Research Ideas and Searching the Literature
How to find an idea for research study
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How do you get an idea for a research study, much less actually develop and carry out a research project?!
There is no one way to get an idea, and your textbook offers some helpful suggestions on pages 40 - 42
Pick a topic that interests you
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This is very, very important! Research takes a lot of time, and you will have to do a lote of reading, writing, and thinking about the subject you are researching. Research can be fun if the topic interests you and aversive, boring, dreadful or worse if the subject does not interest you.
you think about a population, behavior or phenomena, or general topic tha tinterest you.
For example, dogs or students or the elderly....or learning, makeing new friends, or test anxiety...or depression, stress, or intelligence
Do your homework
Read about the topic to see what research has already been done, what questions are being asked, what issues are deemed important.
This 'homeowrk' will help you narrrow your topic from something broad, e.g., dogs or depression, to something more narrow, e.g., learning in puppies, or dperession in first year college students.
Narrowing your topic requires doing some homework, and narrowing your topic early will reduct the amount of later homeowrk you have to do.
Keep an open mind
research can be like a journey.
Have you ever gone on a trip where you planned what you were going to do, and then diecided to linger in a place longer than you planned to, or to head off in another direction after you learned about a new sight to see?
Research can be like that...
For example, I planned to study a therapy by seeing if it was helpful for people with schizophrenia...and in the course of carrying out the study I became very interested in the phenomena of delusions. That is, how do people (with or without schizophrenia) come to believe somethign tha tisn't true?
Ask questions, if something captures your attention then go with it. If you come to a dead end then move in a differentdirection
In short, be flexible.
Focus
Decide what is and is not relevant for your research. A literature can easily produce hundreds of thousands or even millions of results. Narrow your topic to a more specific focus in orer to have a manageable amount of reviewing to do.
Take one step at a time
Research can be a long and arduous process. Go back to chapter one and break your process into manageable steps.
Follow suggestions
You can be on your way to coming up with an idea by learning about what has worked for others. Some strategies for oming up with a research idea are presented on pages 42-44.
Avoid these common mistakes in choosing a research topic
The topic does not interest you
You will have to spend a lot of time reading, writing and thinking abotu the topic. There is an infinitie number of topics to choose from, so you shoudl be able to find one or more that interest you.
The topic is too safe or too easy
you won't learn much if you choose a topic youa re laready entirely familiar with
The topic is too difficult
One of my firends likes to say that "the best paper is a completed paper." While your topic shouldn't be too easy a topic that is too diffiuclt will frustrate you.
Be like Goldilocks and ind the topic that is "just right"
The topic is too broad or too narrow
Again, you should aim for 'just right'
If you google depression the are more than 200 million results. Even google scholar provides 2.4 million results.
The topic 'depression' is too broad.
And a topic such as 'depression in 20 year old women with red hair' is probably too narrow.
The section on doing aliterature search will help you identify some strategies for narrowing your topic, and not narrowing it too much.
Sticking to the first topic that comes to mind
At the beginning of your quest for a good topic your reviewing might lead you to consider a new topic. This is a good thing if that newer topic interests you.
Switching topics is only problematic if you have already invested a lot of time and energy in another topic.
Inadequate literature on the topic
If you find little or nothing on your topic there could be many reasons for this
The best reason is that you have stumbled onto a new line of research -- good for you!
Other reasons are:
- you are using the wrong terms in your search, for instance, youa re looking up 'rotten mood' instead of 'depression'
- you are studying something that cannot be studied via the scientific method, for instance angels or ghosts (and don-t give up yet... you COULD study something like belief in angels or ghosts...)
- you could be searching the wrong database, for instance maybe you should search a medical rather than psychology data base to find out more about cancer patients in chemotherapy
Finding an using background literature
we are almost ready to begin considering how to do a literature, or 'lit' search...
There are several data bases that include relevant behavioral science literature including psychology, medical and social sciens data bases
Most can be accessed through the library or online.
Your book describes a few different databases on page 47. For the lab assignment you will use two databases: psycINFO and Google scholar
Primary Vs secondary sources
primary sources are firsthand reports of ones observations or research results...they are written by the person who made the observations
secondary sources are descriptions of other people's work.
Primary sources are preferred.
Secondary souces are useful for getting a summary of the literature, but since they are not firsthand reports they might be biased, or incomplete, or inaccurate.
A research article in a journal is a primary source. A textbook or review article is a secondary source that describes others' research.
One could write a book about a research study.
Note that not all journal articles are primary sources and not all books secondary sources; the key distinction is whether the report is firsthand or secondhand.
I like to use a good and recent review article to find some primary sources. That is, I don't rely on the review article as a source of information that I will cite directly,and I do use the bibliography of review articles to find primary sources that I might learn from and cite in my research.
A word about wikipedia
wikipedia is a secondary source, and the standard for inclusion in wikipedia is not very high. Wikipedia may be a useful way to get a quick overview of an unfamiliar topic (e.g., say you want to learn something about bipolar disorder, cognitive therapy, the behavior of fruit flies, the study of motivation..you might start with a look at an article in wikipedia as a way to orient yourself to the topic, and you should never cite wikipedia in a scholarly paper.
Now it's time to practice doing a literature search!
Computer technology is advancing so quickly that it might seem like doing a literature search must be so simple that anyone can do one.
(image of a dog typing at a computer)
And while searching a database is easier than ever it still requires some skill and practice.
Using PsycINFO to conduct a literature search
Your textbook does a good job of describing how to use psycINFO, so I won't repeat what they say here.
