Fundamentals of Research Methodology Paper
Tiffiney Thompson
August 28, 2009
Abstract
Fundamentals of Research Methodology Paper
Over the years many individuals have created various practices and forms of Psychology which has led it to becoming a great science. Its development has dramatically evolved from the 18th century until this present day. There have been plenty of contributions to the enhancement of Psychology into a science from Sigmund Freud to B.F. Skinner as well as a host of other psychologists (Shaughnessy, Zechmeister, & Zechmeister, 2006). Its transformation has evolved from intuitions and assumptions into research methods and processes in order to gain evidence to support the information that is being studied (McIntire &Miller, 2007).
Identifying the problem and formulating the hypothesis is the first step in the scientific method process. In this step you decide what you as the researcher wants to study; what interest you and what you want to learn more about. Once you have identified what you want to study then you hypothesize on the information which is basically predicting what you are expecting to occur in a form of a question within the subject that was chosen (McIntire &Miller, 2007). Immediately afterwards looking up literature and previous research is very important not only to check to see if your particular question has already been researched but also to gain more knowledge about your subject as well as find out the limitations of previous research (Shaughnessy, Zechmeister, & Zechmeister, 2006). This will also help in establishing what your operational definition of your variables should be which is basically a specific definition of the variable so that it can correctly be measured using whatever scale has been chosen when creating the study to research
Conducting the experiment is the next step of the scientific method. During this step the researcher actually follows through with the experiment that he has...