research topics in psychology pdf

61 intriguing psychology research topics to explore

Last updated

11 January 2024

Reviewed by

Brittany Ferri, PhD, OTR/L

Psychology is an incredibly diverse, critical, and ever-changing area of study in the medical and health industries. Because of this, it’s a common area of study for students and healthcare professionals.

We’re walking you through picking the perfect topic for your upcoming paper or study. Keep reading for plenty of example topics to pique your interest and curiosity.

• How to choose a psychology research topic

Exploring a psychology-based topic for your research project? You need to pick a specific area of interest to collect compelling data. 

Use these tips to help you narrow down which psychology topics to research:

Focus on a particular area of psychology

The most effective psychological research focuses on a smaller, niche concept or disorder within the scope of a study. 

Psychology is a broad and fascinating area of science, including everything from diagnosed mental health disorders to sports performance mindset assessments. 

This gives you plenty of different avenues to explore. Having a hard time choosing? Check out our list of 61 ideas further down in this article to get started.

Read the latest clinical studies

Once you’ve picked a more niche topic to explore, you need to do your due diligence and explore other research projects on the same topic. 

This practice will help you learn more about your chosen topic, ask more specific questions, and avoid covering existing projects. 

For the best results, we recommend creating a research folder of associated published papers to reference throughout your project. This makes it much easier to cite direct references and find inspiration down the line.

Find a topic you enjoy and ask questions

Once you’ve spent time researching and collecting references for your study, you finally get to explore. 

Whether this research project is for work, school, or just for fun, having a passion for your research will make the project much more enjoyable. (Trust us, there will be times when that is the only thing that keeps you going.) 

Now you’ve decided on the topic, ask more nuanced questions you might want to explore. 

If you can, pick the direction that interests you the most to make the research process much more enjoyable.

• 61 psychology topics to research in 2024

Need some extra help starting your psychology research project on the right foot? Explore our list of 61 cutting-edge, in-demand psychology research topics to use as a starting point for your research journey.

• Psychology research topics for university students

As a university student, it can be hard to pick a research topic that fits the scope of your classes and is still compelling and unique. 

Here are a few exciting topics we recommend exploring for your next assigned research project:

Mental health in post-secondary students

Seeking post-secondary education is a stressful and overwhelming experience for most students, making this topic a great choice to explore for your in-class research paper. 

Examples of post-secondary mental health research topics include:

Student mental health status during exam season

Mental health disorder prevalence based on study major

The impact of chronic school stress on overall quality of life

The impacts of cyberbullying

Cyberbullying can occur at all ages, starting as early as elementary school and carrying through into professional workplaces. 

Examples of cyberbullying-based research topics you can study include:

The impact of cyberbullying on self-esteem

Common reasons people engage in cyberbullying 

Cyberbullying themes and commonly used terms

Cyberbullying habits in children vs. adults

The long-term effects of cyberbullying

• Clinical psychology research topics

If you’re looking to take a more clinical approach to your next project, here are a few topics that involve direct patient assessment for you to consider:

Chronic pain and mental health

Living with chronic pain dramatically impacts every aspect of a person’s life, including their mental and emotional health. 

Here are a few examples of in-demand pain-related psychology research topics:

The connection between diabetic neuropathy and depression

Neurological pain and its connection to mental health disorders

Efficacy of meditation and mindfulness for pain management

The long-term effects of insomnia

Insomnia is where you have difficulty falling or staying asleep. It’s a common health concern that impacts millions of people worldwide. 

This is an excellent topic because insomnia can have a variety of causes, offering many research possibilities. 

Here are a few compelling psychology research topics about insomnia you could investigate:

The prevalence of insomnia based on age, gender, and ethnicity

Insomnia and its impact on workplace productivity

The connection between insomnia and mental health disorders

Efficacy and use of melatonin supplements for insomnia

The risks and benefits of prescription insomnia medications

Lifestyle options for managing insomnia symptoms

The efficacy of mental health treatment options

Management and treatment of mental health conditions is an ever-changing area of study. If you can witness or participate in mental health therapies, this can make a great research project. 

Examples of mental health treatment-related psychology research topics include:

The efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for patients with severe anxiety

The benefits and drawbacks of group vs. individual therapy sessions

Music therapy for mental health disorders

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for patients with depression 

• Controversial psychology research paper topics

If you are looking to explore a more cutting-edge or modern psychology topic, you can delve into a variety of controversial and topical options:

The impact of social media and digital platforms

Ever since access to internet forums and video games became more commonplace, there’s been growing concern about the impact these digital platforms have on mental health. 

Examples of social media and video game-related psychology research topics include:

The effect of edited images on self-confidence

How social media platforms impact social behavior

Video games and their impact on teenage anger and violence

Digital communication and the rapid spread of misinformation

The development of digital friendships

Psychotropic medications for mental health

In recent years, the interest in using psychoactive medications to treat and manage health conditions has increased despite their inherently controversial nature. 

Examples of psychotropic medication-related research topics include:

The risks and benefits of using psilocybin mushrooms for managing anxiety

The impact of marijuana on early-onset psychosis

Childhood marijuana use and related prevalence of mental health conditions

Ketamine and its use for complex PTSD (C-PTSD) symptom management

The effect of long-term psychedelic use and mental health conditions

• Mental health disorder research topics

As one of the most popular subsections of psychology, studying mental health disorders and how they impact quality of life is an essential and impactful area of research. 

While studies in these areas are common, there’s always room for additional exploration, including the following hot-button topics:

Anxiety and depression disorders

Anxiety and depression are well-known and heavily researched mental health disorders. 

Despite this, we still don’t know many things about these conditions, making them great candidates for psychology research projects:

Social anxiety and its connection to chronic loneliness

C-PTSD symptoms and causes

The development of phobias

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) behaviors and symptoms

Depression triggers and causes

Self-care tools and resources for depression

The prevalence of anxiety and depression in particular age groups or geographic areas

Bipolar disorder

Bipolar disorder is a complex and multi-faceted area of psychology research. 

Use your research skills to learn more about this condition and its impact by choosing any of the following topics:

Early signs of bipolar disorder

The incidence of bipolar disorder in young adults

The efficacy of existing bipolar treatment options

Bipolar medication side effects

Cognitive behavioral therapy for people with bipolar 

Schizoaffective disorder

Schizoaffective disorder is often stigmatized, and less common mental health disorders are a hotbed for new and exciting research. 

Here are a few examples of interesting research topics related to this mental health disorder:

The prevalence of schizoaffective disorder by certain age groups or geographic locations

Risk factors for developing schizoaffective disorder

The prevalence and content of auditory and visual hallucinations

Alternative therapies for schizoaffective disorder

• Societal and systematic psychology research topics

Modern society’s impact is deeply enmeshed in our mental and emotional health on a personal and community level. 

Here are a few examples of societal and systemic psychology research topics to explore in more detail:

Access to mental health services

While mental health awareness has risen over the past few decades, access to quality mental health treatment and resources is still not equitable. 

This can significantly impact the severity of a person’s mental health symptoms, which can result in worse health outcomes if left untreated. 

Explore this crucial issue and provide information about the need for improved mental health resource access by studying any of the following topics:

Rural vs. urban access to mental health resources

Access to crisis lines by location

Wait times for emergency mental health services

Inequities in mental health access based on income and location

Insurance coverage for mental health services

Systemic racism and mental health

Societal systems and the prevalence of systemic racism heavily impact every aspect of a person’s overall health.

Researching these topics draws attention to existing problems and contributes valuable insights into ways to improve access to care moving forward.

Examples of systemic racism-related psychology research topics include: 

Access to mental health resources based on race

The prevalence of BIPOC mental health therapists in a chosen area

The impact of systemic racism on mental health and self-worth

Racism training for mental health workers

The prevalence of mental health disorders in discriminated groups

LGBTQIA+ mental health concerns

Research about LGBTQIA+ people and their mental health needs is a unique area of study to explore for your next research project. It’s a commonly overlooked and underserved community.

Examples of LGBTQIA+ psychology research topics to consider include:

Mental health supports for queer teens and children

The impact of queer safe spaces on mental health

The prevalence of mental health disorders in the LGBTQIA+ community

The benefits of queer mentorship and found family

Substance misuse in LQBTQIA+ youth and adults

• Collect data and identify trends with Dovetail

Psychology research is an exciting and competitive study area, making it the perfect choice for projects or papers.

Take the headache out of analyzing your data and instantly access the insights you need to complete your next psychology research project by teaming up with Dovetail today.

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50+ Research Topics for Psychology Papers

How to Find Psychology Research Topics for Your Student Paper

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Steven Gans, MD is board-certified in psychiatry and is an active supervisor, teacher, and mentor at Massachusetts General Hospital.

• Specific Branches of Psychology
• Topics Involving a Disorder or Type of Therapy
• Human Cognition
• Human Development
• Critique of Publications
• Famous Experiments
• Historical Figures
• Specific Careers
• Case Studies
• Literature Reviews
• Your Own Study/Experiment

Are you searching for a great topic for your psychology paper ? Sometimes it seems like coming up with topics of psychology research is more challenging than the actual research and writing. Fortunately, there are plenty of great places to find inspiration and the following list contains just a few ideas to help get you started.

Finding a solid topic is one of the most important steps when writing any type of paper. It can be particularly important when you are writing a psychology research paper or essay. Psychology is such a broad topic, so you want to find a topic that allows you to adequately cover the subject without becoming overwhelmed with information.

I can always tell when a student really cares about the topic they chose; it comes through in the writing. My advice is to choose a topic that genuinely interests you, so you’ll be more motivated to do thorough research.

In some cases, such as in a general psychology class, you might have the option to select any topic from within psychology's broad reach. Other instances, such as in an  abnormal psychology  course, might require you to write your paper on a specific subject such as a psychological disorder.

As you begin your search for a topic for your psychology paper, it is first important to consider the guidelines established by your instructor.

Research Topics Within Specific Branches of Psychology

The key to selecting a good topic for your psychology paper is to select something that is narrow enough to allow you to really focus on the subject, but not so narrow that it is difficult to find sources or information to write about.

One approach is to narrow your focus down to a subject within a specific branch of psychology. For example, you might start by deciding that you want to write a paper on some sort of social psychology topic. Next, you might narrow your focus down to how persuasion can be used to influence behavior .

Other social psychology topics you might consider include:

• Prejudice and discrimination (i.e., homophobia, sexism, racism)
• Social cognition
• Person perception
• Social control and cults
• Persuasion, propaganda, and marketing
• Attraction, romance, and love
• Nonverbal communication
• Prosocial behavior

Psychology Research Topics Involving a Disorder or Type of Therapy

Exploring a psychological disorder or a specific treatment modality can also be a good topic for a psychology paper. Some potential abnormal psychology topics include specific psychological disorders or particular treatment modalities, including:

• Eating disorders
• Borderline personality disorder
• Seasonal affective disorder
• Schizophrenia
• Antisocial personality disorder
• Profile a  type of therapy  (i.e., cognitive-behavioral therapy, group therapy, psychoanalytic therapy)

Topics of Psychology Research Related to Human Cognition

Some of the possible topics you might explore in this area include thinking, language, intelligence, and decision-making. Other ideas might include:

• False memories
• Speech disorders
• Problem-solving

Topics of Psychology Research Related to Human Development

In this area, you might opt to focus on issues pertinent to  early childhood  such as language development, social learning, or childhood attachment or you might instead opt to concentrate on issues that affect older adults such as dementia or Alzheimer's disease.

Some other topics you might consider include:

• Language acquisition
• Media violence and children
• Learning disabilities
• Gender roles
• Child abuse
• Prenatal development
• Parenting styles
• Aspects of the aging process

Do a Critique of Publications Involving Psychology Research Topics

One option is to consider writing a critique paper of a published psychology book or academic journal article. For example, you might write a critical analysis of Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams or you might evaluate a more recent book such as Philip Zimbardo's  The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil .

Professional and academic journals are also great places to find materials for a critique paper. Browse through the collection at your university library to find titles devoted to the subject that you are most interested in, then look through recent articles until you find one that grabs your attention.

Topics of Psychology Research Related to Famous Experiments

There have been many fascinating and groundbreaking experiments throughout the history of psychology, providing ample material for students looking for an interesting term paper topic. In your paper, you might choose to summarize the experiment, analyze the ethics of the research, or evaluate the implications of the study. Possible experiments that you might consider include:

• The Milgram Obedience Experiment
• The Stanford Prison Experiment
• The Little Albert Experiment
• Pavlov's Conditioning Experiments
• The Asch Conformity Experiment
• Harlow's Rhesus Monkey Experiments

Topics of Psychology Research About Historical Figures

One of the simplest ways to find a great topic is to choose an interesting person in the  history of psychology  and write a paper about them. Your paper might focus on many different elements of the individual's life, such as their biography, professional history, theories, or influence on psychology.

While this type of paper may be historical in nature, there is no need for this assignment to be dry or boring. Psychology is full of fascinating figures rife with intriguing stories and anecdotes. Consider such famous individuals as Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner, Harry Harlow, or one of the many other  eminent psychologists .

Psychology Research Topics About a Specific Career

​Another possible topic, depending on the course in which you are enrolled, is to write about specific career paths within the  field of psychology . This type of paper is especially appropriate if you are exploring different subtopics or considering which area interests you the most.

In your paper, you might opt to explore the typical duties of a psychologist, how much people working in these fields typically earn, and the different employment options that are available.

Topics of Psychology Research Involving Case Studies

One potentially interesting idea is to write a  psychology case study  of a particular individual or group of people. In this type of paper, you will provide an in-depth analysis of your subject, including a thorough biography.

Generally, you will also assess the person, often using a major psychological theory such as  Piaget's stages of cognitive development  or  Erikson's eight-stage theory of human development . It is also important to note that your paper doesn't necessarily have to be about someone you know personally.

In fact, many professors encourage students to write case studies on historical figures or fictional characters from books, television programs, or films.

Psychology Research Topics Involving Literature Reviews

Another possibility that would work well for a number of psychology courses is to do a literature review of a specific topic within psychology. A literature review involves finding a variety of sources on a particular subject, then summarizing and reporting on what these sources have to say about the topic.

Literature reviews are generally found in the  introduction  of journal articles and other  psychology papers , but this type of analysis also works well for a full-scale psychology term paper.

Topics of Psychology Research Based on Your Own Study or Experiment

Many psychology courses require students to design an actual psychological study or perform some type of experiment. In some cases, students simply devise the study and then imagine the possible results that might occur. In other situations, you may actually have the opportunity to collect data, analyze your findings, and write up your results.

Finding a topic for your study can be difficult, but there are plenty of great ways to come up with intriguing ideas. Start by considering your own interests as well as subjects you have studied in the past.

Online sources, newspaper articles, books , journal articles, and even your own class textbook are all great places to start searching for topics for your experiments and psychology term papers. Before you begin, learn more about  how to conduct a psychology experiment .

What This Means For You

After looking at this brief list of possible topics for psychology papers, it is easy to see that psychology is a very broad and diverse subject. While this variety makes it possible to find a topic that really catches your interest, it can sometimes make it very difficult for some students to select a good topic.

If you are still stumped by your assignment, ask your instructor for suggestions and consider a few from this list for inspiration.

• Hockenbury, SE & Nolan, SA. Psychology. New York: Worth Publishers; 2014.
• Santrock, JW. A Topical Approach to Lifespan Development. New York: McGraw-Hill Education; 2016.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Collection  12 March 2023

Top 100 in Psychology - 2022

This collection highlights our most downloaded* psychology papers published in 2022. Featuring authors from around the world, these papers showcase valuable research from an international community.

You can also view the top papers across various subject areas here .

*Data obtained from SN Insights, which is based on Digital Science's Dimensions.

Cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives

• Saho Takagi
• Atsuko Saito
• Hika Kuroshima

The impact of digital media on children’s intelligence while controlling for genetic differences in cognition and socioeconomic background

• Bruno Sauce
• Magnus Liebherr
• Torkel Klingberg

Reading on a smartphone affects sigh generation, brain activity, and comprehension

• Motoyasu Honma
• Yuri Masaoka
• Masahiko Izumizaki

Birdsongs alleviate anxiety and paranoia in healthy participants

• J. Sundermann

SARS-CoV-2 spike protein induces cognitive deficit and anxiety-like behavior in mouse via non-cell autonomous hippocampal neuronal death

• Junyoung Oh
• Woo-Hyun Cho
• Sung Joong Lee

Prevalence, age of decision, and interpersonal warmth judgements of childfree adults

• Zachary P. Neal
• Jennifer Watling Neal

Acute and protracted abstinence from methamphetamine bidirectionally changes intrinsic excitability of indirect pathway spiny projection neurons in the dorsomedial striatum

• Sanghoon Choi
• Steven M. Graves

Indeterminacy of cannabis impairment and ∆ 9 -tetrahydrocannabinol (∆ 9 -THC) levels in blood and breath

• Gregory T. Wurz
• Michael W. DeGregorio

Perceiving societal pressure to be happy is linked to poor well-being, especially in happy nations

• Egon Dejonckheere
• Joshua J. Rhee
• Brock Bastian

Fitness tracking reveals task-specific associations between memory, mental health, and physical activity

• Jeremy R. Manning
• Gina M. Notaro
• Paxton C. Fitzpatrick

Higher emotional awareness is associated with greater domain-general reflective tendencies

• Michelle Persich
• William D. S. Killgore

Investigation of humans individual differences as predictors of their animal interaction styles, focused on the domestic cat

• Lauren R. Finka
• Lucia Ripari
• Marnie L. Brennan

Cichlids and stingrays can add and subtract ‘one’ in the number space from one to five

• V. Schluessel

Group VR experiences can produce ego attenuation and connectedness comparable to psychedelics

• David R. Glowacki
• Rhoslyn Roebuck Williams
• Mike Chatziapostolou

Smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment reveals mental health benefits of birdlife

• Ryan Hammoud
• Stefania Tognin
• Andrea Mechelli

Deep language algorithms predict semantic comprehension from brain activity

• Charlotte Caucheteux
• Alexandre Gramfort
• Jean-Rémi King

Misinformation of COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine hesitancy

• Sun Kyong Lee
• Juhyung Sun
• Shane Connelly

Children with autism spectrum disorder show atypical electroencephalographic response to processing contextual incongruencies

• Amparo V. Márquez-García
• Vasily A. Vakorin
• Sam M. Doesburg

Childhood temperament and adulthood personality differentially predict life outcomes

• Amanda J. Wright
• Joshua J. Jackson

Identification of genes associated with human-canine communication in canine evolution

• Akiko Tonoike
• Ken-ichi Otaki
• Miho Nagasawa

Breath chemical markers of sexual arousal in humans

• G. Pugliese
• J. Williams

Hyperrealistic neural decoding for reconstructing faces from fMRI activations via the GAN latent space

• Thirza Dado
• Yağmur Güçlütürk

Brain aging differs with cognitive ability regardless of education

• Kristine B. Walhovd
• Lars Nyberg
• Anders M. Fjell

Short-sighted decision-making by those not vaccinated against COVID-19

• Julia G. Halilova
• Samuel Fynes-Clinton
• R. Shayna Rosenbaum

Groove rhythm stimulates prefrontal cortex function in groove enjoyers

• Takemune Fukuie
• Kazuya Suwabe
• Hideaki Soya

Human magnetic sense is mediated by a light and magnetic field resonance-dependent mechanism

• Kwon-Seok Chae
• Soo-Chan Kim
• Yongkuk Kim

Innovative composite tool use by Goffin’s cockatoos ( Cacatua goffiniana )

• Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró
• Roger Mundry
• Alice M. I. Auersperg

Is a downwards head tilt a cross-cultural signal of dominance? Evidence for a universal visual illusion

• Zachary Witkower
• Alexander K. Hill
• Jessica L. Tracy

Systematic review and meta-analysis of cognitive impairment in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)

• Mehdi Aoun Sebaiti
• Mathieu Hainselin
• François Jérôme Authier

Identification and validation of Alzheimer’s disease-related metabolic brain pattern in biomarker confirmed Alzheimer’s dementia patients

• Matej Perovnik
• Petra Tomše

Impact of fasting on stress systems and depressive symptoms in patients with major depressive disorder: a cross-sectional study

• Britta Stapel
• Daniela Fraccarollo
• Kai G. Kahl

Bio-behavioral synchrony is a potential mechanism for mate selection in humans

• Nathalie klein Selle

The cognitive and psychiatric subacute impairment in severe Covid-19

• Pedro J. Serrano-Castro
• Francisco J. Garzón-Maldonado
• Fernando Rodríguez de Fonseca

CNS imaging characteristics in fibromyalgia patients with and without peripheral nerve involvement

• Hans-Christoph Aster
• Dimitar Evdokimov
• Claudia Sommer

The effects of contracting Covid-19 on cognitive failures at work: implications for task performance and turnover intentions

• James W. Beck

The effects of mindfulness meditation versus CBT for anxiety on emotional distress and attitudes toward seeking mental health treatment: a semi-randomized trial

• Daniela Aisenberg-Shafran
• Liav Shturm

Trait emotional intelligence in American pilots

• Zachary Dugger
• K. V. Petrides
• Bernadette McCrory

Mindfulness meditation increases default mode, salience, and central executive network connectivity

• Benno Bremer
• Kathrin Koch

Effect of MIND diet intervention on cognitive performance and brain structure in healthy obese women: a randomized controlled trial

• Golnaz Arjmand
• Mojtaba Abbas-Zadeh
• Mohammad Hassan Eftekhari

Bodily ownership of an independent supernumerary limb: an exploratory study

• Kohei Umezawa
• Yuta Suzuki
• Yoichi Miyawaki

Anabolic–androgenic steroid use is associated with psychopathy, risk-taking, anger, and physical problems

• Bryan S. Nelson
• Tom Hildebrandt
• Pascal Wallisch

Longitudinal changes in auditory and reward systems following receptive music-based intervention in older adults

• Milena Aiello Quinci
• Alexander Belden
• Psyche Loui

Reaction time and working memory in gamers and non-gamers

• Ronnie Lidor

Simulated visual hallucinations in virtual reality enhance cognitive flexibility

• Clara Rastelli
• Antonino Greco
• Nicola De Pisapia

Rapid but specific perceptual learning partially explains individual differences in the recognition of challenging speech

• Karen Banai
• Hanin Karawani
• Yizhar Lavner

Mindfulness-based online intervention increases well-being and decreases stress after Covid-19 lockdown

• Francesco Bossi
• Francesca Zaninotto
• Emiliano Ricciardi

Automated meta-analysis of the event-related potential (ERP) literature

• Thomas Donoghue
• Bradley Voytek

Model-based learning retrospectively updates model-free values

• Maaike M. H. Van Swieten
• Sanjay G. Manohar

Interaction with the future self in virtual reality reduces self-defeating behavior in a sample of convicted offenders

• Jean-Louis van Gelder
• Liza J. M. Cornet
• Job van der Schalk

The newborn brain is sensitive to the communicative function of language

• Bálint Forgács
• Tibor Tauzin
• Judit Gervain

Cognitive profiles in children and adolescents with Down syndrome

• Sara Onnivello
• Francesca Pulina
• Silvia Lanfranchi

Short term treatment with a cocktail of rapamycin, acarbose and phenylbutyrate delays aging phenotypes in mice

• Warren Ladiges

Effects of exploring a novel environment on memory across the lifespan

• Judith Schomaker
• Valentin Baumann
• Marit F. L. Ruitenberg

The impact of psychopathology on academic performance in school-age children and adolescents

• Mireia Pagerols
• Raquel Prat

Effect of berry-based supplements and foods on cognitive function: a systematic review

• Negar Bonyadi
• Neda Dolatkhah
• Maryam Hashemian

Attention rhythmically samples multi-feature objects in working memory

• Samson Chota
• Stefan Van der Stigchel

Functional brain connectomes reflect acute and chronic cannabis use

• J. G. Ramaekers
• N. L. Mason

Simple questionnaires outperform behavioral tasks to measure socio-emotional skills in students

• Mélusine Boon-Falleur
• Adrien Bouguen
• Coralie Chevallier

Neuronal effects of glabellar botulinum toxin injections using a valenced inhibition task in borderline personality disorder

• Tillmann H. C. Kruger
• Jara Schulze
• M. Axel Wollmer

Naloxone’s dose-dependent displacement of [ 11 C]carfentanil and duration of receptor occupancy in the rat brain

• Kelly A. O’Conor
• Nora D. Volkow

rs-fMRI and machine learning for ASD diagnosis: a systematic review and meta-analysis

• Caio Pinheiro Santana
• Emerson Assis de Carvalho
• Lucelmo Lacerda de Brito

Machine learning and expression analyses reveal circadian clock features predictive of anxiety

• Rebeccah Overton
• Krista Ingram

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on oral health and psychosocial factors

• Antonio Ciardo
• Marlinde M. Simon

Facial asymmetry in dogs with fear and aggressive behaviors towards humans

• Marcello Siniscalchi
• Serenella d’Ingeo
• Angelo Quaranta

Superposition mechanism as a neural basis for understanding others

• Wataru Noguchi
• Hiroyuki Iizuka
• Shigeru Taguchi

Influence of diurnal phase on behavioral tests of sensorimotor performance, anxiety, learning and memory in mice

• Chi-Hui Tsao
• Jonathan Flint
• Guo-Jen Huang

Gender stereotypes about intellectual ability in Japanese children

• Mako Okanda
• Xianwei Meng
• Yusuke Moriguchi

Meta-analytic evidence that mindfulness training alters resting state default mode network connectivity

• Hadley Rahrig
• David R. Vago
• Kirk Warren Brown

Mentalization and dissociation after adverse childhood experiences

• J. Wagner-Skacel

fMRI-based validation of continuous-wave fNIRS of supplementary motor area activation during motor execution and motor imagery

• Franziska Klein
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Mapping the field of psychology: Trends in research topics 1995–2015

• Open access
• Published: 23 June 2021
• Volume 126 , pages 9699–9731, ( 2021 )

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• Oliver Wieczorek   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6504-0965 1 , 2 ,
• Saïd Unger   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1266-2055 3 ,
• Jan Riebling 4 ,
• Lukas Erhard   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4977-2947 4 ,
• Christian Koß 3 &
• Raphael Heiberger 3  

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We map the topic structure of psychology utilizing a sample of over 500,000 abstracts of research articles and conference proceedings spanning two decades (1995–2015). To do so, we apply structural topic models to examine three research questions: (i) What are the discipline’s most prevalent research topics? (ii) How did the scientific discourse in psychology change over the last decades, especially since the advent of neurosciences? (iii) And was this change carried by high impact (HI) or less prestigious journals? Our results reveal that topics related to natural sciences are trending, while their ’counterparts’ leaning to humanities are declining in popularity. Those trends are even more pronounced in the leading outlets of the field. Furthermore, our findings indicate a continued interest in methodological topics accompanied by the ascent of neurosciences and related methods and technologies (e.g. fMRI’s). At the same time, other established approaches (e.g. psychoanalysis) become less popular and indicate a relative decline of topics related to the social sciences and the humanities.

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Introduction

Historically, psychology has been a discipline characterized by a high degree of internal differentiation between basic, applied, and clinical branches (Brennan and Houde 2017 ) which still exists today (Gaj 2016 ). This internal differentiation is driven by exchanges between the different branches of psychology with the natural sciences (e.g. evolutionary biology), or social sciences such as economics, political science, and sociology (Marshall 2009 ; Morf 2018 ; Schwartz et al. 2016 ). More recently, psychology witnessed the advent of neurosciences and the advance of technological devices such as the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) (Marshall 2009 ; Yeung et al. 2017b ). Consequently, the fMRI has led to new ways how to study the linkage between the mind and the brain, and is now widely applied in clinical branches of psychology (Berman et al. 2006 ; Fairburn and Patel 2017 ; Schwartz et al. 2016 ; Brennan and Houde 2017 ; Toomela 2019 ).

Despite the well-documented changes, it is not well understood how topics become established in the psychological discourse and whether this change is carried by high impact journals or less prestigious journals. While some studies with a focus on different disciplines stress the importance of the former (Kwiek 2020 ; Yeung et al. 2017a ), others emphasize the role of mainstream and low-impact journals (Münch 2014 ; Yeung 2018 ), and interdisciplinarity for changes in the scientific discourse (Leahey and Moody 2014 ). Our goal is to contribute to the literature by providing an overview of the diverse landscape of psychology and mapping changes in its discourse. In order to do so, we ask:

What are the discipline’s most prevalent research topics?

How did the scientific discourse in psychology change over the last decades, especially since the advent of neurosciences?

And was this change carried by high impact (HI) or less prestigious journals?

These questions cannot be answered by individual accounts, since scientists’ views tend to be shaped by their own disciplinary experience and academic environment. The psychological discourse is simply too broad to comprehend for individual scholars, “that an entire team of researchers working for several years could only map a fraction of all the texts, transcripts, or archives that define them” (Bail 2014 , 469). Fortunately, computational linguistics provides the means to reconstruct the history of a field (Anderson et al. 2012 ; Munoz-Najar Galvez et al. 2020 ), explain scientists’ choice of research strategy (Foster et al. 2015 ), and model scientific discovery (Shi et al. 2015 ). A central feature of computational linguistics is the development of impersonal and automatic procedures that offer a more objective and top-down view compared with earlier attempts to map academic fields by insiders (Buurma 2015 , 3).

We apply structural topic models (STMs) (Roberts et al. 2014 ) to a dataset consisting of 528, 488 abstracts of published journal articles and conference proceedings to provide answers for the three questions raised and to approximate psychology as a field. STMs allow us to reduce the high-dimensional space of research themes in a reproducible way and, hence, to extract the meaning inherent in a large corpus of psychological research.

In order to map the topic structure of psychology and its flux over time, our paper is structured as follows: We discuss the rich literature on how psychology is organized as a scientific discipline in sect.  2 . We proceed with the introduction of our dataset, cleaning procedures of the textual data, and our methodological approach in sect.  3 . The results on the changing landscape of research topics are presented in sect.  4 . We close with discussing the limitations and future direction of research in sect.  5 .

Literature review

Current debates regarding the state of psychology revolve mostly around questions of its multidisciplinarity and potential common ground in psychology and its subfields (Brennan and Houde 2017 ; Gentner 2010 ; Henriques 2017 ; Jackson 2017 ; Joseph 2017 ; Kaplan 2015 ; Marshall 2009 ; Melchert 2016 ; Miller 2010 ; Tryon 2017 ; Toomela 2019 ; Zagaria et al. 2020 ). Specifically, Melchert ( 2016 ) criticizes that the internal differentiation of psychology hinders the accumulation of reliable knowledge on the human psyche. Instead, he envisions psychology as a “unified clinical science” under the lead of cognitive sciences, neurosciences, and evolutionary biology. At the same time, other psychologists emphasize that it is precisely this diversity that contributes to advances in knowledge about the many facets of the human psyche (Jackson 2017 ; Joseph 2017 ; Miller 2010 ).

Despite this debate, few studies so far attempted to map the scientific discourse of psychology comprehensively. For example, Krampen et al. ( 2011 ) tried to forecast research trends in psychology using data provided by PsycINFO and PSYNDEX from 1977 to 2008. They assigned journal abstract data to the APA subject classification scheme and forecasted a relative decline in developmental psychology, methodology and statistics, organizational psychology with a focus on management, clinical psychology with a focus on psychotherapy, family psychology, and environmental psychology. Using the same data source, Krampen ( 2016 ) reports a decline of publications dealing with the history of psychology and thus self-reflexive studies on the discipline of psychology, whereas Krampen and Trierweiler ( 2016 ) uncovered increasing epistemic ties between psychology and the natural sciences that evolved from the 1920s onward. Flis and van Eck ( 2018 ) conducted an analysis of term co-occurence in titles and abstracts of 673,393 psychology articles published between 1950 and 1999 listed in PsycINFO. Their findings show a schism between experimental and physical psychology on the one hand, and applied psychology consisting of educational psychology, social psychology, as well as research on personality and clinical psychology on the other hand. Psychologists in the former domain apply experiments to investigate a limited number of treatment effects. In contrast, psychologists conducting research in the ‘applied’ branches ideal-typically rely on methods like correlation analysis or structural equation modeling. In this sense, the findings of Flis and van Eck ( 2018 ) empirically validate the observation of Cronbach ( 1957 ), who described an entrenchment between “experimentalists” and psychologists aligned to “correlational methods”.

Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Bittermann and Fischer ( 2018 ) studied the emergence of “hot topics” in psychology in German-speaking countries from 1980 to 2016. Based on 314, 573 English and German article abstracts listed in PSYNDEX and relying on the APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms , they investigated associations between topics uncovered and the terms provided by the thesaurus. Their findings indicate a redefinition of theoretical concepts over time in addition to a different application of these concepts across domains of psychology.

Benjafield ( 2019 ) investigated the most salient keywords in anglophone psychology from 1887 to 2014. His findings suggest that keywords associated with the emergence of psychological paradigms are widely used over extended periods of time. These keywords include “learning”, “perception”, “memory”, “motor”, “personality”, “performance”, “program” and “schizophrenia” among others. Based on the analysis of shared scientific vocabulary between different disciplines, the findings of Benjafield ( 2020 ) provide empirical evidence for a shift in psychology towards the natural sciences, concluding that:

[...] much of what we now call psychology may end up being part of biology [...]. The remainder may coalesce around the study of aspects of the person that are not easily reducible to biology and consequently may develop stronger affiliations with the humanities. (Benjafield 2020 , 15)

Furthermore, studies have demonstrated increasing alignments with the natural sciences for various subfields of psychology. For example, an examination of topics in sport and exercise psychology journals between 2008 and 2011 suggests a relative dominance of research on motivation with links to cognitive science and intersections between sport and health psychology (Lindahl et al. 2015 ). Furthermore, they identified isolated research areas such as “behavioral change, physical activity, and health”, “performance, anxiety, and chocking”, and “talent development and expertise”. Preckel and Krampen ( 2016 ) analyzed PSYNDEX data of research on highly gifted and mentally impaired persons issued between 1980 and 2014. They note a dramatic increase in research on gifted students since the 2000s and a growing number of empirically oriented papers. Kaplan ( 2015 ) identifies two distinct research cultures in educational psychology: Post-positivists who apply quantitative methods, and interpretative researchers using mainly qualitative methodology. In his view, the former is aligned to the natural sciences and increasingly endorsed as the sole legitimate paradigm in educational psychology due to the possibility to replicate experimental findings. At the same time, interpretative research is increasingly marginalized because its findings are harder to reproduce and do not presuppose universal laws of the psyche.

