role of research and statistics in the field of psychology

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Hi,
I can't write the essay for you, but I will provide you with all the info needed, and then you can convert it to an essay

A) I will start with scientific method, and bring in research later on.

This is like a process of investigation, how do you understand phenomena that occurs. For example, you might observe something interesting, but then want to know more scientific info regarding this phenomena. So you would then gather info and and knowledge through the process of scientific method.

For example, you observe how a little boy does not like to share his toys with his friends in daycare.

The first step, as already stated is OBSERVATION. This is when you observe something that looks interesting.

Then comes QUESTION. Your observation made you think, and then you wonder: why did this happen? How did it happen? Would it happen in all conditions? Why does he not want to share his toys? Will he share his toys at home? Now, these are broad questions, and there are many questions to deal with. When doing research, it is best to examine ONE question at a time.

This leads us to constructing a hypothesis. We would look at the one question that is most interesting, and put it into a scientific hypothesis and use that as a basis for your research. The reason why we only chose one hypothesis is to make sure that our research objective is clear, and that you don't confound your results by looking at too many phenomena at one.

A hypothesis must be stated in a way that it is easy to test, and will answer your question.

For example:

Children in daycare will not sure their toys if there is only one copy of that toy.

Next, we want to TEST our HYPOTHESIS. This is when conduct a RESEARCH STUDY to formally investigate your hypothesis. There are many ways to test a hypothesis by doing a research study, and some of the ways are:
- observational (you examine what is happening)
- surveys (you ask the people in the study to answer questions)
- experimental (you manipulate a variable and examine what happens to their behavior)
- secondary (you collect already perviously collected data)
...

So in this case, perhaps we can do an actual experiment and manipulate one variable. For example, in one room, the kids have to share one toy, which would be our CONTROL group. In a second room, we can have many of the exact same toys (EXPERIMENTAL group). We can then examine how children play together and share toys. We would watch their interactions and count the number of times ...