Author Description

Offering a very easy-to-follow and practical approach for students who are learning to conduct their own research projects, this engaging text is designed to help students not only master the concepts of the course, but also become critical consumers of everyday research-related information. The authors provide numerous examples from the real world (as well as from many different areas of psychology), actual media reports with critical thinking questions, and case studies that provide insight into how a researcher "thinks through" issues of research design. The wide range of applications involves students and helps them understand how the research tools used in psychological research help satisfy our curiosity about why people think, act, and feel the way they do. The text approaches the topic of research in a very balanced manner, providing an overview of experimental and non-experimental research designs, an overview of the appropriate statistical analyses and a description of how scientific knowledge can be disseminated using APA format.