Moreover, studies show an increasing influence of neurosciences on the psychological discourse. Yeung et al. ( 2017b ) reveal neuroscience research to be increasingly important in the domains of behavioral sciences, geriatrics and gerontology and – especially – psychology. Methodologically, Yeung et al. ( 2017a ) note that statistical, computational, and technical approaches aligned with neurosciences are increasingly common in HI-journals. These methods are related to topics such as physiology, motor function, anatomy, aging, social neuroscience, and language and learning. Interestingly, a significant share of highly influential neurosciences papers (measured in citation rates) were not published in high impact journals and indicate the importance of other journals for the dissemination of novel insights (Yeung and Ho 2018 ).

Taken together, the findings provided by previous research indicate firstly an occurring shift towards the natural sciences primarily driven by neurosciences and cognitive sciences. Second, experimental methods and the use of fMRIs and other advanced imaging devices increasingly exert influence on the psychological discourse. Finally, it remains unclear whether the changes in the psychological discourse towards the natural sciences are driven by publications in HI or mainstream journals.

Data and methods

We utilize the Web of Science database to describe the research discourses in psychology, to map the landscape of psychological topics discussed in HI journals and mainstream journals as well as conference proceedings, and the changes over time. We queried the Web of Science database in September 2018 and downloaded all abstracts associated with at least one of the following Web of Science categories: “Psychology”, “Psychology, Psychoanalysis”, “Psychology, Multidisciplinary”, “Psychology, Experimental”, “Psychology, Clinical”, “Psychology, Educational”, “Psychology, Mathematical”, “Psychology, Social”, “Psychology, Developmental”, “Psychology, Biological”, “Psychology, Applied”. We then excluded all non-English abstracts. In total, our corpus included 528, 488 abstracts, stemming from articles published in 642 psychology outlets and 709 conference proceedings (1, 351 items in total).

As is common in quantitative text analysis, the acquired data needed to be prepared and cleaned. In a first step, we removed all stopwords like “in”, “and”, “or”, “the”. Following this, we tokenized and lemmatized the words Footnote 1 . Lemmatization is a common step in NLP to reduce different forms of a word (e.g., singular and plural) to a common base form. As a last preprocessing step, we concatenated bigrams appearing more than 50 times to detect phrases like “factor_analysis” or “statistical_significant” in our abstract data (Blaheta and Johnson 2001 ).

Working with large amounts of texts is a long-standing issue in the field of information retrieval (e.g. Billhardt et al. 2002 ). The main idea is to summarize a corpus of documents by reducing their dimensions, but to keep, at the same time, most of its relevant information. One popular branch of information retrieval is topic modeling (Jordan and Mitchell 2015 ), where a set of documents is assigned to meaningful themes (i.e. “topics”). Topics are directly derived from the documents by probabilistic algorithms and consist of words that co-occur across documents.

In so-called generative models, each topic is seen as a probability distribution across all words of a given language, describing the likelihood for a word to be chosen to be part of a certain topic (Blei et al. 2003 ; Griffiths and Steyvers 2004 ). Since this likelihood is independent of the position of the word in a text it is sometimes referred to as a “bag-of-words” representation of documents. Although this assumption is clearly not realistic (e.g. grammar is ignored), it has been proven to be very reliable in practical applications (DiMaggio et al. 2013 ; McFarland et al. 2013 ).

In this paper, we use a recently developed variety of probabilistic topic models called Structural Topic Models (STMs) by Roberts et al. ( 2014 ). Its key feature is to enable researchers to utilize document metadata (e.g. year) to improve the estimation of topics. Including the publication date has proven to be especially useful for longer time periods and changing discourses (Farrell 2016 ). It has been shown that the incorporation of additional covariates as “a way of ‘structuring’ the prior distributions in the topic model” improves the topic quality substantially (Roberts et al. 2016 , 1067). We follow this example and use the year of each document as a covariate in our models.

These improvements notwithstanding, the STM requires a researcher to make a decision on the number of topics ( k ) although the number of relevant themes is not known a priori. Insufficient numbers render models coarse, an excessive number could result in a model that is too complex. This is a widely recognized issue in topic modeling (e.g. Chang et al. 2009 ). To validate the number of topics, we first utilize two commonly used metrics, semantic coherence and exclusivity (Mimno et al. 2011 ; Roberts et al. 2014 ). Semantic coherence addresses whether a topic is internally consistent by calculating the frequency with which high probability topic words tend to co-occur in documents. However, semantic coherence alone can be misleading since high values can simply be obtained by very common words of a topic that occur together in most documents. To account for the desired statistical discrimination between topics we consider exclusivity. It provides us with the extent to which the words of a topic are distinct to it. Considering the optimum trade-off between exclusivity and coherence, we seek for a ‘plateau’, i.e., steps where coherence is not decreasing and, at the same time, exclusivity is not improving. We find such a range for \(k=(90,100)\) (cf. Fig. 5 in Appendix 1 ) Footnote 2 .

To further analyze and label each topic, we applied a three-step qualitative interpretative design. In a first step, three scholars labeled each topic based on the ten most frequent and most specific tokens as well as the most typical abstracts. The list of these tokens was established using the FREX measure, which combines the weighted frequency with which a word occurs in the documents associated with a topic with the exclusivity of it occurring only in these documents (Bischof and Airoldi 2012 ). In a second step, two other researchers reviewed the labels given in the first step and calculated the agreement of the topic labels. The values of this agreement-measure are 0 if all topics are labeled differently, and 2 or 3 respectively if two or three labels were sufficiently similar. We did so to penalize completely different interpretations of the respective topics.

The topics were labeled sufficiently similar by 2.25 scholars on average. In sum, eleven of our 100 topics were inconsistently labeled and two were consistently identified as junk topics. The first junk topic includes notes on publishing procedures, psychological awards and information on professional associations (T30). The second consists of non-English tokens present in multilingual abstracts (T100). In the third step, the latter two researchers either assigned the topic labels according to the most agreed label or suggested a new label if all of the first three scholars disagreed on the label in the first step.

The following section addresses the three initially raised research questions. To do so, we first present the characteristics of the most prevalent, rising, and declining topics and group them thematically by clustering our findings into distinct topic groups. In sum, nine topic groups emerged from our data (see Table 1 ). We further provide the prevalence for each topic and all nine clusters. In total, we analyze 21 topics which comprise \(32.3\%\) of all tokens according to their theta values. We then proceed with analyzing differences in publication patterns in HI journals on the one hand, and mainstream journals and proceedings on the other hand. Footnote 3

Prevalence of the ten most prevalent topics across all years and documents. Each topic is represented by its most aligned words

Characteristics of the most prevalent topics

Beginning with the analysis of the ten most prevalent topics over the whole period between 1995 and 2015, we see that the most prevalent topic (psychoanalysis, topic 8) shows an average document-topic probability of \(3.38\%\) (see Fig. 1 for a depiction of the expected proportions of the ten most prevalent topics) Footnote 4 . The expected document-topic probability refers to “the mean proportion of words across the documents that are assigned to this topic” (Roberts et al. 2014 , online appendix 31).

Additionally, Table 2 provides an overview on the prevalence and FREX words of the ten most prevalent topics. This percentage seems small at first, but considering the number of 100 topics chosen for our STM, the value is considerably higher than the expected value of \(1\%\) per topic Footnote 5 .

Three areas of research stand out within the ten most prevalent topics: methodology, cognition and perception, and studies on therapy and clinical intervention.

Topics focusing on methodology included research on quantitative methods with emphasis on item response theory (T38) and psychometrics (T47). These were the two most prevalent topics, revealing an ongoing debate on the adequacy of methods used in psychology. Against this backdrop, a variety of different research designs are addressed by psychology scholars, representing the field’s methodological diversity: Regression models, e.g. multilevel-, fixed-, random- and mixed effects models, monte-carlo simulations, and model misspecifications as sources of errors (T38), as well as reliability and validity of psychometric scales (T47). Both indicate a prevalence of quantitative methods in the psychological discourse.

Studies focusing on cognition and perception are associated with cognitive theories (T29), visual perception (T1), and spatial recognition (T73). Cognitive theories focus mainly on the development of mental models, reasoning, and the theory of mind. They aim to explain cognitive misconceptions of visual stimuli and for understanding visual information processing (T1). Similar patterns emerge for research on spatial recognition (T73). Again, the tokens loading high on the topic point to experimental designs to study the ability to process information or focus on two (or more) stimuli simultaneously.

Therapy and clinical trials include two topics and highlight a drive towards applications in psychology. Topics associated with this line of research include addiction interventions (T63), and psychoanalysis (T8). Whereas the former is aligned with clinical trials and experiments as methodological underpinnings, the latter is characterized by the relation between clients and psychotherapists in addition to the application of qualitative research methods. This methodological divide shows an alignment with the natural sciences for topics 63 and 88 (clinical trials of anti depressants), and alignment with social scientific approaches for therapeutic consultation for topic 8.

Three further topics are among the ten most prevalent which are representatives of distinct groups of topics discussed in more detail in the following sections. These are response reinforcement (T49), group theory (T80), and working memory (T85). The first topic focuses on animal experimentation, reinforced learning and conditioning and belongs to a topic cluster identified as behaviorism and animal experiments . The topic group theory covers concepts related to status formation, stereotypes, discrimination, and social identity. Hereby, a topic cluster is established that revolves around group dynamics . The last topic, working memory , belongs to a topic cluster centered on learning and memorization . Research belonging to this topic relies on experiments to measure performance on memorization tasks and information processing while being distracted or confronted with two or more types of information simultaneously. These topics specifically focus more strongly on experiments and a have a strong connection towards natural sciences.

Overall, applied, theoretical, and methodological topics are represented in similar proportions in the ten most prevalent topics during the study period.

The 10 most trending (upper echelon) and, respectively, declining topics (lower echelon)

Changes in psychological discourse

In order to analyze the changes in psychological discourse, we apply linear regression to illustrate the general (linear) trend of a subject over time and define the rise and decline of topics by the slope of their prevalence across time Footnote 6 . It is important to mention that this neither accounts for short-term changes at the beginning or end of the time frames, nor does it consider non-linear trends in the topics prevalence. While this is a clear limitation of our research design, it is also necessary to highlight the general trends in topic prevalence. Using a non-linear trend would be preferable, yet it would require a formal theory of semantic drifting in order to predict the amount of uptake or downturn one could expect on average. At the point of writing it is not clear if something like this would even be possible.

In order to make the changes in the psychological discourse more comparable, only the ten most declining as well as the ten topics with the steepest rise are considered to illustrate the changes in the discourse of psychology. The restriction to only focus on the Top 10 only is somewhat arbitrary, since we could just as well selected only nine or even eleven. However, since any other choice on the matter would be just as arbitrary and because we want to depict the overall changes, we chose a subset which we find to be illustrative.

Trending topics

There are topics discussed in psychology outlets that are gaining ground over time or witness relative decline in prominence (see Fig. 2 ). In this regard, Table 3 provides information on topic prevalence, FREX words and slopes of the ten trending topics.

Turning to trending topics, we see a mixture of topics associated with cognitive science, addictive and mental disorders, life satisfaction and motivation on the rise. Furthermore, there is some overlap between the highest trending and the most prevalent topics, namely addiction interventions (T63) and spatial recognition (T73). We also witness the ascent of brain imaging techniques (T54) within psychology outlets from 1995 ( \(\sim 0.5\%\) ) to 2015 ( \(\sim 1.6\%\) share on all publications). In fact, T54 shows the steepest slope of all trending topics and signals the rise of neuroscience topics in psychology. The topic brain imaging techniques is characterized by biological terms related to different areas of the brain, and by tokens related to brain imaging techniques such as the fMRI. As it does not fit into the previously introduced and discussed topic clusters, neurosciences emerge as a separate topic cluster from our data.

Looking on the other trending topics, we see a debate on regression models (T21), life satisfaction (T69) in general, the impact of chronic illnesses and quality of life (T76), research on obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and autism (T51), smoking behavior (T52), motivation (T67) and facial recognition (T3) gaining momentum. With this in mind, we are able to expand our topic clusters by either adding topics to already established clusters or by introducing new groups of topics.

Beginning with the former, we are able to add regression models (T21) to the methodology topic cluster. The tokens associated with this topic suggest that associated studies deal with predictive power of regression models, regression techniques in general, mediator effects and structural equation modeling. Albeit not as prevalent as our more general topics on quantitative methods and psychometrics , the topic of regression models indicate an ongoing interest in the refinement of classical statistical methods.

Facial recognition (T3) belongs to the cognition and perception topic cluster. It is associated with studies using experimental designs, and focus on ethnic discrimination based on skin color and facial expression of minorities. In contrast to the other, more prevalent topics belonging to the same topic cluster, facial recognition is more applied and aligned to social issues.

Turning to the clinical studies and clinical interventions topic cluster, we are able to append topic 51 dealing with OCD and autism . Topic 51 deals with conditions correlating to OCD and related disorders such as learning disabilities and accompanying character traits (e.g. hyperactivity or repetitive behavior patterns). It addresses a specialized and thematically limited subfield of psychology and by doing so distinguishes itself from the more prevalent and more general topics in the clinical studies and clinical interventions-cluster.

Moreover, we are able to add two additional topic clusters based on the remaining four topics. The first is labeled quality of life and includes life satisfaction (T69) and chronic illness and quality of life (T76). The former topic (T69) deals with the impact of positive thinking and positive events on short-term and long-term life satisfaction. Additionally, it covers subjective definitions of a “good life” and explores the relationship between character traits and life satisfaction. The latter topic (T76) sheds light on the relation between physical and mental health with a particular focus on chronic diseases. In contrast to the former, more biological terms are related to chronic illnesses and quality of life compared to life satisfaction , unveiling the mind-body dualism still present in psychology (Brennan and Houde 2017 ).

The second new topic cluster was labeled as addiction and self-regulative behavior and includes motivation (T67) and smoking (T52). Motivation deals with issues of procrastination, time usage and leisure time, and the investigation of different types of motivation (e.g. intrinsic or extrinsic motivation). Beyond that, it is discussed what types of self-regulative behaviors are negatively associated with procrastination. Smoking focuses on the reasons for adolescents to start and ways to quit smoking. This topic also deals with self-regulative behavior and its association with smoking patterns, relapse, and mental health problems associated with smoking patterns.

Overall, we see specialized, applied and thematically driven topics gaining ground in psychology. Methodologically, these topics are aligned with experimental designs and classical statistical methods such as regression techniques.

Declining topics

Now that we witnessed neurosciences, applied as well as rather specialized topics gaining prevalence as against other topics in psychology, which topics are in decline and what are their characteristics compared to trending topics?

At first glance, we observe a more or less continuous decline of six prevalent topics, namely visual perception (T1), quantitative methods with focus on item response theory (T38), psychometrics (T47), and response reinforcement / behavioral experiments (T49), psychoanalysis (T8), and cognition theory (T29). Of these topics, psychoanalysis witnessed the steepest decline. This however does not imply a fall from grace as seen in the still sizable prevalence of the psychoanalysis topic (T8). Besides the topics mentioned above, we witness a relative decline of memory loss disorders (T7), quantitative methods (validity) (T75), animal experiments (diet) (T41) and animal testing (T41). Table 4 gives an overview on the ten declining topics, their prevalence, FREX terms, and slopes.

Similar to the trending topics, we are able to assign additional topics to the thematic clusters. First of all, we can assign memory loss disorders (T7) to the topic cluster learning and memorization . In contrast to topic working memory (T85), it deals with cognitive impairment following Alzheimer’s disease, different forms of dementia and Parkinson’s disease. It further links memory loss disorders with clinical studies or biological descriptions of their effects on the brain, memorization and motor abilities.

Secondly, quantitative methods (validity) (T75) seems to fall straight into the already established methodology cluster. This topic deals with psychometric issues related to experiments and questionnaires, e.g. recall or information retrieval in item scales. It complements psychometrics insofar, as it focuses on the participants’ abilities to answer items correctly and to recall information. Furthermore, the topic quantitative methods (validity) is characterized by the absence of tokens related to prediction and model specifications. Therefore, the topic cluster reveals that the methodological discourse in psychology seems to focus increasingly on objective measurements and model specifications.

At last, we can assign animal experiment (diet) (T41) and animal testing (T96) to the behaviorism and animal experimentation topic cluster. Animal experiments on diet are characterized by tokens stemming from biology. The experiments described focus on the effects of diets and nutrition intake (or lack thereof) on the animals’ bodies. Furthermore, behavioral changes related to modifications of food intake are discussed. At last, animal testing involves the study on the effects of drugs and medication on the subjects’ bodies. Beside the physical effects, the impact of drugs and medication on task performance, regular behavior, and memorization were tested.

