Content
in this class will depend on the number of students and varies from year to
year but probably will deal with some aspect of social psychology and the
law. There are three reasons for the
emphasis on psychology and law. First,
this is a class in social psychology and its applications. There are many areas to which social
psychology can and has been applied, e.g., environmental policy (clean air,
water, automobile use, etc.), health, politics, prejudice, drug use, birth
control, crime, education, and law.
Applications to health and the law are probably the most common. I felt I wanted to expose you to one of the
more common areas; of the two most common, I chose law because there are other
courses in health psychology available.
A second reason is that it is possible to conduct research in
psychology and the law within the practical and time limits imposed by a
quarter long class. (One practical issue
is that the legal system provides multiple instances of similar observable
events within a reasonable time period.
Another is that many issues in the legal system are related to
theoretical issues within social and cognitive psychology. Still another is that aspects of the legal
system are open to the public and/or records of events, e.g., court decisions,
are available to us.) The third (and
most important) reason is that I am interested in this content area. I like thinking about psychology and the law
and so I want to share my enthusiasm and interest in this applied domain with
you.
The
purpose of this class is to teach you about three main topic areas: Social
psychology as it applies to some real world domain, methodological issues in
designing, conducting, and analyzing research with an applied orientation, and
problems specific to applied research.
Although
this is not a class in theories in social psychology, I will assume that you
are familiar with a number of social psychological ideas, e.g., attitudes,
social comparison, cognitive dissonance, aggression, altruism, person
perception, and attribution. Because
this is an advanced class, you are expected to know a fair amount about ideas
such as these before you start. If you haven't taken an introductory class in
social psychology then you should be taking one concurrently or you should read
a text book on the topic.
A
great deal of what you will learn about in this class is methodology. This is a
laboratory class and not a lecture class. This means that you learn about methodology
by doing research. The kinds of methodological issues with which we will
deal will vary from causal analysis, to measurement, to such mundane matters as
how to ask people questions so that you can get answers to the theoretical
questions you are interested in.
This
is, first and foremost, a laboratory class.
That means that it is my hope that what you will learn in this class is
the set of skills associated with doing good applied social psychology
research.
(a)
Getting
access to data
(b)
Meeting
the right people
(c)
Designing
and implementing research protocol
(d)
Keeping
good records
(e)
Coming
to agreement with co-workers about definitions and rules
(f)
Engaging
in behaviors necessary to collect data
(a) Exploratory data
analysis
(b) Descriptive
statistics
(c) Hypothesis
testing
(a) Journal article
with enough detail for replication
(b) Journal and/or
media article for social influence
External
validity refers to whether a conclusion (not the results, per se) from a study
can be generalized beyond the particular subjects, tasks, measures, time
period, procedures, experimenters, confederates, location, etc. used in the
research that lead to the conclusion. When we are concerned about applying
conclusions from results of studies to real world issues, we need to worry
about the match between the research and the real world issue. There are many
issues involved in experimental design that increase or decease the external
validity of the conclusions. We will explore some of these in this class.
In
addition to the book required for this class (namely, A Practical Guide to Behavioral Research, by Sommer and Sommer) I expect that you will do a great deal of
independent reading for this class. This
means that you will be expected to go the library and read those original
articles and chapters that deal with your topic. This also means following “trails” of
articles maybe as far back as the early 1900s.
(By trails I mean reading articles referenced in the current article
and then reading articles referenced in those articles and so on.) This is the only way you will be able to
acquire a sufficient knowledge of the topic to be able to think about the
problem on which you are working in an intelligent manner. Because each of you will find different
“trails,” there is no way that I can test you on your memory for what you read
and learn about except by requiring that you write a paper about the topic.
I
am requiring this book for several reasons. First, it tells you on how to write
a research paper. You can use the example in the book as a model. The second
reason is that it covers basic issues in research design that I assume you
already know, and therefore, that you may need to review. You should have read much of the Sommer and Sommer book by the end of
the second week!
The
class is scheduled to meet in McGill Annex on Wed. from 2:30-5pm. (This year we will be moving
to another room in McGill Annex – the conference room on the top floor – for
the second half of the class starting at 4 pm.) However, because of the nature
of this class, you should be prepared to meet at many other times and places --
sometimes with me, sometimes with contact people, and sometimes with members
of your work group.
My
office is Rm. 5115 in McGill Hall. I will have office hours every Tues. and
Thurs. from 2:15 to 3:30 PM.
When
you begin to collect data, we will frequently meet in the Macintosh Lab in
McGill Hall Annex 1539 for the purpose of learning about data analysis. I will
announce when we will start to meet there.
All
of you will be working in groups. It is
not possible to do good applied work without the help of others. As such, you will have to get to know,
interact with, and at least tolerate members of your work group. You will have to meet with your work group to
assign tasks and agree about who will do what, when.
There
are two reasons why I require people to work in groups in this class. First, the work that you do will be better
because of it. (Time pressures prevents
a single individual from conducting anything worthwhile.) Second, this is a class in applied social psychology
and one of the areas of applied social psychology about which much has been
written but with little impact, is the area of group productivity and
cohesiveness. You will experience, first
hand, some of the issues involved in group productivity, in interaction among
group members, in leadership, in channels of communication, etc. This is my way of giving you first hand
experience with one of the classic areas of social psychology.