For an additional resource, the UCF library has a heplful guide to using psycINFO that you can access here:
http://library.ucf.edu/Reference/Instruction/Education/PsycinfoUserGuide.asp
Using Google Scholar to conduct a literature search
I use psycINFO to search the literature, and I also use Google Scholar...it is being used increasingly by scholars in many disciplines, and in your lab you will use both psycINFO and Google Scholar.
Here are some reasons why I like Google Scholar:
- some articles not available in full text on psycINFO are available in google scholar
- the results are broader than psychology - sometimes that is problematic, and sometimes it leads to some useful resources and good ideas
- I find it to be a little faster than psycINFO, though it does take some practice to learn how to select terms such that the number of results is manageable enough to be useful.
An Example of a Google Scholar search
Suppose I want to do research on the effects of meditation practice on stress using Google Scholar...
Go to Google Scholar - open in the usual www.google.com Links to an external site. then select "more" then select "even more" and select "scholar"
It will probably be helpful if you open another window and follow along on google by using the steps I will describe below.
When the Google scholar window appears, select 'articles' and make sure that 'include patents' and 'legal documents' are NOT selected.
Of course, if you were doing a search as a law student or perhaps an engineering student looking for a patent you might want to select those, and they are not relevant ot most psychology research...
Click on the arrow in the textbox to get "advanced scholar" options.
when I search a single term...I just entered the word "meditation" in the text box that says "find articles with all of the words"..and I got 540,000 results.
That is way too many, so I decide to try "stress" instead of "meditation"
.Now I get 4.430,000 results.
Talk about STRESS!!! That is far too many items to consider....
I can narrow my search in a couple of ways...
First, I'll try to enter bothterms at once, stress and meditation - and now there are "only" 113,000 results.
Now, the default position is that the words appear 'anywhere in the article', so I'll see if I can narrow it by selecting that the words "meditation" and "stress" appear 'in the title of the article' rather than anywhere in the articles.
Now I get a much more manageable 375 results...that is still alot, so I might narrow it by limiting the time-frame, by finding the box that says "articles published between" and I can select a specific date range. For instance, if I narrow it to the last 10 years, so articles with the words 'meditation' and 'stress' in the title, and that were published between 2003 and 2013 I am now down to 162 results.
I might decide to scroll through those, or I could narrow it further by selecting another key word, maybe related to my population, so women (5 results) or students (11 results)
I coudl also opt to narrow by author...for instance, I know that Jon Kabat-Zinn does research on stress and meditation, and now I have only two results.
Both types of searches might be useful. I would certainly need more than two or five articles...and those two or five will be most relevant to my study. But some of the larger collection of 162 might be worth reading because of insight on a method, data analysis strategy, or problems encountered in previous research.
You will soon try it yourself...and also use psycINFO... for the lab assignment.
In order to make use of the articles it is helpful to understand how research articles are organized -- this will be in the quiz, and there is a helpful table on p. 61 in your textbook.
Use the matching game below to prepare for the quiz by testing your knowledge of the contents of a research article
Finding an idea for a research study and converting it to a hypothesis and prediction
Now we've come full circle.
One of the major purposes of doing a literature search is to get ideas for a research study.
Question: what are some other reasons to do a lit search? Think about it, and then consider the answer below...
So now that you have a bunch of articles to review to find an idea for a research study, how exactly do you use those articles to get ideas?
Of course a general idea must come from you -- you did your search on a general topic that you have some general interest in.
And the next step is to peruse articles to get more specific ideas. According to your textbook (pp. 64 - 65) you might get ideas by
- looking at a research article's discussion section and seeing what the authors suggest as articles for future directions
- modifying or extending an existing study, perhaps by extneding it to a different age group, or using a shorter or longer procedure, or measuring the phenomenon of interest in a different way
- replicating a study, that is, repeating it exactly --- and only so long as it has not been done many times and its conclusion is not widely accepted
- combining results, for instance if one study finds that meditation improves stress, while another finds that exercise improves stress; you might decide to examine the combined effects of meditation and exercise on stress
Answer to question above: you might also do a lit search after your study has concluded. For isntance, to look for articles where the results were similar or very different, or to see if your results might apply to a different populations such as a different age or ethnic group. You might also do a lit search to strengthen your intoroduction, or to search for measures to use in your method section. And if youa re not a researcher, you might do a literature search to write a book chapter or book that summarizes a topic, or to prepare a report, or prepare to teach a class, or understand a problem a client is having, OR TO DO AN ASSIGNMENT IN A RESEARCH METHODS CLASS!!
The book chapter concludes with a very short section on how to critically evaluate a research article,
The section may be short, but it is very important.
I'd like to think that any study worthy of being published in a journal is a 'good' study, and sadly, some less-than-perfect studies are published.
So how do you CRITICALLY EVALUATE a study to decide if it is a good one?
Consider the journal itself:
Is it peer reviewed?
Does it have a high standard for accepting empirical articles?
(image of the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science)
To evaluate the quality of the study by reviewing the introduction you might consider the following:
- are the articles cited in the introduction up to date and primarily from primary rather than secondary sources?
- is the introduction thorough or are important topics left out?
- is the hypothesis clear?
- Is the literature reviewed related to the hypothesis?
- Does the outcome the authors predict make sense given the hypothesis?
- Are the authors missing anything? For instance, are there other hypotheses that could be made, or does the hypothesis seem not to follow from the introductory material?
These suggestions are related only to reading the introduction. See table 2.3 on p. 67 to also see how to evaluate the method, results, discussion, and references sections.
Now what?
This concludes the 'lecture' material for module 1.
The webcourses material should not be regarded as a substitute for reading the chapter. It is a supplement to it.
If you feel you have a good understanding of the material in chapters 1 & 2 and online in this module, then you are ready to complete the quiz and lab assignment.