Insofar, both topics differ substantially from response reinforcement . They focus on physical reactions and the impact of administered substances instead of programming and learning of behavior. Also, both topics are more concerned with the description of the effects administered drugs and medication or forced dietary changes have on the animals’ bodies. This clearly sets them apart from response reinforcement with their focus on the explanation of learning behavior. We therefore see a divide among topics concerned with description and explanation with the former in decline.

The division of topics in high impact journals and mainstream journals

Differentiating most trending topics in psychology by HI and mainstream journals and conference proceedings

Differentiating most declining topics in psychology by HI and mainstream journals and conference proceedings

Not all contributions to the knowledge base in psychology are published in equally visible journals. Prior studies in the field of higher education research suggest differences in the spread of disciplinary knowledge depending on journal prestige (Kwiek 2020 ; Yeung et al. 2017a ). It is therefore reasonable to assume that topics with the ability to shape an entire academic discipline are mainly discussed in HI journals. However, as Münch ( 2014 ) and Yeung ( 2018 ) suggest, new and innovative topics may be discussed in rather marginalized outlets and have the ability to subvert the disciplinary discourse.

With this in mind, we take a closer look at trending and declining topics and their representation in HI and mainstream journals. We define the ten journals with the highest journal impact factor related to psychology according to the Web of Science database as HI journals. In this regard, Fig. 3 decomposes the changes in prevalence over time for the ten trending topics and their appearance in high impact journals (orange line) versus mainstream journals (blue line). The same is shown in Fig. 4 for declining topics.

Regarding trending and declining topics, we see two patterns emerge. Firstly, there are topics, whose growth is primarily driven by growing shares in publications in HI journals. The same applies for declining topics. Secondly, we find topics, where the gain or loss in prevalence is driven in equal parts by HI and mainstream journals. Beginning with trending topics, we see brain imaging (T54) and addiction interventions (T63) to belong to the first category. These findings signal not only growing prevalence, but also importance and ascribed quality within the psychological discourse.

On the other hand, psychoanalysis (T8) witnesses a decline in prevalence, mainly driven by a loss in prevalence in HI journals at the end of our observation period. This finding indicates that psychoanalysis with its focus on the interaction between therapist and client does not match the current trend in psychological research with its growing emphasis on objectivity and approaches aligned to the natural sciences.

Discussion and conclusion

Our paper explores the scholarly discourse held in psychology outlets and provides a descriptive overview of the topics that inform psychological research and its changing discourse over the last two decades. The most remarkable result is that psychology appears to head towards an application oriented, clinical discipline with a growing focus on brain imaging techniques (e.g., fMRI) and approaches closely aligned to neurosciences and cognitive sciences. This development is reflected in the rising prevalence of clinical trials, cognitive sciences, neurosciences, cognitive psychology and studies addressing quality of life issues. On the one hand, this concurs with Melchert’s ( 2016 ) vision of psychology as a unified clinical science under the lead of neurosciences, cognitive sciences, and evolutionary biology. On the other hand, our analysis also shows that the multiparadigmatic roots of psychology described by Brennan and Houde ( 2017 ) and criticized by Gentner ( 2010 ) or Melchert ( 2016 ) are still present today. This resonates with Jackson ( 2017 ), Henriques ( 2017 ), and Tryon ( 2017 ), who advocate for diversity in psychology in order to study phenomena as comprehensively as possible.

Our findings reveal an internal hierarchy of different domains which align with natural sciences as more popular and social sciences / humanities as less popular factions. This becomes particularly visible in the growth of neurosciences in the psychological discourse, which was published above average in HI journals. As indicated by Yeung et al. ( 2017a ), neuroscience research fell on fertile ground in psychology and was able to connect to already existing research in the domain of cognition sciences and cognitive psychology. This corroborates the findings of Gentner ( 2010 ) and Schwartz et al. ( 2016 ) that the neurosciences substantially contribute to the mind-body duality debate in psychology.

Furthermore, our paper provides evidence for the decreasing alignment between psychology and the humanities on the one hand, and an increase in relevance of the natural sciences (Krampen 2016 ; Krampen and Trierweiler 2016 ). This is especially true for the neurosciences and cognitive sciences as examined by Yeung ( 2018 ) and Yeung and Ho ( 2018 ). This substantiates previous findings of Benjafield ( 2020 ), who noted that psychology might end up either as part of biology or a divided discipline, whereby this division occurs in both basic research and clinical applications.

However, our findings do not support the forecast of Krampen et al. ( 2011 ). Albeit we found a decrease in the coverage of psychoanalysis and some areas of quantitative methods, we found growing prevalence of organizational psychology and coverage of regression techniques and methodology aligned to the neurosciences. Changes in the foundations of psychology seem to be carried by HI- and mainstream journals, albeit the topic proportions indicate no dominance of one particular branch of psychology.

Our study is, of course, prone to a number of limitations. Firstly, we rely on the Web of Science database and the pre-defined category of psychology. This is mostly due to the wider accessibility of the data. An alternative approach would have been to rely on the PsycINFO database. PsycINFO covers 2, 307 journals with a total of 2, 434, 849 publications issued between 1995 and 2015 in contrast to our 528, 488 abstracts, of which 487.816 are available in both databases Footnote 7 . Our sample therefore covered \(20.03\%\) of the abstracts available on PsycINFO between 1995 and 2015. Secondly, these numbers indicate that systematic errors may occur due to our use of the Web of Science database. For example, the inclusion of abstracts issued in journal articles and conference proceedings could lead to over- or underestimation of topics as well as their actual change over time. Thirdly, given the interdisciplinary nature of neuroscience and its strong connection to biology and life sciences, a significant amount of the associated research would not be included in our dataset. Future studies could address these three problems by using the PsycINFO database. Since it is curated by the APA, it is the most comprehensive and accurate database that may be used to conduct scientometric studies on psychology.

Despite these limitations, our study provides insights into how topics change over time depending on their coverage in HI and mainstream journals. In this vein, future studies could investigate how neurosciences and applied clinical branches of psychology spread into other branches of psychology. Taking a closer look at interdisciplinary areas between psychology and other disciplines could therefore shed light on the question whether dominated or marginalized methods and paradigms are transferred to other disciplines, such as the social sciences. Finally, we encourage scholars to investigate the overlap between PsycINFO, Web of Science and other databases as an avenue for future research. A replication study could thus, for example, map nuances in topic development not captured in the dataset obtained in Web of Science. Such a comparison can contribute insights into how individual subject areas (such as psychology) are delimited in the respective databases and what impact the respective definition has on the topics discussed in the discipline according to topic modeling approaches.

To remove stopwords we used the snowball stopword list from the stopwords package in R (Benoit et al. 2020 ), and custom wordlists containing (1) time related words (“year”, “january”, etc.), (2) numeral related words (“one”, “tenth”, etc.), and (3) miscellaneous subject related words (“examine”, “study”, etc.). The lemmatization was achieved through the ‘lemmatize_words’ function of the R package ‘textstem’ (Rinker 2018 ). The abstracts were tokenized into words through the ‘tokenize_words’ function of the R package ‘tokenizers’ (Mullen et al. 2018 ).

Please note that across all evaluated numbers of topics we find a high consistency of topic-document assignments (further details are discussed in "Appendix 1 ").

We denoted the ten journals with the highest impact factor in 2018 as HI journals. These include Annual Review of Psychology , Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Psychological Bulletin , Trends in Cognitive Sciences , Annual Review of Clinical Psychology , Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics , Psychological Inquiry , Clinical Psychology Review , and Personality and Social Psychology Review .

Note that junk topic 30 dealing with APA and publication issues is even more prevalent, but without meaning for our analysis. Because of this we decided to exclude it from our analysis.

The expected average document-topic probability is calculated by 1/ k .

The changes over time were significant for each topic except topics 6 (teamwork), 13 (memory), 23 (animal communication), and 58 (neurotransmitters). A full account of the significance of change in topic proportion, intercept and slope is given in "Appendix 2 ".

A comparison between our sample and PsycINFO is provided in "Appendix 3 ".

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Acknowledgements

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for important critiques and suggestions that significantly improved our article, as well as Brigitte Münzel and Isabella Czedik-Eysenberg for additional proofreading.

Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. This study was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Science (grant numbers: 01PU17021A, 01PU17021B, 01PU17021C).

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Appendix 1: Details on Structural Topic Models

Although STMs solve other technical issues like finding the optimal starting parameters and providing consistent results by a “spectral initialization” (Arora et al. 2013 ), selecting an appropriate number of topics is crucial for any further analysis. It remains a central task for researchers to interpret the latent semantic space qualitatively and decide whether the presented topics are meaningful or one is only “reading tea leaves” (Chang et al. 2009 ). Besides the problem of “garbage in, garbage out” ousting for all models (McFarland et al. 2016 ), determining the number of topics ( k ) is a wide-ranging decision made by the researcher. Insufficient numbers render models coarse, an excessive number could result in a model too complex for further investigation.

Comparable to efforts in cluster analysis to determine the optimal number of clusters, there is no “right” answer to the question on how many topics are appropriate for a given corpus (Grimmer and Stewart 2013 ; Munoz-Najar Galvez et al. 2020 ). Due to the fact that there is not a single, correct number of topics found in a corpus, careful examination and pondering of different topic solutions is key to choose a topic model that allows for qualitative judgment of the researchers (Rule et al. 2015 ). Fortunately, the qualitative consideration can be complemented and assisted by statistical measures.

Following this line of reasoning, we propose a twofold approach to choose the optimal number k of topics before we interpret the results of our STM qualitatively. First, we check internal validity of different choices of k by statistical measures. Second, we check consistency across k -models. Especially the last aspect demonstrates that almost all topics found by STMs are “nested”, and that k does not alter the semantic space substantially. Therefore our main unit of investigation is rather stable regardless of k being X or Y.

To investigate the internal validity of our models, we apply measures of semantic coherence and exclusivity. Both are widely used measures to approximate the number of k in topic models (Mimno et al. 2011 ; Roberts et al. 2014 ). The coherence of a semantic space addresses whether a topic is internally consistent by calculating the frequency with which words being highly associated with a topic (given by \(\theta\) ) tend to co-occur in documents. However, semantic coherence alone can be misleading since high values can simply be obtained by very common words that occur together systematically in most documents and are associated with the same topic. We therefore consider the exclusivity of topics in order to select a model with optimal number of distinct topics (Roberts et al. 2014 ). This measure provides us with the extent to which the tokens of a topic are distinct to it, i.e. words that have only high loadings in one topic. Both exclusivity and coherence complement each other and, hence, are examined in concert to give us a comprehensive, quantitative impression on the choice of k .

Thus, we are looking for a “plateau” of both indicators. This gives us an upper limit for reasonable k -number of topics. Figure 5 shows that this limit may well be between 80 and 100. After that plateau, coherence falls rather rapidly and exclusivity increases only slightly. This holds when we depict the distribution of the metrics by topic using violin plots Fig. 6 . 80 and 100 have the least outliers. To maximize resolution, we choose 100 as the best solution. As presented in Fig. 8 and Tables 5 , 6 , and 7 the hundred topics in our selected solution show very reasonable coherence and exclusivity values.

Distribution of exclusivity (right y-axis) and semantic coherence (left) on two axis. In general, exclusivity improves with a rising number of topics, whereas coherence gets worse

Depicts each topic as a point and the distribution of the metric as violin plot for each k . Red triangles show means of each k

In addition, we check the consistency of our topic models across a range of k . For that purpose, we use the “Fowlkes-Mallows index” (FM). It provides a straight-forward way to measure consistency by investigating the rate of change with regard to topic-document assignments across different values of k . To assign topics to documents we used the max-approach so that each document is assigned to its maximum topic, i.e., the max-theta of a document defines its topic. Figure 7 shows that k on the x-axis represents similarity of topic-assignments for all docs between two consecutive k ’s, i.e. a STM with k -topics is compared to the next smaller STM with \(k-50\) . We see relatively high and growing values of consistency from 50 to 100 topics. The FM index at \(k=100\) marks the peak, i.e., the STM with 100 topics is largely consistent with lower ranges of k . After 100 topics, consistency declines before ascending again after 150 topics. The value at \(k=100\) suggests that almost two thirds of topic assignments are stable. Hence, the choice of k suggested by FM is in line with the values provided by the coherence and exclusivity measures.

Fowlkes-Mallows index indicating overlap of topic-assignments (max-approach) for consecutive k ’s

Exclusivity and coherence of all topics (outlier T8: psychoanalysis marked in red)

Appendix 2: Significance levels of the slopes of the topic change over time

Appendix 3: additional sample information.

The PsycINFO database covers 2, 307 journals. In comparison, our sample comprises 642 journals of which 639 outlets are also contained in PsycINFO. Furthermore, we included 709 conference proceedings in our data. Insofar, we cover \(27.70\%\) of the journals included in PsycINFO. In total, the Web of Science sample used in this article includes 487, 816 of the 2, 434, 849 ( \(20.03\%\) ) abstracts of articles available in PsycINFO.

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Wieczorek, O., Unger, S., Riebling, J. et al. Mapping the field of psychology: Trends in research topics 1995–2015. Scientometrics 126 , 9699–9731 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04069-9

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This is an extremely comprehensive text for an undergraduate psychology course about research methods. It does an excellent job covering the basics of a variety of types of research design. It also includes important topics related to research... read more

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This is an extremely comprehensive text for an undergraduate psychology course about research methods. It does an excellent job covering the basics of a variety of types of research design. It also includes important topics related to research such as ethics, finding journal articles, and writing reports in APA format.

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This is an excellent text for an undergraduate research methods course in the field of Psychology. I have been using the text for my Research Methods and Statistics course for a few years now. This text focuses on research methods, so I do use another text to cover statistical information. I do highly recommend this text for research methods. It is comprehensive, clear, and easy for students to use.

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This textbook covers every topic that I teach in my Research Methods course aside from psychology careers (which I would not really expect it to cover). read more

This textbook covers every topic that I teach in my Research Methods course aside from psychology careers (which I would not really expect it to cover).

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Many of the basic concepts of research methods are rather timeless, but I appreciate that the text includes newer research as examples while also including "classic" studies that exemplify different methods.

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I do not think the textbook is insensitive, but there is not much thought given to adapting research instruments across cultures. For instance, talking about how different constructs might have different underlying distributions in different cultures would be useful for students. In the survey methods section, a discussion of back translation or emic personality trait measurement/development for example might be a nice addition.

I choose to use this textbook in my methods classes, but I do miss the organization of the previous American editions. Overall, I recommend this textbook to my colleagues.

Reviewed by Brianna Ewert, Psychology Instructor, Salish Kootenai College on 12/30/22

This text includes the majority of content included in our undergraduate Research Methods in Psychology course. The glossary provides concise definitions of key terms. This text includes most of the background knowledge we expect our students to... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

This text includes the majority of content included in our undergraduate Research Methods in Psychology course. The glossary provides concise definitions of key terms. This text includes most of the background knowledge we expect our students to have as well as skill-based sections that will support them in developing their own research projects.

The content I have read is accurate and error-free.

The content is relevant and up-to-date.

The text is clear and concise. I find it pleasantly readable and anticipate undergraduate students will find it readable and understandable as well.

The terminology appears to be consistent throughout the text.

The modular sections stand alone and lend themselves to alignment with the syllabus of a particular course. I anticipate readily selecting relevant modules to assign in my course.

The book is logically organized with clear and section headings and subheadings. Content on a particular topic is easy to locate.

The text is easy to navigate and the format/design are clean and clear. There are not interface issues, distortions or distracting format in the pdf or online versions.

The text is grammatically correct.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

I have not found culturally insensitive and offensive language or content in the text. For my courses, I would add examples and supplemental materials that are relevant for students at a Tribal College.

This textbook includes supplemental instructor materials, included slides and worksheets. I plan to adopt this text this year in our Research Methods in Psychology course. I expect it to be a benefit to the course and students.

Reviewed by Sara Peters, Associate Professor of Psychology, Newberry College on 11/3/22

This text serves as an excellent resource for introducing survey research methods topics to undergraduate students. It begins with a background of the science of psychology, the scientific method, and research ethics, before moving into the main... read more

This text serves as an excellent resource for introducing survey research methods topics to undergraduate students. It begins with a background of the science of psychology, the scientific method, and research ethics, before moving into the main types of research. This text covers experimental, non-experimental, survey, and quasi-experimental approaches, among others. It extends to factorial and single subject research, and within each topic is a subset (such as observational research, field studies, etc.) depending on the section.

I could find no accuracy issues with the text, and appreciated the discussions of research and cited studies.

There are revised editions of this textbook (this being the 4th), and the examples are up to date and clear. The inclusion of exercises at the end of each chapter offer potential for students to continue working with material in meaningful ways as they move through the book and (and course).

The prose for this text is well aimed at the undergraduate population. This book can easily be utilized for freshman/sophomore level students. It introduces the scientific terminology surrounding research methods and experimental design in a clear way, and the authors provide extensive examples of different studies and applications.

