Research Methods in Psychology (Certificate)

Define social science and research methods; identify stages of social research; recognize various research methods. Learn how psychology observes, describes, predicts, and explains behavior and mental processes.

Explore what social science research methods are and how researchers study how societies work, using experiments, surveys, case studies, and naturalistic observation to collect and analyze data.

Define human behavior and the historical foundations of behaviorism. Recognize influences in human behavior and compare theories, including the distinction between covert and overt behavior.

Explore the ABC model—antecedents, behavior, and consequences—and how maintaining antecedents and maintaining consequences shape behavior, including prompts, set in events, and stimulus control.

Explore how environmental influences and epigenetic mechanisms shape gene expression, challenging the idea that genes alone determine development, and show how nature and nurture alter the epigenome and phenotype.

Define ethics in research, explain moral judgments and the objective vs subjective debate, and outline principles guiding fair treatment, harm avoidance, and honest reporting in psychological studies.

Explore ethical guidelines in psychology research, including informed consent, IRB review, deception, confidentiality, and participant protection, while considering socially sensitive issues and the impact on groups involved.

Identify factors affecting problem selection and recognize current research, then develop ideas and describe research questions, frameworks, study designs, and measures while explaining influences on choosing research designs.

Explore how values shape the research process, reduce bias, and craft hypotheses and key questions that clarify relationships among variables and offer practical applications.

Learn how to choose a research design by distinguishing design from method, comparing correlation and experimental designs, and selecting data collection methods and settings.

Explore systematic observations and how researchers select study subjects, weighing advantages and disadvantages, while identifying observation types and the criteria for choosing research participants.

Learn how to conduct systematic observations within descriptive research by using a predefined framework to capture objective, reliable behavioral data in naturalistic or controlled settings.

Learn how to select research participants and subjects who align with your question, ensure informed consent and privacy, and design representative, well-defined samples.

Describe non-experimental research and surveys by observing variables in their natural state, then compare experimental and non-experimental methods and recognize survey terms.

Explore nonexperimental research, including cross-sectional, correlational, and observational designs. Learn methods like naturalistic observation, ethnography, case studies, archival research, and content analysis.

Learn the essentials of survey research, including defining objectives, creating and testing questions, selecting data collection methods and sampling, and analyzing results to reveal behavior and attitudes.

Compare between-subject and within-subject experimental designs and recognize non-survey data collection techniques such as interviews, observations, and experiments.

Compare different groups with a between-subjects design where each participant experiences one condition, versus a within-subjects design where participants try conditions. Learn how independent and dependent variables drive cause-and-effect conclusions.

Explore specialized research and single subject designs, including research specialization and specialized research grants, and the single subject design where the subject acts as their own control.

Explore specialized research designs that extend beyond conventional non-experimental or experimental methods, including mixed and nested designs, quasi-experiments, and developmental and longitudinal approaches.

Explore single-subject designs to establish causal relationships between independent and dependent variables in one or few individuals, using baseline, dynamic, and discrete-trials designs with visual analysis and ABA applications.

Describe how researchers summarize data and apply inferential statistics to draw conclusions from a sample about a population, while recognizing data descriptions, validity, reliability, and the qualitative and quantitative distinction.

Describe data clearly using descriptive statistics. Learn to summarize, organize, and present data with mean, median, mode, range, variance, and standard deviation.

Learn how inferential statistics use a random, unbiased sample to draw conclusions about a population through hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, and estimation, with notes on NHST, Bayes factors, and replication.