration of the psychological implications of nervous system functions. Both Bell and Magendie pointed out that each type of sensory nerve was specific to a sensory modality—vision, hearing, touch, and so on. This became in the hands of Johannes Müller the doctrine of specific nerve energies, discussed later. Two research streams were linked to this conceptualization. One was the concept of cerebral localization, already discussed. The other was work on the nervous system that led from the concept of specific nerve energies to a mechanistic model of human nervous system function. Both streams were part of the extension of a naturalistic model to encompass all of human nature. The concept of reflexes or reflex action was part of both streams. The discovery of specific sensory and motor nerves helped refine the previously ill-defined concept of reflex actions.

The concept of reflexes was not new to the 19th century. Whytt had employed the concept in his work on stimulated movement. The work of Whytt and his successor, Cullen, as noted, was critical in making it possible to link psychological questions to physiological methods. The Moravian-born physiologist Georg Prochaska employed the concept of reflexive action as part of his vis nervosa and sensorium commune. The former referred to the latent energy of the nerves that found expression in reflexes. Sensorium commune encompassed the medulla, basal ganglia, and spinal cord. Its role was to link sensory input to motor responses, without reliance on consciousness. These earlier uses of the reflex concept were typically not precise or precisely linked to physiological processes. But with the articulation of the sensory–motor distinction, the English physiologist Marshall Hall offered a specific connection between local nerve action and behavior. Hall’s use of the reflex concept meant that behavior could be described in terms of nerve action, that consciousness does not have to be involved in behavior. This challenged the mentalistic conceptions of human behavior. If the brain and soul are equivalent, and the soul directs human behavior, then neurophysiology or experimentation is unnecessary. If, however, at least some aspects of human behavior are based in stimuli and responses at the physiological level, then experimental approaches to understanding human behavior are needed. Hall’s proposal of reflex action and behavior was, at first, accepted only as accurate for the lower nerve centers. By the end of the 19th century, reflex action was extended to the highest centers of the brain, as the work of Fritsch and Hitzig and that of Ferrier showed.

The Mechanization of the Brain

Johannes Müller (1801–1858) is often referred to as the person who made physiology a truly scientific field. His work occurred when German universities were expecting from professors original research by scholars devoted to specific topics. His handbook of physiology, published in several volumes from 1833 to 1840, fostered a critical, experimental approach to investigations of bodily processes that became the norm for other scientists. Müller extended the Bell-Magendie sensory–motor distinction with his doctrine of specific nerve energies. Each sensory modality, Müller argued, is specialized to respond in ways that are unique to it. So, visual nerves when stimulated give visual sensations. For example, pressing on the eye gives a visual sensation, just as looking at an object does. The doctrine also suggests that what determines our sensory experiences are not the objects-out-there in the physical world; rather, it is the structure and function of our nervous systems that determines what we sense. In this work and in his handbook, Müller promoted the importance of laboratory-based experimental work. In doing so, Müller opened a line of research in physiology that led directly to Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt and helped make a physiologically based Psychology possible.

FIGURE 1.5 Johannes Müller

Helmholtz (1821–1894), perhaps the greatest scientist of the 19th century, made contributions that changed physics, physiology, optics, audition, and psychology. While a student with Müller, Helmholtz joined with several fellow students—Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896), Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), and Ernst Brücke (1819–1892)—in committing himself to scientific explanations that relied only on physical and chemical explanations for all phenomena. Their work over the next half century made Germany the center of first-rank scientific work in several fields. The application of their mechanistic approach by others was also vital for helping transform Germany into an industrial and military powerhouse by the end of the century. It was also the background for the later development of Gestalt and holistic theories, especially after the defeat of Germany in World War I.

The contributions of Helmholtz to psychological topics included the measurement of the nerve impulse, previously thought to occur instantaneously. This indicated the possibility of measuring aspects of mental activity, using what was soon called the reaction time method. Helmholtz also showed that the law of conservation of energyapplied to living organisms, including humans, as well as to the inorganic world. Using frogs as his experimental animal, Helmholtz showed that the energy and heat expended by a frog were equal to the calories available in the food the frog consumed. He went on to further work with these principles and eventually formulated the law of the conservation of energy: Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed from one kind to another. What this suggested was that machines, including the human machine, are devices for transforming energy from one kind to another kind. His work on optics led to a crucial distinction between sensation and perception. Sensations are, Helmholtz argued, merely the raw data that comes through our senses. These data are made meaningful by perception. In this account, perception is a psychological process that depends on the brain, prior learning, and our experiences.

FIGURE 1.6 Hermann von Helmoltz