Terminology is consistent throughout the text. Aligns well with other research methods and statistics sources, so the vocabulary is transferrable beyond the text itself.

Navigating this book is a breeze. There are 13 chapters, and each have subsections that can be assigned. Within each chapter subsection, there is a set of learning objectives, and paragraphs are mixed in with tables and figures for students to have different visuals. Different application assignments within each chapter are highlighted with boxes, so students can think more deeply given a set of constructs as they consider different information. The last subsection in each chapter has key summaries and exercises.

The sections and topics in this text are very straightforward. The authors begin with an introduction of psychology as a science, and move into the scientific method, research ethics, and psychological measurement. They then present multiple different research methodologies that are well known and heavily utilized within the social sciences, before concluding with information on how to present your research, and also analyze your data. The text even provides links throughout to other free resources for a reader.

This book can be navigated either online (using a drop-down menu), or as a pdf download, so students can have an electronic copy if needed. All pictures and text display properly on screen, with no distortions. Very easy to use.

There were no grammatical errors, and nothing distracting within the text.

This book includes inclusive material in the discussion of research ethics, as well as when giving examples of the different types of research approaches. While there is always room for improvement in terms of examples, I was satisfied with the breadth of research the authors presented.

This text provides an overview of both research methods, and a nice introduction to statistics for a social science student. It would be a good choice for a survey research methods class, and if looking to change a statistics class into an open resource class, could also serve as a great resource.

Reviewed by Sharlene Fedorowicz, Adjunct Professor, Bridgewater State University on 6/23/21

The comprehensiveness of this book was appropriate for an introductory undergraduate psychology course. Critical topics are covered that are necessary for psychology students to obtain foundational learning concepts for research. Sections within... read more

The comprehensiveness of this book was appropriate for an introductory undergraduate psychology course. Critical topics are covered that are necessary for psychology students to obtain foundational learning concepts for research. Sections within the text and each chapter provide areas for class discussion with students to dive deeper into key concepts for better learning comprehension. The text covered APA format along with examples of research studies to supplement the learning. The text segues appropriately by introducing the science of psychology, followed by scientific method and ethics before getting into the core of scientific research in the field of psychology. Details are provided in quantitative and qualitative research, correlations, surveys, and research design. Overall, the text is fully comprehensive and necessary introductory research concepts.

The text appears to be accurate with no issues related to content.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

The text provided relevant research information to support the learning. The content was up-to-date with a variety of different examples related to the different fields of psychology. However, some topics such as in the pseudoscience section were not very relevant and bordered the line of beliefs. Here, more current or relevant solid examples would provide more relevancy in this part of the text. Bringing in more solid or concrete examples that are more current for students may have been more appropriate such as lack of connection between information found on social media versus real science.

The language and flow of the chapters accompanied by the terms, concepts, and examples of applied research allows for clarity of learning content. Terms were introduced at the appropriate time with the support of concepts and current or classic research. The writing style flows nicely and segues easily from concept to concept. The text is easy for students to understand and grasp the details related to psychological research and science.

The text provides consistency in the outline of each chapter. The beginning section chapter starts objectives as an overview to help students unpack the learning content. Key terms are consistently bolded followed by concept or definition and relevant examples. Research examples are pertinent and provide students with an opportunity to understand application of the contents. Practice exercises are provided with in the chapter and at the and in order for students to integrate learning concepts from within the text.

Sections and subsections are clearly organized and divided appropriately for ease-of-use. The topics are easily discernible and follow the flow of ideal learning routines for students. The sections and subsections are consistently outlined for each concept module. The modularity provides consistency allowing for students to focus on content rather than trying to discern how to pull out the information differently from each chapter or section. In addition, each section and subsection allow for flexibility in learning or expanding concepts within the content area.

The organization of the textbook was easy to follow and each major topic was outlined clearly. However, the chapter on presenting research may be more appropriately placed toward the end of the book rather than in the middle of the chapters related to research and research design. In addition, more information could have been provided upfront around APA format so that students could identify the format of citations within the text as practice for students throughout the book.

The interface of the book lends itself to a nice layout with appropriate examples and links to break up the different sections in the chapters. Examples where appropriate and provided engagement opportunities for the students for each learning module. Images and QR codes or easily viewed and used. Key terms are highlighted in relevant figures, graphs, and tables were appropriately placed. Overall, the interface of the text assisted with the organization and flow of learning material.

No grammatical errors were detected in this book.

The text appears to be culturally sensitive and not offensive. A variety of current and classic research examples are relevant. However, more examples of research from women, minorities, and ethnicities would strengthen the culture of this textbook. Instructors may need to supplement some research in this area to provide additional inclusivity.

Overall, I was impressed by the layout of the textbook and the ease of use. The layout provides a set of expectations for students related to the routine of how the book is laid out and how students will be able to unpack the information. Research examples were relevant, although I see areas where I will supplement information. The book provides opportunities for students to dive deeper into the learning and have rich conversations in the classroom. I plan to start using the psychology textbook for my students starting next year.

Reviewed by Anna Behler, Assistant Professo, North Carolina State University on 6/1/21

The text is very thorough and covers all of the necessary topics for an undergraduate psychology research methods course. There is even coverage of qualitative research, case studies, and the replication crisis which I have not seen in some other... read more

The text is very thorough and covers all of the necessary topics for an undergraduate psychology research methods course. There is even coverage of qualitative research, case studies, and the replication crisis which I have not seen in some other texts.

There were no issues with the accuracy of the text.

The content is very up to date and relevant for a research methods course. The only updates that will likely be necessary in the coming years are updates to examples and modifications to the section on APA formatting.

The clarity of the writing was good, and the chapters were written in a way that was accessible and easy to follow.

I did not note any issues with consistency.

Each chapter is divided into multiple subsections. This makes the chapters even easier to read, as they are broken down into short and easy to navigate sections. These sections make it easy to assign readings as needed depending on which topics are being covered in class.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 3

The organization was one of the few areas of weakness, and I felt that the chapters were ordered somewhat oddly. However, this is something that is easily fixed, as chapters (and even subsections) can be assigned in whatever order is needed.

There were no issues of note with the interface, and the PDF of the text was easy to navigate.

The text was well written and there were no grammatical/writing errors of note.

Overall, the book did not contain any notable instances of bias. However, it would probably be appropriate to offer a more thorough discussion of the WEIRD problem in psychology research.

Reviewed by Seth Surgan, Professor, Worcester State University on 5/24/21

Pitched very well for a 200-level Research Methods course. This text provided students with solid basis for class discussion and the further development of their understanding of fundamental concepts. read more

Pitched very well for a 200-level Research Methods course. This text provided students with solid basis for class discussion and the further development of their understanding of fundamental concepts.

No issues with accuracy.

Coverage was on target, relevant, and applicable, with good examples from a variety of subfields within Psychology.

Clearly written -- students often struggle with the dry, technical nature of concepts in Research Methods. Part of the reason I chose this text in the first place was how favorably it compared to other options in terms of clarity.

No problems with inconsistent of shifting language. This is extremely important in Research Methods, where there are many closely related terms. Language was consistent and compatible with other textbook options that were available to my students.

Chapters are broken down into sections that are reasonably sized and conceptually appropriate.

The organization of this textbook fit perfectly with the syllabus I've been using (in one form or another) for 15+ years.

This textbook was easy to navigate and available in a variety of formats.

No problems at all.

Examples show an eye toward inclusivity. I did not detect any insensitive or offensive examples or undertones.

I have used this textbook for a 200-level Research Methods course run over a single summer session. This was my first experience using an OER textbook and I don't plan on going back.

Reviewed by Laura Getz, Assistant Professor, University of San Diego on 4/29/21

The topics covered seemed to be at an appropriate level for beginner undergraduate psychology students; the learning objectives for each subsection and the key takeaways and exercises for each chapter are also very helpful in guiding students’... read more

The topics covered seemed to be at an appropriate level for beginner undergraduate psychology students; the learning objectives for each subsection and the key takeaways and exercises for each chapter are also very helpful in guiding students’ attention to what is most relevant. The glossary is also thorough and a good resource for clear definitions. I would like to see a final chapter on a “big picture” or integrating key ideas of replication, meta-analysis, and open science.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

For the most part, I like the way information is presented. I had a few specific issues with definitions for ordinal variables being quantitative (1st, 2nd, 3rd aren’t really numbers as much as ranked categories), the lack of specificity about different forms of validity (face, content, criterion, and discriminant all just labeled “validity” whereas internal and external validity appear in different sections), and the lack of clear distinction between correlational and quasi-experimental variables (e.g., in some places, country of origin is listed as making a design quasi-experimental, but in other chapters it is defined as correlational).

Some of the specific studies/experiments mentioned do not seem like the best or most relevant for students to learn about the topics, but for the most part, content is up-to-date and can definitely be updated with new studies to illustrate concepts with relative ease.

Besides the few concepts I listed above in “accuracy”, I feel the text was very accessible, provides clear definitions, and many examples to illustrate any potential technical/jargon terms.

I did not notice any issues with inconsistent terms except for terms that do have more than one way of describing the same concept (e.g., 2-sample vs. independent samples t-test)

I assigned the chapters out of order with relative ease, and students did not comment about it being burdensome to navigate.

The order of chapters sometimes did not make sense to me (e.g., Experimental before Non-experimental designs, Quasi-experimental designs separate from other non-experimental designs, waiting until Chapter 11 to talk about writing), but for the most part, the chapter subsections were logical and clear.

Interface rating: 4

I had no issues navigating the online version of the textbook other than taking a while to figure out how to move forward and back within the text itself rather than going back to the table of contents (this might just be a browser issue, but is still worth considering).

No grammatical errors of note.

There was nothing explicitly insensitive or offensive about the text, but there were many places where I felt like more focus on diversity and individual differences could be helpful. For example, ethics and history of psychological testing would definitely be a place to bring in issues of systemic racism and/or sexism and a focus on WEIRD samples (which is mentioned briefly at another point).

I was very satisfied with this free resource overall, and I recommend it for beginning level undergraduate psychology research methods courses.

Reviewed by Laura Stull, Associate Professor, Anderson University on 4/23/21

This book covers essential topics and areas related to conducting introductory psychological research. It covers all critical topics, including the scientific method, research ethics, research designs, and basic descriptive and inferential... read more

This book covers essential topics and areas related to conducting introductory psychological research. It covers all critical topics, including the scientific method, research ethics, research designs, and basic descriptive and inferential statistics. It even goes beyond other texts in terms of offering specific guidance in areas like how to conduct research literature searches and psychological measurement development. The only area that appears slightly lacking is detailed guidance in the mechanics of writing in APA style (though excellent basic information is provided in chapter 11).

All content appears accurate. For example, experimental designs discussed, descriptive and inferential statistical guidance, and critical ethical issues are all accurately addressed, See comment on relevance below regarding some outdated information.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 3

Chapter 11 on APA style does not appear to cover the most current version of the APA style guide (7th edition). While much of the information in Chapter 11 is still current, there are specifics that did change from 6th to 7th edition of the APA manual and so, in order to be current, this information would have to be supplemented with external sources.

The book is extremely well organized, written in language and terms that should be easily understood by undergraduate freshmen, and explains all necessary technical jargon.

The text is consistent throughout in terms of terminology and the organizational framework (which aids in the readability of the text).

The text is divided into intuitive and common units based on basic psychological research methodology. It is clear and easy to follow and is divided in a way that would allow omission of some information if necessary (such as "single subject research") or reorganization of information (such as presenting survey research before experimental research) without disruption to the course as a whole.

As stated previously, the book is organized in a clear and logical fashion. Not only are the chapters presented in a logical order (starting with basic and critical information like overviews of the scientific method and research ethics and progressing to more complex topics like statistical analyses).

No issues with interface were noted. Helpful images/charts/web resources (e.g., Youtube videos) are embedded throughout and are even easy to follow in a print version of the text.

No grammatical issues were noted.

No issues with cultural bias are noted. Examples are included that address topics that are culturally sensitive in nature.

I ordered a print version of the text so that I could also view it as students would who prefer a print version. I am extremely impressed with what is offered. It covers all of the key content that I am currently covering with a (non-open source) textbook in an introduction to research methods course. The only concern I have is that APA style is not completely current and would need to be supplemented with a style guide. However, I consider this a minimal issue given all of the many strengths of the book.

Reviewed by Anika Gearhart, Instructor (TT), Leeward Community College on 4/22/21

Includes the majority of elements you expect from a textbook covering research methods. Some topics that could have been covered in a bit more depth were factorial research designs (no coverage of 3 or more independent variables) and external... read more

Includes the majority of elements you expect from a textbook covering research methods. Some topics that could have been covered in a bit more depth were factorial research designs (no coverage of 3 or more independent variables) and external validity (or the validities in general).

Nothing found that was inaccurate.

Looks like a few updates could be made to chapter 11 to bring it up to date with APA 7. Otherwise, most examples are current.

Very clear, a great fit for those very new to the topic.

The framework is clear and logical, and the learning objectives are very helpful for orienting the reader immediately to the main goals of each section.

Subsections are well-organized and clear. Titles for sections and subsections are clear.

Though I think the flow of this textbook for the most part is excellent, I would make two changes: move chapter 5 down with the other chapters on experimental research and move chapter 11 to the very end. I feel that this would allow for a more logical presentation of content.

The webpage navigation is easy to use and intuitive, the ebook download works as designed, and the page can be embedded directly into a variety of LMS sites or used with a variety of devices.

I found no grammatical errors in this book.

While there were some examples of studies that included participants from several cultures, the book does not touch on ecological validity, an important external validity issue tied to cultural psychology, and there is no mention of the WEIRD culture issue in psychology, which seems somewhat necessary when orienting new psychology students to research methods today.

I currently use and enjoy this textbook in my research methods class. Overall, it has been a great addition to the course, and I am easily able to supplement any areas that I feel aren't covered with enough breadth.

Reviewed by Amy Foley, Instructor/Field & Clinical Placement Coordinator, University of Indianapolis on 3/11/21

This text provides a comprehensive overview of the research process from ideation to proposal. It covers research designs common to psychology and related fields. read more

This text provides a comprehensive overview of the research process from ideation to proposal. It covers research designs common to psychology and related fields.

Accurate information!

This book is current and lines up well with the music therapy research course I teach as a supplemental text for students to understand research designs.

Clear language for psychology and related fields.

The format of the text is consistent. I appreciate the examples, different colored boxes, questions, and links to external sources such as video clips.

It is easy to navigate this text by chapters and smaller units within each chapter. The only confusion that has come from using this text includes the fact that the larger units have roman numerals and the individual chapters have numbers. I have told students to "read unit six" and they only read the small chapter 6, not the entire unit for example.

Flows well!

I have not experienced any interface issues.

I have not found any grammar errors.

Book appears culturally relevant.

This is a great resource for research methods courses in psychology or related fields. I am glad to have used several chapters of this text within the music therapy research course I teach where students learn about research design and then create their own research proposal.

Reviewed by Veronica Howard, Associate Professor, University of Alaska Anchorage on 1/11/21, updated 1/11/21

VERY impressed by the coverage of single subject designs. I would recommend this content to colleagues. read more

VERY impressed by the coverage of single subject designs. I would recommend this content to colleagues.

Content appears accurate.

By expanding to include more contemporary research perspectives, the authors have created a wonderful dynamic that permits the text to be the foundation for many courses as well as revision and remixing for other authors.

Book easy to read, follow.

Consistency rating: 4

Content overall consistent. Only mild inconsistency in writing style between chapters.

Exceptionally modular. All content neatly divided into units with smaller portions. This would be a great book to use in a course that meets bi-weekly, or adapted into other formats.

Content organized in a clear and logical fashion, and would guide students through a semester-long course on research methods, starting with review content, broad overview of procedures (including limitations), then highlighting less common (though relevant) procedures.

Rich variety of formats for use.

No errors found.

I would appreciate more cultural examples.

Reviewed by Greg Mullin, Associate Professor, Bunker Hill Community College on 12/30/20, updated 1/6/21

I was VERY pleased with the comprehensiveness of the text. I believe it actually has an edge over the publisher-based text that I've been using for years. Each major topic was thoroughly covered with more than enough detail on individual concepts. read more

I was VERY pleased with the comprehensiveness of the text. I believe it actually has an edge over the publisher-based text that I've been using for years. Each major topic was thoroughly covered with more than enough detail on individual concepts.

I did not find any errors within the text. The authors provided an unbiased representation of research methods in psychology.

The content connects to classic, timeless examples in the field, but also mixes in a fair amount of more current, relatable examples. I feel like I'll be able to use this version of the text for many years without its age showing.

The authors present a clear and efficient writing style throughout that is rich with relatable examples. The only area that may be a bit much for undergraduate-level student understanding is the topic of statistics. I personally scale back my discussion of statistics in my Intro to Research Methods course, but for those that prefer a deeper dive, the higher-level elements are there.

I did not notice any shifts with the use of terminology or with the structural framework of the text. The text is very consistent and organized in an easily digestible way.

The authors do a fantastic job breaking complex topics down into manageable chunks both as a whole and within chapters. As I was reading, I could easily see how I could align my current approach of teaching Intro to Research Methods with their modulated presentation of the material.

