Research Methods

• Identifying/recognizing social problems
• reviewing previous research
• personal theories

• Obtaining a representative sample (people who fit the specified criteria set for the study) advantage: provides good information for the study. disadvantage: can be difficult to nearly impossible to obtain a truly representative sample, you may be able to obtain a few that fit the sample but not the whole sample
• Obtaining a convenience sample (anyone who roughly fits the study criteria and is "conveniently" available) advantage: easy to obtain participants for sample as they are widely available. disadvantage: does not necessarily fit your criteria as well and can be less favorable to your results.

• correlational
• experimental
• cross-sectional
• longitudinal
• retrospective

Collecting data in a lab can prevent true and accurate relationship data from occurring but you cannot always obtain data from natural situations as it can be difficult to control for outside influences for identifying possible causal relationships.

• self-reports
• observations
• physiological measurements
• archival evidence

It is important to inform participants about what the study involves so as to try and prevent any problems from forming in the participant's relationships due to effects from participation in the research (discovering information from research questions that could be troubling to participants)

Statistics help show us whether there is any significance to the data that was collected or not and if that significance is correlational or causal