Beginning Behavioral Research A Conceptual Primer

Welcome to the fifth edition ofBeginning Behavioral Research.This book was originally conceived as an undergraduate text for students who, as part of an introductory course in research methods, are required to plan an empirical study, to analyze and interpret the data, and to present their findings and conclusions in a written report. It is also intended to encourage students to be analytical and critical not only in interpreting their own research findings, but in seeing and understanding what is behind the research reported in newspaper, TV, and Internet stories of scientific (and pseudoscientific) results and claims. Boyce Rensberger (2000), a prominent science journalist and author of several popular science books, commented on the general public's relative lack of discrimination about science and pseudoscience: Without a grasp of scientific ways of thinking, the average person cannot tell the difference between science based on real data and something that resembles science--at least in their eyes--but is based on uncontrolled experiments, anecdotal evidence, and passionate assertions. They like it all. (p. 61) Our hope is that this book will teach students to understand the difference between real science and pseudoscience and the exacting standards of good scientific research. Thus, although the primary emphasis of this text is on behavioral research, we have tried to connect this approach with the empirical reasoning used in other fields in order to underscore the broad base of scientific thinking. The examples we have chosen give a sense not only of traditional ways of doing, analyzing, and thinking about research, but also of some recent developments that may not be as well known. For example, we introduce students to statistical methods that, while enormously useful, do not yet generally appear in many methods texts: contrast analysis and interpretable indices of effect size, the distinction between intrinsic and nonintrinsic repeated measures, interval estimates of effect sizes, meta-analysis, and so on. The emphasis of these discussions is intended to resonate with the spirit and substance of the guidelines recommended by the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Statistical Inference (Wilkinson et al., 1999), which is reflected in the most recent edition of thePublication Manual of the American Psychological Association(APA, 2001). AlthoughBeginning Behavioral Researchwas conceived as a text for students assigned an empirical research project, we have been pleasantly surprised to learn that it has been successfully used in ways that go far beyond its original purpose. For example, it has been used in courses in which the production of a research project was not a major goal, as well as by master's degree students in several fields as a primary methods text and by doctoral students to slip into our advanced text, Essentials of Behavioral Research (Rosenthal & Rosnow, 1991). Beginning Behavioral Research has also been used to teach research methods and data analysis to several thousand students in distance learning programs. Organization As in earlier editions, the chapters in this edition are presented in a linear sequence corresponding to the steps involved in conducting an empirical research study and in analyzing and reporting the results. The beginning researcher is led step by step through the following process: Crafting a research idea that can be empirically tested.Understanding empirical reasoning, the scientific method, levels of empirical investigation, and the scientific outlook (Chapter 1); creating, shaping, and polishing a research idea, and conducting a search of the relevant literature for the research proposal and the project itself (Chapter 2); weighing and balancing ethical considerations, and preparing for an ethics review (Chapter 3) Choosing methRosnow, Ralph L. is the author of 'Beginning Behavioral Research A Conceptual Primer', published 2004 under ISBN 9780131147300 and ISBN 0131147307.