I effortlessly moved through the text given the structural organization. All topics are presented in a logical fashion that allowed each message to be delivered to the reader with ease.

I read the text through the PDF version and found no issue with the interface. All image and text-based material was presented clearly.

I cannot recall coming across any grammatical errors. The text is very well written.

I did not find the text to be culturally insensitive in any way. The authors use inclusive language and even encourage that style of writing in the chapter on Presenting Your Research. I would have liked to see more cross-cultural research examples and more of an extended effort to include the theme of diversity throughout, but at no point did I find the text to be offensive.

This is a fantastic text and I look forward to adopting it for my Intro to Research Methods course in the Spring. :)

Reviewed by Maureen O'Connell, Adjunct Professor, Bunker Hill Community College on 12/15/20, updated 12/18/20

This text edition has covered all ideas and areas of research methods in psychology. It has provided a glossary of terms, sample APA format, and sample research papers.  read more

This text edition has covered all ideas and areas of research methods in psychology. It has provided a glossary of terms, sample APA format, and sample research papers. 

The content is unbiased, accurate, and I did not find any errors in the text. 

The content is current and up-to-date. I found that the text can be added to should material change, the arrangement of the text/content makes it easily accessible to add material, if necessary. 

The text is clear, easy to understand, simplistic writing at times, but I find this text easy for students to comprehend. All text is relevant to the content of behavioral research. 

The text and terminology is consistent. 

The text is organized well and sectioned appropriately. The information is presented in an easy-to-read format, with sections that can be assigned at various points during the semester and the reader can easily locate this. 

The topics in the text are organized in a logical and clear manner. It flows really well. 

The text is presented well, including charts, diagrams, and images. There did not appear to be any confusion with this text. 

The text contains no grammatical errors.

The text was culturally appropriate and not offensive. Clear examples of potential biases were outlined in this text which I found quite helpful for the reader. 

Overall, I found this to be a great edition. Much of the time I spend researching outside material for students has been included in this text. I enjoyed the format, easier to navigate, helpful to students by providing an updated version of discussions and practice assignments, and visually more appealing. 

Reviewed by Brittany Jeye, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Worcester State University on 6/26/20

All of the main topics in a Research Methods course are covered in this textbook (e.g., scientific method, ethics, measurement, experimental design, hypothesis testing, APA style, etc.). Some of these topics are not covered as in-depth as in other... read more

All of the main topics in a Research Methods course are covered in this textbook (e.g., scientific method, ethics, measurement, experimental design, hypothesis testing, APA style, etc.). Some of these topics are not covered as in-depth as in other Research Method textbooks I have used previously, but this actually may be a positive depending on the students and course level (that is, students may only need a solid overview of certain topics without getting overwhelmed with too many details). It also gives the instructor the ability to add content as needed, which helps with flexibility in course design.

I did not note any errors or inaccurate/biasing statements in the text.

For the most part, everything was up to date. There was a good mix of classic research and newer studies presented and/or used as examples, which kept the chapters interesting, topical and relevant. I only noted the section on APA Style in the chapter “Presenting Your Research” which may need some updating to be in line with the new APA 7th edition. However, there should be only minor edits needed (the chapter itself was great overview and introduction to the main points of APA style) and it looks like they should be relatively easy to implement.

The text was very well-written and was presented at an accessible level for undergraduates new to Research Methods. Terms were well-defined with a helpful glossary at the end of the textbook.

The consistent structure of the textbook is huge positive. Each chapter begins with learning objectives and ends with bulleted key takeaways. There are also good exercises and learning activities for students at the end of each chapter. Instructors may need to add their own activities for chapters that do not go into a lot of depth (there are also instructor resources online, which may have more options available).

This is one of the biggest strengths of this textbook, in my opinion. I appreciate how each chapter is broken down into clearly defined subsections. The chapters and the subsections, in particular, are not lengthy, which is great for students’ learning. These subsections could be reorganized and used in a variety of ways to suit the needs of a particular course (or even as standalone subsections).

The topics were presented in a logical manner. As mentioned above, since the textbook is very modular, I feel that you could easily rearrange the chapters to fit your needs (for example, presenting survey design before experimental research or making the presenting your research section a standalone unit).

I downloaded the textbook as an ebook, which was very easy to use/navigate. There were no problems reading any of the text or figures/tables. I also appreciated that you could open the ebook using a variety of apps (Kindle, iBook, etc.) depending on your preference (and this is good for students who have a variety of technical needs).

There were no grammatical errors noted.

The examples were inclusive of races, ethnicity and background and there were not any examples that were culturally insensitive or offensive in any way. In future iterations of the replicability section, it may be beneficial to touch upon the “weird” phenomena in psychology research (that many studies use participants who are western, educated and from industrialized, rich and democratic countries) as a point to engage students in improving psychological practices.

I will definitely consider switching to this textbook in the future for Research Methods.

Reviewed by Alice Frye, Associate Teaching Professor, University of Massachusetts Lowell on 6/22/20

Hits all the necessary marks from ways of knowing to measurement, research designs, and presentation. Comparable in detail and content to other Research Methods texts I have used for teaching. read more

Hits all the necessary marks from ways of knowing to measurement, research designs, and presentation. Comparable in detail and content to other Research Methods texts I have used for teaching.

Correct and to the point. Complex ideas such as internal consistency reliability and discriminant validity are well handled--correct descriptions that are also succinct and articulated simply and with clear examples that are easy for a student reader to grasp.

Seems likely to have good staying power. One area that has changed quickly in the past is the usefulness of various research data bases. So it is possible that portion could become more quickly outdated, but there is no predicting that. The current descriptions are useful.

Very clearly written without being condescending, overly casual or clunky.

Excellent consistency throughout in terms of organization, language usage, level of detail and tone.

Imho this is one of the particular strengths of the text. Chapters are well divided into discrete parts, which seems likely to be a benefit in cohorts of students who are increasingly accustomed to digesting small amounts of information.

Well organized, straightforward structure that is maintained throughout.

No problems with the interface.

The grammar level is another notable strength. Ideas are articulated clearly, and with sophistication, but in a syntactically very straightforward manner.

The text isn't biased or offensive. I wish that to illustrate various points and research designs it had drawn more frequently on research studies that incorporate a specific focus on race and ethnicity.

This is a very good text. As good as any for profit text I have used to teach a research methods course, if not better.

Reviewed by Lauren Mathieu-Frasier, Adjunct Instructor, University of Indianapolis on 1/13/20

As other reviews have mentioned, this textbook provides a comprehensive look at multiple concepts for an introductory course in research methods in psychology. Some of the concepts (i.e., variables, external validity) are briefly described and... read more

As other reviews have mentioned, this textbook provides a comprehensive look at multiple concepts for an introductory course in research methods in psychology. Some of the concepts (i.e., variables, external validity) are briefly described and glossed over that it will take additional information, examples, and reinforcement from instructors in the classroom. Other sections and concepts, like ethics or reporting of research were well-described and thorough.

It appeared that the information was accurate, error-free, and unbiased.

The information is up-to-date. In the section on APA presentation, it looks like the minor adjustments to the APA Publication Manual 7th Edition would need to be included. However, this section gives a good foundation and the instructor can easily implement the changes.

Clarity rating: 4

The text is clearly written written and provides an appropriate context when terminology is used.

There aren't any issues with consistency in the textbook.

The division of smaller sections can be beneficial when reading it and assigning it to classes. The sections are clearly organized based on learning objectives.

The textbook is organized in a logical, clear manner. There may be topics that instructors choose to present in a different manner (non-experimental and survey research prior to experimental). However, this doesn't generally impact the organization and flow of the book.

While reading and utilizing the book, there weren't any navigation issues that could impact the readability of the book. Students could find this textbook easy to use.

Grammatical errors were not noted.

There weren't any issues with cultural sensitivity in the examples of studies used in the textbook.

Reviewed by Tiffany Kindratt, Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Arlington on 1/1/20

The text is comprehensive with an effective glossary of terms at the end. It would be beneficial to include additional examples and exercises for students to better understand concepts covered in Chapter II, Overview of the Scientific Method,... read more

The text is comprehensive with an effective glossary of terms at the end. It would be beneficial to include additional examples and exercises for students to better understand concepts covered in Chapter II, Overview of the Scientific Method, Chapter IV, Psychological Measurement, and Chapter XII Descriptive Statistics.

The text is accurate and there are minimal type/grammatical errors throughout. The verbiage is written in an unbiased manner consistently throughout the textbook.

The content is up-to-date, and examples can be easily updated for future versions. As a public health instructor, I would be interested in seeing examples of community-based examples in future versions. The current examples provided are relevant for undergraduate public health students as well as psychology students.

The text is written in a clear manner. The studies used can be easily understood by undergraduate students in other social science fields, such as public health. More examples and exercises using inferential statistics would be helpful for students to better grasp the concepts.

The framework for each chapter and terminology used are consistent. It is helpful that each section within each chapter begins with learning objectives and the chapter ends with key takeaways and exercises.

The text is clearly divided into sections within each chapter. When I first started reviewing this textbook, I thought each section was actually a very short chapter. I would recommend including a listing of all of the objectives covered in each chapter at the beginning to improve the modularity of the text.

Some of the topics do not follow a logical order. For example, it would be more appropriate to discuss ethics before providing the overview of the scientific method. It would be better to discuss statistics used to determine results before describing how to write manuscripts. However, the text is written in a way that that the chapters could be assigned to students in a different order without impacting the students’ comprehension of the concepts.

I did not encounter any interface issues when reviewing this text. All links worked and there were no distortions of the images or charts that may confuse the reader. There are several data tables throughout the text which are left-aligned and there is a large amount of empty white space next it. I would rearrange the text in future versions to make better use of this space.

The text contains minimal grammatical errors.

The examples are culturally relevant. I did not see any examples that may be considered culturally insensitive or offensive in any way.

As an instructor for an undergraduate public health sciences and methods course, I will consider using some of the content in this text to supplement the current textbook in the future.

Reviewed by Mickey White, Assistant Professor, East Tennessee State University on 10/23/19

The table of contents is well-formatted and comprehensive. Easy to navigate and find exactly what is needed, students would be able to quickly find needed subjects. read more

The table of contents is well-formatted and comprehensive. Easy to navigate and find exactly what is needed, students would be able to quickly find needed subjects.

Content appears to be accurate and up-to-date.

This text is useful and relevant, particularly with regard to expressing and reporting descriptive statistics and results. As APA updates, the text will be easy to edit, as the sections are separated.

Easy to read and engaging.

Chapters were laid out in a consistent manner, which allows readers to know what is coming. The subsections contained a brief overview and terminology was consistent throughout. The glossary added additional information.

Sections and subsections are delineated in a usable format.

The key takeaways were useful, including the exercises at the end of each chapter.

Reading the book online is a little difficult to navigate page-by-page, but e-pub and PDF formats are easy to navigate.

No errors noted.

Would be helpful to have a clearer exploration of cultural factors impacting research, including historical bias in assessment and research outside of research ethics.

Reviewed by Robert Michael, Assistant Professor, University of Louisiana at Lafayette on 10/14/19

Successfully spans the gamut of topics expected in a Research Methods textbook. Some topics are covered in-depth, while others are addressed only at a surface level. Instructors may therefore need to carefully arrange class material for topics in... read more

Successfully spans the gamut of topics expected in a Research Methods textbook. Some topics are covered in-depth, while others are addressed only at a surface level. Instructors may therefore need to carefully arrange class material for topics in which depth of knowledge is an important learning outcome.

The factual content was error-free, according to my reading. I did spot a few grammatical and typographical errors, but they were infrequent and minor.

Great to see nuanced—although limited—discussion of issues with Null Hypothesis Significance Testing, Reproducibility in Psychological Science, and so forth. I expect that these areas are likely to grow in future editions, perhaps supplementing or even replacing more traditional material.

Extremely easy to read with multiple examples throughout to illustrate the principles being covered. Many of these examples are "classics" that students can easily relate to. Plus, who doesn't like XKCD comics?

The textbook is structured sensibly. At times, certain authors' "voices" seemed apparent in the writing, but I suspect this variability is unlikely to be noticed by or even bothersome to the vast majority of readers.

The topics are easily divisible and seem to follow routine expectations. Instructors might find it beneficial and/or necessary to incorporate some of the statistical thinking and learning into various earlier chapters to facilitate student understanding in-the-moment, rather than trying to leave all the statistics to the end.

Sensible and easy-to-follow structure. As per "Modularity", the Statistical sections may benefit from instructors folding in such learning throughout, rather than only at the end.

Beautifully presented, crisp, easy-to-read and navigate. Caveat: I read this online, in a web-browser, on only one device. I haven't tested across multiple platforms.

High quality writing throughout. Only a few minor slip-ups that could be easily fixed.

Includes limited culturally relevant material where appropriate.

Reviewed by Matthew DeCarlo, Assistant Professor, Radford University on 6/26/19

The authors do a great job of simplifying the concepts of research methods and presenting them in a way that is understandable. There is a tradeoff between brevity and depth here. Faculty who adopt this textbook may need to spend more time in... read more

The authors do a great job of simplifying the concepts of research methods and presenting them in a way that is understandable. There is a tradeoff between brevity and depth here. Faculty who adopt this textbook may need to spend more time in class going in depth into concepts, rather than relying on the textbook for all of the information related to key concepts. The text does not cover qualitative methods in detail.

The textbook provides an accurate picture of research methods. The tone is objective and without bias.

The textbook is highly relevant and up to date. Examples are drawn from modern theories and articles.

The writing is a fantastic mix of objective and authoritative while also being approachable.

The book coheres well together. Each chapter and section are uniform.

This book fits very well within a traditional 16 week semester, covering roughly a chapter per week. One could take out specific chapters and assign them individually if research methods is taught in a different way from a standard research textbook.

Content is very well organized. The table of contents is easy to navigate and each chapter is presented in a clear and consistent manner. The use of a two-tier table of contents is particularly helpful.

Standard pressbooks interface, which is great. Uses all of the standard components of Pressbooks well, though the lack of H5P and interactive content is a drawback.

I did not notice any grammar errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 2

The book does not deal with cultural competence and humility in the research process. Integration of action research and decolonization perspectives would be helpful.

Reviewed by Christopher Garris, Associate Professor, Metropolitan State University of Denver on 5/24/19

Most content areas in this textbook were covered appropriately extensively. Notably, this textbook included some content that is commonly missing in other textbooks (e.g. presenting your research). There were some areas where more elaboration... read more

Most content areas in this textbook were covered appropriately extensively. Notably, this textbook included some content that is commonly missing in other textbooks (e.g. presenting your research). There were some areas where more elaboration and more examples were needed. For example, the section covering measurement validities included all the important concepts, but needed more guidance for student comprehension. Also, the beginning chapters on 'common sense' reasoning and pseudoscience seemed a little too brief.

Overall, this textbook appeared to be free from glaring errors. There were a couple of instances of concern, but were not errors, per se. For example, the cut-off for Cronbach's alpha was stated definitively at .80, while this value likely would be debated among researchers.

This textbook was presented in such a way that seemed protect it from becoming obsolete within the next few years. This is important for continued, consistent use of the book. The authors have revised this book, and those revisions are clearly summarized in the text. Importantly, the APA section of the textbook appears to be up-to-date. Also, the use of QR codes throughout the text is a nice touch that students may appreciate.

Connected to comprehensiveness, there are some important content areas that I felt were lacking in elaboration and examples (e.g. testing the validity of measurement; introduction of experimental design), which inhibits clarity. Overall, however, the topics seemed to be presented in a straightforward, accessible manner. The textbook includes links to informative videos and walk-throughs where appropriate, which seem to be potentially beneficial for student comprehension. The textbook includes tools designed to aid learning, namely "Key Takeaways" and "Exercises" sections at the end of most modules, but not all. "Key Takeaways" seemed valuable, as they were a nice bookend to the learning objectives stated at the beginning of each module. "Exercises" did not appear to be as valuable, especially for the less-motivated student. On their face, these seemed to be more designed for instructors to use as class activities/active learning. Lastly, many modules of the textbook were text-heavy and visually unappealing. While this is superficial, the inclusion of additional graphics, example boxes, or figures in these text-heavy modules might be beneficial.

The textbook appeared to be internally consistent with its approach and use of terminology.

The textbook had a tendency to 'throw out' big concepts very briefly in earlier modules (e.g. sampling, experimental/non-experimental design), and then cover them in more detail in later modules. This would have been less problematic if the text would explicitly inform the student that these concepts would be elaborated upon later. Beyond this issue, the textbook seems to lend itself to being divided up and used on module-by-module basis.

The organization of the chapters did not make intuitive sense to me. The fact that correlation followed experimental research, and that descriptive research was the second-to-last module in the sequence was confusing. That said, textbook is written in such a way that an instructor easily assign the modules in the order that works best for their class.

Overall, the interface worked smoothly and there were few technical issues. Where there were issues (e.g. inconsistent spacing between lines and words), they were negligible.

The text seemed to be free from glaring grammatical problems.

