Discuss how and why particular research methods are used at the cognitive level of analysis
- Experimental Methods:
- -Laboratory Experiments: detects cause and effect relationships between variable in a controlled enviroment for the experimental conditions. Higher internal validity however has a lower ecological validity
-Field Experiment Studies: higher ecological validity, however it is difficult to control all extreneous variables.
-Cross-cultural Studies: a naturalistic experiment with little to no control of extreneous variables, however has a higher ecological validity and more meaningful findings because it becomes easier to generalize across cultures.
Neurophysiological Techniques: experiment is carried out as a correlation study. fMRI's help psychologists understand the role certain ares of the brain impact thoughts and emotions and attribute to considerable breakthroughs.
Case Studies: provides an in-depth account into psychological phenomena that could not be found in experiments, however with few cases, there is little to no confidence regarding a generalization across other cases because the information has such a low participant count, however with more cases with the same/similar findings, there is a higher confidence with theories.
Interviews: interviews provide subjective data [data that is easily communicated and not too deep into a psyche]. A good interview is dependent upon the type of interview, sensitivity of the issue(s) addressed, and the validity of the data analysis techniques used.