The
great majority of the work that you do for this class will be done outside of
class. This means that to do well in
this class, you must be self-motivated.
If you are the type who sits around waiting for someone else to tell you
to read such and such by Tues. of next week, this is not the class for you.
Primary
requirement is a paper. Although I
advise against it, a group can hand in one paper. The problems with one paper consist of a)
amount of learning each student gets (in my experience students learn most
about the area for which they are responsible
and very little about the others) and b) everyone in the group is evaluated
according to the weakest link in the group. I will expect you to hand in a
draft of your methods section, a draft of your reference list, and an outline
of your introduction and discussion before you hand in your final papers. I expect that you will have extensive
conversations with me and other group members about your results and discussion
sections before handing in your final papers. If we have time, I will ask each
group to give a presentation to the other groups about their work during the
last week of class.
My
responsibility is to provide guidance, the main ideas, oversee work, provide
consultation, try to correct all of your mistakes before they happen, and
insure that the study(s) gets done in a manner in which we can all be
proud. We will use a seminar style of
teaching. That is, I will not lecture
about methodology to you and I will not test you on how well you can memorized
an applied social psychology text book.
But I do expect you to read the methods book that I have assigned, if
you haven’t already. In an ideal world,
you would have read such a book already as part of taking an Introductory
Social Psychology class (e.g., Psych 104).
I
will also supply you with reading lists on the topics relevant to the work
that you are doing, direct your attention to key issues, discuss these issues
with you, help you with your papers, etc.
In
short, in this class I will function more as a tutor or “master” and you more
as an “apprentice” rather than my serving the role of an information provider
and you serving as a note taker. I hope
that you will ask a lot of questions. I
hope that you will challenge me and my suggestions. I will certainly challenge your ideas.
Obviously,
I will grade your final papers and provide written feedback about your work in
the class.
Come
up with ideas that might improve your study.
Criticize your own and others ideas.
Discuss problems in conducting this kind of work with me and other
class members. Read a great deal of
original material about the topic on which you are working and about
methods. Prepare materials for
study. Collect data for study. Analyze data.
Write up, in journal form, a report of the results of the work that you
did.
One
of the most important aspects of any research endeavor is figuring out what to
measure and how to do it. We will talk
about this issue in great detail in this class.
Whether
one conducts an experiment, a quasi-experiment, or an observational study, it
is necessary to design and carry out highly specific procedures for collecting
data. These procedures could include anything
from how to create the illusion that a particular event has a theoretically
interesting meaning (deception) to the coding rules to be used to extract data
from existing archives.
Any
study requires that the set of subjects be selected whose behavior will provide
the best insight into the issues that you are studying.
i) Access
Often
the best set of subjects are not readily available and we have to “make due”
with another set. A big problem is
getting access to the relevant people, either those who control access to data
or to relevant subjects. Solving these
kinds of problems are sometimes at the heart of the quality of applied research
and are rarely if ever a problem in “basic” research (because those who do
basic research assume that college students taking introductory psychology
classes or responding to ads in local papers are representative of all adult
humans).
ii) Debriefing
Because
some the work done in this lab class will involve people off campus (not
students in an introductory psychology class), we must be extra specially
careful about how we treat those people, the impression we leave, and the
procedures that are followed in dealing with them. This is especially a problem if the
procedures used in the study involve creating an illusion (deception). Such procedures must include methods of debriefing
subjects, if necessary.
iii) Ethical considerations
One
of the main concerns that I, and you, should have about conducting research
with human subjects is care and concern that you do not damage anyone as a
result of their helping you complete your research. That is,
subjects (or anyone else with whom you might have to deal in order to complete
your work, secretaries, friends, lawyers, etc.) are doing you a favor, and you
should want their experience to be as pleasant as it can be while still getting
the research done. If it is every the case that obtaining data and damage to a subject
or participant come in conflict, the choice is to be made in favor of the
person helping you, that is, give up the data. We do not want to harm people in
any way in this class. We do want to embarrass people in any way. Therefore, we
want to pay special attention to how people might react to whatever we do. We
need to think carefully and seriously about whether our procedures for
collecting data might not put people at risk of being damaged and/or pained.
You will want to make sure that all of your observations meet reasonable
ethical guidelines.
We
will talk more about this when we decide on the projects that you will be
doing.
Crano,
W. D. & Brewer, M. B. (1973) Principles
of research in social psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Carlsmith,
J. M., Ellsworth, P., & Aronson, E. (1976) Methods of research in social psychology. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley.
Baron
and Byrne’s Intro to social book
Roger
Brown’s Intro to social book (2nd edition)
or
almost any other intro to social book
Wrightsman,
L. S. et al. (1994) Psychology and the
legal system (3nd ed). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing.
Parrott III, L. (1994) How to write psychology papers. NY: Harper Collins.
Rosnow, R. L. & Rosnow, M. (1986) Writing papers in psychology. Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth Publishing.
Solomon, P. R. (1985) A student’s guide to research report writing in psychology. London,
England: Scott, Foresman and Comp.
Smyth, T. R. (1996) Writing in psychology: A student guide. NY:Wiley.