Because this is a methodology textbook, it does not lend itself to too much cultural criticism. That said, the book did not rely on overly controversial examples, but also didn't shy away from important cultural topics (e.g. gender stereotypes, vaccines).

Reviewed by Michel Heijnen, Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina Wilmington on 3/27/18

The book covers all areas related to research methods, not only for the field of psychology, but also to other related fields like exercise science. Topics include ethics, developing a research questions, experimental designs, non-experimental... read more

The book covers all areas related to research methods, not only for the field of psychology, but also to other related fields like exercise science. Topics include ethics, developing a research questions, experimental designs, non-experimental designs, and basic statistics, making this book a great resource for undergraduate research methods classes.

Reviewed content is accurate and seems free of any personal bias.

The topic of research methods in general is not expected to change quickly. It is not expected that this text will become obsolete in the near future. Furthermore, for both the field of psychology as well as other related fields, the examples will continue to have an application to explain certain concepts and will not be outdated soon, even with new research emerging every day.

The text is written so an undergraduate student should be able to understand the concepts. The examples provided in the text greatly contribute to the understanding of the topics and the proposed exercises at the end of each chapter will further apply the knowledge.

The layout and writing style are consistent throughout the text.

Layout of the text is clear, with multiple subsection within each chapter. Each chapter can easily be split into multiple subsection to assign to students. No evidence of self-refers was observed, and individual chapters could be assigned to students without needed to read all preceding chapters. For example, Chapter 4 may not be particularly useful to students outside of psychology, but an instructor can easily reorganize the text and skip this chapter while students can still understand following chapters.

Topics are addressed in a logical manner. Overall, an introduction to research is provided first (including ethics to research), which is followed by different types of research, and concludes with types of analysis.

No images or tables are distorted, making the text easy to read.

No grammatical errors observed in text.

Text is not offensive and does not appear to be culturally insensitive.

I believe that this book is a great resource and, as mentioned previously, can be used for a wider audience than just psychology as the basics of research methods can be applied to various fields, including exercise science.

Reviewed by Chris Koch, Professor of Psychology, George Fox University on 3/27/18

All appropriate areas and topics are covered in the text. In that sense, this book is equivalent to other top texts dealing with research methods in psychology. The appeal of this book is the brevity and clarity. Therefore, some may find that,... read more

All appropriate areas and topics are covered in the text. In that sense, this book is equivalent to other top texts dealing with research methods in psychology. The appeal of this book is the brevity and clarity. Therefore, some may find that, although the topics are covered, topics may not be covered as thoroughly they might like. Overall, the coverage is solid for an introductory course in research methods.

In terms of presentation, this book could be more comprehensive. Each chapter does start with a set of learning objectives and ends with "takeaways" and a short set of exercises. However, it lacks detailed chapter outlines, summaries, and glossaries. Furthermore, an index does not accompany the text.

I found the book to be accurate with content being fairly presented. There was no underlying bias throughout the book.

This is an introductory text for research methods. The basics of research methods have been consistent for some time. The examples used in the text fit the concepts well. Therefore, it should not be quickly dated. It is organized in such a way that sections could be easily modified with more current examples as needed.

The text is easy to read. It is succinct yet engaging. Examples are clear and terminology is adequately defined.

New terms and concepts are dealt with chapter by chapter. However, those things which go across chapters are consistently presented.

The material for each chapter is presented in subsections with each subsection being tied to a particular learning objective. It is possible to use the book by subsection instead of by chapter. In fact, I did that during class by discussing the majority of one chapter, discussing another chapter, and then covering what I previously skipped,

In general, the book follows a "traditional" organization, matching the organization of many competing books. As mentioned in regard to modularity, I did not follow the organization of the book exactly as it was laid out. This may not necessarily reflect poorly on the book, however, since I have never followed the order of any research methods book. My three exams covered chapter 1 through 4, chapters 5, 6, part of 8, and chapters 7, the remainder of 8, 9, and 10. Once we collected data I covered chapters 11 through 13.

Interface rating: 3

The text and images are clear and distortion free. The text is available in several formats including epub, pdf, mobi, odt, and wxr. Unfortunately, the electronic format is not taken full advantage of. The text could be more interactive. As it is, it is just text and images. Therefore, the interface could be improved.

The book appeared to be well written and edited.

I did not find anything in the book that was culturally insensitive or offensive. However, more examples of cross-cultural research could be included.

I was, honestly, surprised by how much I liked the text. The material was presented in easy to follow format that is consistent with how I think about research methods. That made the text extremely easy to use. Students also thought the book was highly accessible Each chapter was relatively short but informative and easy to read.

Reviewed by Kevin White, Assistant Professor, East Carolina University on 2/1/18

This book covers all relevant topics for an introduction to research methods course in the social sciences, including measurement, sampling, basic research design, and ethics. The chapters were long enough to be somewhat comprehensive, but short... read more

This book covers all relevant topics for an introduction to research methods course in the social sciences, including measurement, sampling, basic research design, and ethics. The chapters were long enough to be somewhat comprehensive, but short enough to be digestible for students in an introductory-level class. Student reviews of the book have so far been very positive. The only section of the text for which more detail may be helpful is 2.3 (Reviewing the Research Literature), in which more specific instructions related to literature searches may be helpful to students.

I did not notice any issues related to accuracy. Content appeared to be accurate, error-free, and unbiased.

One advantage of this book is that it is relevant to other applied fields outside of psychology (e.g., social work, counseling, etc.). Also, the exercises at the end of chapter sections are helpful.

The clarity of the text provides students with succinct definitions for research-related concepts, without unnecessary discipline-specific jargon. One suggestion for future editions would be to make the distinctions between different types of non-experimental research a bit more clear for students in introductory classes (e.g., "Correlational Research" in Section 7.2).

Formatting and terminology was consistent throughout this text.

A nice feature of this book is that instructors can select individual sections within chapters, or even jump between sections within chapters. For example, Section 1.4 may not fit for a class that is less clinically-oriented in nature.

The flow of the text was appropriate, with ethics close to the beginning of the book (and an entire chapter devoted to it), and descriptive/inferential statistics at the end.

I did not notice any problems related to interface. I had no trouble accessing or reading the text, and the images were clear.

The text contained no discernible grammatical errors.

The book does not appear to be culturally insensitive in any discernible way, and explicitly addresses prejudice in research (e.g., Section 5.2). However, I think that continuing to add more examples that relate to specific marginalized groups would help improve the text (and especially exercises).

Overall, this book is very useful for an introductory research methods course in psychology or social work, and I highly recommend.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Do, Instructor, Virginia Commonwealth University on 2/1/18

Although this textbook does provide good information regarding introductory concepts necessary for the understanding of correlational designs, and is presented in a logical order. It does not, however, cover qualitative methodologies, or research... read more

Although this textbook does provide good information regarding introductory concepts necessary for the understanding of correlational designs, and is presented in a logical order. It does not, however, cover qualitative methodologies, or research ethics as it relates to other countries outside of the US.

There does not seem to be any errors within the text.

Since this textbook covers a topic that is unlikely to change over the years and it's content is up-to-date, it remains relevant to the field.

The textbook is written at an appropriate level for undergraduate students and is useful in that it does explain important terminology.

There does not seem to be any major inconsistencies within the text.

Overall, the text is very well organized - it is separated into chapters that are divided up into modules and within each module, there are clear learning objectives. It is also helpful that the textbook includes useful exercises for students to practice what they've read about from the text.

The topics covered by this textbook are presented in an order that is logical. The writing is clear and the examples are very useful. However, more information could be provided in some of the chapters and it would be useful to include a table of contents that links to the different chapters within the PDF copy, for reader's ease in navigation when looking for specific terms and/or topics.

Overall, the PDF copy of the textbook made it easy to read; however, there did seem to be a few links that were missing. Additionally, it would be helpful to have some of the graphs printed in color to help with ease of following explanations provided by the text. The inclusion of a table of contents would also be useful for greater ease with navigation.

There does not seem to be any grammatical errors in the textbook. Also, the textbook is written in a clear way, and the information flows nicely.

This textbook focuses primarily on examples from the United States. It does not seem to be culturally insensitive or offensive in anyway and I liked that it included content regarding the avoidance of biased language (chapter 11).

This textbook makes the material very accessible, and it is easy to read/follow examples.

Reviewed by Eric Lindsey, Professor, Penn State University Berks Campus on 2/1/18

The content of the Research Methods in Psychology textbook was very thorough and covered what I would consider to be the important concepts and issues pertaining to research methods. I would judge that the textbook has a comparable coverage of... read more

The content of the Research Methods in Psychology textbook was very thorough and covered what I would consider to be the important concepts and issues pertaining to research methods. I would judge that the textbook has a comparable coverage of information to other textbooks I have reviewed, including the current textbook I am using. The range of scholarly sources included in the textbook was good, with an appropriate balance between older and classic research examples and newer more cutting edge research information. Overall, the textbook provides substantive coverage of the science of conducting research in the field of psychology, supported by good examples, and thoughtful questions.

The textbook adopts a coherent and student-friendly format, and offers a precise introduction to psychological research methodology that includes consideration of a broad range of qualitative and quantitative methods to help students identify and evaluate the best approach for their research needs. The textbook offers a detailed review of the way that psychological researchers approach their craft. The author guides the reader through all aspects of the research process including formulating objectives, choosing research methods, securing research participants, as well as advice on how to effectively collect, analyze and interpret data and disseminate those findings to others through a variety of presentation and publication venues. The textbook offers relevant supplemental information in textboxes that is highly relevant to the material in the accompanying text and should prove helpful to learners. Likewise the graphics and figures that are included are highly relevant and clearly linked to the material presented in the text. The information covered by the textbook reflects an accurate summary of current techniques and methods used in research in the field of psychology. The presentation of information addresses the pros and cons of different research strategies in an objective and evenhanded way.

The range of scholarly sources included in the textbook was good, with an appropriate balance between older, classic research evidence and newer, cutting edge research. Overall, the textbook provides substantive coverage of the science on most topics in research methods of psychology, supported by good case studies, and thoughtful questions. The book is generally up to date, with adequate coverage of basic data collection methods and statistical techniques. Likewise the review of APA style guidelines is reflects the current manual and I like the way the author summarizes changes from the older version of the APA manual. The organization of the textbook does appear to lend itself to editing and adding new information with updates in the future.

I found the textbook chapters to be well written, in a straightforward yet conversational manner. It gives the reader an impression of being taught by a knowledgeable yet approachable expert. The writing style gives the learner a feeling of being guided through the lessons and supported in a very conversational approach. The experience of reading the textbook is less like being taught and more like a colleague sharing information. Furthermore, the style keeps the reader engaged but doesn't detract from its educational purpose. I also appreciate that the writing is appropriately concise. No explanations are so wordy as to overwhelm or lull the reader to sleep, but at the same time the information is not so vague that the reader can't understand the point at all.

The book’s main aim is to enable students to develop their own skills as researchers, so they can generate and advance common knowledge on a variety of psychological topics. The book achieves this objective by introducing its readers, step-by-step, to psychological research design, while maintaining an excellent balance between substance and attention grabbing examples that is uncommon in other research methods textbooks. Its accessible language and easy-to-follow structure and examples lend themselves to encouraging readers to move away from the mere memorization of facts, formulas and techniques towards a more critical evaluation of their own ideas and work – both inside and outside the classroom. The content of the chapters have a very good flow that help the reader to connect information in a progressive manner as they proceed through the textbook.

Each chapter goes into adequate depth in reviewing both past and current research related to the topic that it covers for an undergraduate textbook on research methods in psychology. The information within each chapter flows well from point-to-point, so that the reader comes away feeling like there is a progression in the information presented. The only limitation that I see is that I felt the author could do a little more to let the reader know how information is connected from chapter to chapter. Rather than just drawing the reader’s attention to things that were mentioned in previous chapters, it would be nice to have brief comments about how issues in one chapter relate to topics covered in previous chapters.

In my opinion the chapters are arranged in easily digestible units that are manageable in 30-40 minute reading sessions. In fact, the author designed the chapters of the textbook in a way to make it easy to chunk information, and start and stop to easily pick up where one leaves off from one reading session to another. I also found the flow of information to be appropriate, with chapters containing just the right amount of detail for use in my introductory course in research methods in psychology.

The book is organized into thirteen chapters. The order of the chapters offers a logical progression from a broad overview of information about the principles and theory behind research in psychology, to more specific issues concerning the techniques and mechanics of conducting research. Each chapter ends with a summary of key takeaways from the chapter and exercises that do more than ask for content regurgitation. I find the organization of the textbook to be effective, and matches my approach to the course very well. I would not make any changes to the overall format with the exception of moving chapter 11 on presenting research to the end of the textbook, after the chapters on statistical analysis and interpretation.

I found the quality of the appearance of the textbook to be very good. The textbook features appropriate text and section/header font sizes that allow for an adequate zooming level to read large or smalls sections of text, that will give readers flexibility to match their personal preference. There are learning objectives at the start of each chapter to help students know what to expect. Key terms are highlighted in a separate color that are easily distinguishable in the body of the page. There are very useful visuals in every chapter, including tables, figures, and graphs. Relevant supplemental information is also highlighted in well formatted text boxes that are color coded to indicate what type of information is included. My only criticism is that the photographs included in the text are of low quality, and there are so few in the textbook that I feel it would have been better to just leave them out.

I found no grammatical errors in my review of the textbook. The textbook is generally well written, and the style of writing is at a level that is appropriate for an undergraduate class.

Although the textbook contains no instances of presenting information that is cultural insensitive or offensive, it does not offer an culturally inclusive review of information pertaining to research methods in psychology. I found no inclusion of examples of research conducting with non European American samples included in the summary of studies. Likewise the authors do place much attention on the issue of cultural sensitivity when conducing research. If there is one major weakness of the textbook I would say it is in this area, but based on my experience it is not an uncommon characteristic of textbooks on research methods in psychology.

Reviewed by zehra peynircioglu, Professor, American University on 2/1/18

Short and sweet in most areas. Covers the basic concepts, not very comprehensively but definitely adequately so for a general beginning-level research methods course. For instance, I would liked to have seen a "separate" chapter on correlational... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

Short and sweet in most areas. Covers the basic concepts, not very comprehensively but definitely adequately so for a general beginning-level research methods course. For instance, I would liked to have seen a "separate" chapter on correlational research (there is one on single subject research and one on survey research), a discussion of the importance of providing a theoretical rationale for "getting an idea" (most students are fine with finding interesting and feasible project ideas but cannot give a theoretical rationale) before or after Chapter 4 on Theory, or a chapter on neuroscientific methods, which are becoming more and more popular. Nevertheless, it touches on most traditional areas that are in other books.

I did not find any errors or biases

This is one area where there is not much danger of going obsolete any time soon. The examples might need to be updated periodically (my students tend to not like dated materials, however relevant), but that should be easy.

Very clear and accessible prose. Despite the brevity, the concepts are put forth quite clearly. I like the "not much fluff" mentality. There is also adequate explanations of jargon and technical terminology.

I could not find any inconsistencies. The style and exposition frameworks are also quite consistent.

Yes, the modularity is fine. The chapters follow a logical pattern, so there should not be too much of a need for jumping around. And even if jumping around is needed depending on teaching style, the sections are solid in terms of being able to stand alone (or as an accompaniment to lectures).

Yes, the contents is ordered logically and the high modularity helps with any reorganization that an instructor may favor. In my case, for instance, Ch. 1 is fine, but I would skip it because it's mostly a repetition of what most introductory psychology books also say. I would also discuss non-experimental methods before going into experimental design. But such changes are easy to do, and if someone followed the book's own organization, there would also be a logical flow.

As far as I could see, the text is free of significant interface issues, at least in the pdf version

I could not find any errors.

As far as I could see, the book was culturally relevant.

I loved the short and sweet learning objectives, key takeaway sections, and the exercises. They are not overwhelming and can be used in class discussions, too.

Reviewed by George Woodbury, Graduate Student, Miami University, Ohio on 6/20/17

This text covers the typical areas for an undergraduate psychology course in research design. There is no table of contents included with the downloadable version, although there is a table of contents on the website (which excludes sub-sections... read more

This text covers the typical areas for an undergraduate psychology course in research design. There is no table of contents included with the downloadable version, although there is a table of contents on the website (which excludes sub-sections of chapters). The sections on statistics are not extensive enough to be useful in and of themselves, but they are useful for transitions to a follow-up statistics course. There does not seem to be a glossary of terms, which made it difficult at times for my read through and I assume later for students who decide to print the text. The text is comprehensive without being wordy or tedious.

Relatively minor errors; There does not seem to be explicit cultural or methodological bias in the text.

The content is up-to-date, and examples from the psychology literature are generally within the last 25 years. Barring extensive restructuring in the fundamentals of methodology and design in psychology, any updates will be very easy to implement.

Text will be very clear and easy to read for students fluent in English. There is little jargon/technical terminology used, and the vocabulary that is provided in the text is contemporary

There do not seem to be obvious shifts in the terminology or the framework. The text is internally consistent in that regard.

The text is well divided into chapter and subsections. Each chapter is relatively self-contained, so there are little issues with referring to past material that may have been skipped. The learning objectives at the beginning of the chapter are very useful. Blocks of text are well divided with headings.

As mentioned above, the topics of the text follow the well-established trajectory of undergraduate psychology courses. This makes it very logical and clear.

The lack of a good table of contents made it difficult to navigate the text for my read through. There were links to an outside photo-hosting website (flickr) for some of the stock photos, which contained the photos of the original creators of the photos. This may be distracting or confusing to readers. However, the hyperlinks in general helped with navigation with the PDF.

No more grammatical errors than a standard, edited textbook.

Very few examples explicitly include other races, ethnicities, or backgrounds, however the examples seem to intentionally avoid cultural bias. Overall, the writing seems to be appropriately focused on avoiding culturally insensitive or offensive content.

After having examined several textbooks on research design and methodology related to psychology, this book stands out as superior.

Reviewed by Angela Curl, Assistant Professor, Miami University (Ohio) on 6/20/17

"Research Methods in Psychology" covers most research method topics comprehensively. The author does an excellent job explaining main concepts. The chapter on causation is very detailed and well-written as well as the chapter on research ethics.... read more

"Research Methods in Psychology" covers most research method topics comprehensively. The author does an excellent job explaining main concepts. The chapter on causation is very detailed and well-written as well as the chapter on research ethics. However, the explanations of data analysis seem to address upper level students rather than beginners. For example, in the “Describing Statistical Relationships” chapter, the author does not give detailed enough explanations for key terms. A reader who is not versed in research terminology, in my opinion, would struggle to understand the process. While most topics are covered, there are some large gaps. For example, this textbook has very little content related to qualitative research methods (five pages).

The content appears to be accurate and unbias.

The majority of the content will not become obsolete within a short time period-- many of the information can be used for the coming years, as the information provided is, overall, general in nature. The notably exceptions are the content on APA Code of Ethics and the APA Publication Manual, which both rely heavily on outdated versions, which limits the usefulness of these sections. In addition, it would be helpful to incorporate research studies that have been published after 2011.

The majority of the text is clear, with content that is easy for undergraduate students to read and understand. The key points included in the chapters are helpful, but some chapters seem to be missing key points (i.e., the key points do not accurately represent the overall chapter).

The text seems to be internally consistent in its terminology and organization.

Each chapter is broken into subsections that can be used alone. For example, section 5.2 covers reliability and validity of measurement. This could be extremely helpful for educators to select specific content for assigned readings.

The topics are presented in a logical matter for the most part. However, the PDF version of the book does not include a table of contents, and none of the formats has a glossary or index. This can make it difficult to quickly navigate to specific topics or terms, especially when explanations do not appear where expected. For example, the definitions of independent and dependent variables is provided under the heading “Correlation Does Not Imply Causation” (p. 22).

The text is consistent but needs more visual representations throughout the book, rather than heavily in some chapters and none at all in other chapters. Similarly, the text within the chapters is not easily readable due to the large sections of text with little to no graphics or breaks.

The interface of the text is adequate. However, the formatting of the PDF is sometimes weak. For example, the textbook has a number of pages with large blank spaces and other pages are taken up with large photos or graphics. The number of pages (and cost of printing) could have been reduced, or more graphics added to maximize utility.

I found no grammatical errors.

Text appears to be culturally sensitive. I appreciated the inclusion of the content about avoiding biased language (chapter 11).

Instructors who adopt this book would likely benefit from either selecting certain chapters/modules and/or integrating multiple texts together to address the shortcomings of this text. Further, the sole focus on psychology limits the use of this textbook for introductory research methods for other disciplines (e.g., social work, sociology).

Reviewed by Pramit Nadpara, Assistant Professor, Virginia Commonwealth University on 4/11/17

The text book provides good information in certain areas, while not comprehensive information in other areas. The text provides practical information, especially the section on survey development was good. Additional information on sampling... read more

The text book provides good information in certain areas, while not comprehensive information in other areas. The text provides practical information, especially the section on survey development was good. Additional information on sampling strategies would have been beneficial for the readers.

There are no errors.

Research method is a common topic and the fundamentals of it will not change over the years. Therefore, the book is relevant and will not become obsolete.

Clarity rating: 3

The text in the book is clear. Certain aspects of the text could have been presented more clearly. For example, the section on main effects and interactions are some concepts that students may have difficulty understanding. Those areas could be explained more clearly with an example.

Consistency rating: 3

Graphs in the book lacks titles and variable names. Also, the format of chapter title page needs to be consistent.

At times there were related topics spread across several chapters. This could be corrected for a better read by the audience..

The book text is very clear, and the flow from one topic to the next was adequate. However, having a outline would help the reader.

The PDF copy of the book was a easy read. There were few links that were missing though.

There were no grammatical errors.

The text is not offensive and examples in it are mostly based on historical US based experiments.

I would start of by saying that I am a supporter of the Open Textbook concept. In this day and age, there are a variety of Research Methods book/text available on the market. While this book covers research methods basics, it cannot be recommended in its current form as an acceptable alternative to the standard text. Modifications to the text as recommended by myself and other reviewers might improve the quality of this book in the future.

Reviewed by Meghan Babcock, Instructor, University of Texas at Arlington on 4/11/17

This text includes all important areas that are featured in other Research Methods textbooks and are presented in a logical order. The text includes great examples and provides the references which can be assigned as supplemental readings. In... read more

This text includes all important areas that are featured in other Research Methods textbooks and are presented in a logical order. The text includes great examples and provides the references which can be assigned as supplemental readings. In addition, the chapters end with exercises that can be completed in class or as part of a laboratory assignment. This text would be a great addition to a Research Methods course or an Introductory Statistics course for Psychology majors.

The content is accurate. I did not find any errors and the material is unbiased.

Yes - the content is up to date and would be easy to update if/when necessary.

The text is written at an appropriate level for undergraduate students and explains important terminology. The research studies that the author references are ones that undergraduate psychology majors should be familiar with. The only section that was questionable to me was that on multiple regression in section 8.3 (Complex Correlational Designs). I am unaware of other introductory Research Methods textbooks that cover this analysis, especially without describing simple regression first.

The text is consistent in terms of terminology. The framework is also consistent - the chapters begin with Learning Objectives and ends with Key Takeaways and Exercises.

The text is divisible into smaller reading sections - possibly too many. The sections are brief, and in some instances too brief (e.g., the section on qualitative research). I think that the section headers are helpful for instructors who plan on using this text in conjunction with another text in their course.

The topics were presented in a logical fashion and are similar to other published Research Methods texts. The writing is very clear and great examples are provided. I think that some of the sections are rather brief and more information and examples could be provided.

I did not see any interface issues. All of the links worked properly and the tables and figures were accurate and free of errors. I particularly liked the figures in section 5.2 on reliability of measurement.

There are three comments that I have about the interface, however. First, I was expecting the keywords in blue font to be linked to a glossary, but they were not. I would have appreciated this feature. Second, I read this text as a PDF on an iPad and this version lacking was the Table of Contents (TOC) feature. Although I was able to view the TOC in different versions, I would have appreciated it in the PDF version. Also, it would be nice if the TOC was clickable (i.e., you could click on a section and it automatically directed you to that section). Third, I think the reader of this text would benefit from a glossary at the end of each chapter and/or an index at the end of the text. The "Key Takeaways" sections at the end of each chapter were helpful, but I think that a glossary would be a nice addition as well.

I did not notice any grammatical errors of any kind. The text was easy to read and I think that undergraduate students would agree.

The text was not insensitive or offensive to any races, ethnicities, or backgrounds. I appreciated the section on avoiding biased language when writing manuscripts (e.g., using 'children with learning disabilities' instead of 'special children' or using 'African American' instead of 'minority').

I think that this text would be a nice addition to a Research Methods & Statistics course in psychology. There are some sections that I found particularly helpful: (1) 2.2 and 2.3 - the author gives detailed information about generating research questions and reviewing the literature; (2) 9.2 - this section focuses on constructing survey questionnaires; (3) 11.2 and 11.3 - the author talks about writing a research report and about presenting at conferences. These sections will be great additions to an undergraduate Research Methods course. The brief introduction to APA style was also helpful, but should be supplemented with the most recent APA style manual.

Reviewed by Shannon Layman, Lecturer, University of Texas at Arlington on 4/11/17

The sections in this textbook are overall more brief than in previous Methods texts that I have used. Sometimes this brevity is helpful in terms of getting to the point of the text and moving on. In other cases, some topics could use a bit more... read more

The sections in this textbook are overall more brief than in previous Methods texts that I have used. Sometimes this brevity is helpful in terms of getting to the point of the text and moving on. In other cases, some topics could use a bit more detail to establish a better foundation of the content before moving on to examples and/or the next topic.

I did not find any incorrect information or gross language issues.

Basic statistical and/or methodological texts tend to stay current and up-to-date because the topics in this field have not changed over the decades. Any updated methodologies would be found in a more advanced methods text.

The text is very clear and the ideas are easy to follow/ presented in a logical manner. The most helpful thing about this textbook is that the author arrives at the point of the topic very quickly. Another helpful point about this textbook is the relevancy of the examples used. The examples appear to be accessible to a wide audience and do not require specialization or previous knowledge of other fields of psychology.

I feel this text is very consistent throughout. The ideas build on each other and no terms are discussed in later chapters without being established in previous chapters.

Each chapter had multiple subsections which would allow for smaller reading sections throughout the course. The amount of content in each section and chapter appeared to be less than what I have encountered in other Methods texts.

The organization of the topics in this textbook follows the same or similar organization that I see in other textbooks. As I mentioned previously, the ideas build very well throughout the text.

I did not find any issues with navigation or distortion of the figures in the text.

There were not any obvious and/or egregious grammatical errors that I encountered in this text.

This topic is not really an issue with a Methods textbook as the topics are more so conceptual as opposed to topical. That being said, I did not see an issue with any examples used.

I have no other comments than what I addressed previously.

Reviewed by Sarah Allred, Associate Professor, Rutgers University, Camden on 2/8/17

Mixed. For some topics, there is more (and more practical) information than in most textbooks. I appreciated the very practical advice to students about how to plot data (in statistics chapters). Similarly, there is practical advice about how... read more

Mixed. For some topics, there is more (and more practical) information than in most textbooks. I appreciated the very practical advice to students about how to plot data (in statistics chapters). Similarly, there is practical advice about how to comply with ethical guidelines. The section on item development in surveys was very good.

On the other hand, there is far too little information about some subjects. For example, independent and dependent variables are introduced in passing in an early chapter and then referred to only much later in the text. In my experience, students have a surprisingly difficult time grasping this concept. Another important example is sampling; I would have preferred much more information on types of samples and sampling techniques, and the problems that arise from poor sampling. A third example is the introduction to basic experimental design. Variables, measurement, validity, and reliability are all introduced in one chapter.

I did not see an index or glossary.

I found no errors.

The fundamentals of research methods do not change much. Given the current replication crisis in psychology, it might be helpful to have something about replicability.

Mixed. The text itself is spare and clear. The style of the book is to explain a concept in very few words. There are some excellent aspects of this, but on the other hand, there are some concepts that students have a very difficult time undersatnding if they are not embedded in concrete examples. For example, the section on main effects and interactions shows bar graphs of interactions, but this is presented without variable names or axis titles, and separate from any specific experiment.

Sometimes the chapter stucture is laid out on the title page, and other times it is not. Some graphs lack titles and variable names.

The chapters can be stand alone, but sometimes I found conceptually similar pieces spread across several chapters, and conceptually different pieces in the same chapters.

The individual sentences and paragraphs are always very clear. However, I felt that more tables/outlines of major concepts would have been helpful. For example, perhaps a flow chart of different kinds of experimental designs would be useful. (See section on comprehensiveness for more about organization).

The flow from one topic to the next was adequate.

I read the pdf. Perhaps the interface is more pleasant on other devices, but I found the different formats and fonts in image/captions/main text/figure labels distracting. Many if the instances of apparently hyperlinked (blue) text to do not link to anything.

I found no grammatical errors, and prose is standard academic English.

Like most psychology textbooks available in the US, examples are focused on important experiments in US history.

I really wanted to be happy with this text. I am a supporter of the Open Textbook concept, and I wanted to find this book an acceptable alternative to the variety of Research Methods texts I’ve used. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this book as superior in quality.

Reviewed by Joel Malin, Assistant Professor, Miami University on 8/21/16

This textbook covers all or nearly all of what I believe are important topics to provide an introduction to research methods in psychology. One minor issue is that the pdf version, which I reviewed, does not include an index or a glossary. As... read more

This textbook covers all or nearly all of what I believe are important topics to provide an introduction to research methods in psychology. One minor issue is that the pdf version, which I reviewed, does not include an index or a glossary. As such, it may be difficult for readers to zero in on material that they need, and/or to get a full sense of what will be covered and in what order.

I did not notice errors.

The book provides a solid overview of key issues related to introductory research methods, many of which are nearly timeless.

The writing is clear and accessible. It was easy and pleasing to read.

Terms are clearly defined and build upon each other as the book progresses.

I believe the text is organized in such a way that it could be easily divided into smaller sections.

The order in which material is presented seems to be well thought out and sensible.

I did not notice any issues with the interface. I reviewed the pdf version and thought the images were very helpful.

The book is written in a culturally relevant manner.

Reviewed by Abbey Dvorak, Assistant Professor, University of Kansas on 8/21/16

The text includes basic, essential information needed for students in an introductory research methods course. In addition, the text includes three chapters (i.e., research ethics, theory, and APA style) that are typically absent from or... read more

The text includes basic, essential information needed for students in an introductory research methods course. In addition, the text includes three chapters (i.e., research ethics, theory, and APA style) that are typically absent from or inadequately covered in similar texts. However, I did have some areas of concern regarding the coverage of qualitative and mixed methods approaches, and nonparametric tests. Although the author advocates for the research question to guide the choice of approach and design, minimal attention is given to the various qualitative designs (e.g., phenomenology, narrative, participatory action, etc.) beyond grounded theory and case studies, with no mention of the different types of mixed methods designs (e.g., concurrent, explanatory, exploratory) that are prevalent today. In addition, common nonparametric tests (e.g., Wilcoxon, Mann-Whitney, etc.) and parametric tests for categorical data (e.g., chi-square, Fisher’s exact, etc.) are not mentioned.

The text overall is accurate and free of errors. I noticed in the qualitative research sub-section, the author describes qualitative research in general, but does not mention common practices associated with qualitative research, such as transcribing interviews, coding data (e.g., different approaches to coding, different types of codes), and data analysis procedures. The information that is included appears accurate.

The text appears up-to-date and includes basic research information and classic examples that rarely change, which may allow the text to be used for many years. However, the author may want to add information about mixed methods research, a growing research approach, in order for the text to stay relevant across time.

The text includes clear, accessible, straightforward language with minimal jargon. When the author introduces a new term, the term is immediately defined and described. The author also provides interesting examples to clarify and expand understanding of terms and concepts throughout the text.

The text is internally consistent and uses similar language and vocabulary throughout. The author uses real-life examples across chapters in order to provide depth and insight into the information. In addition, the vocabulary, concepts, and organization are consistent with other research methods textbooks.

The modules are short, concise, and manageable for students; the material within each module is logically focused and related to each other. I may move the modules and the sub-topics within them into a slightly different order for my class, and add the information mentioned above, but overall, this is very good.

The author presents topics and structures chapters in a logical and organized manner. The epub and online version do not include page numbers in the text, but the pdf does; this may be confusing when referencing the text or answering student questions. The book ends somewhat abruptly after the chapter on inferential statistics; the text may benefit from a concluding chapter to bring everything together, perhaps with a culminating example that walks the reader through creating the research question, choosing a research approach/design, etc., all the way to writing the research report.

I used and compared the pdf, epub, and online versions of the text. The epub and online versions include a clickable table of contents, but the pdf does not. The table format is inconsistent across the three versions; in the epub version (viewed through ibooks), the table data does not always line up correctly, making it difficult to interpret quickly. In the pdf and online versions, the table format looks different, but the data are lined up. No index made it difficult to quickly find areas of interest in the text; however, I could use the Find/Search functions in all three versions to search and find needed items.

As I read through this text, I did not detect any glaring grammatical errors. Overall, I think the text is written quite well in a style that is accessible to students.

The author uses inclusive, person-first language, and the text does not seem to be offensive or insensitive. As I read, I did notice that topics such as diversity and cultural competency are absent.

I enjoyed reading this text and am very excited to have a free research methods text for my students that I may supplement as needed. I wish there was a test question bank and/or flashcards for my students to help them study, but perhaps that could be added in the future. Overall, this is a great resource!

Reviewed by Karen Pikula, Psychology Instructor PhD, Central Lakes College on 1/7/16

The text covers all the areas and ideas of the subject of research methods in psychology for the learner that is just entering the field. The authors cover all of the content of an introductory research methods textbook and use exemplary examples... read more

The text covers all the areas and ideas of the subject of research methods in psychology for the learner that is just entering the field. The authors cover all of the content of an introductory research methods textbook and use exemplary examples that make those concepts relevent to a beginning researcher. As the authors state, the material is presented in such a manner as to encourage learners to not only be effective consumers of current research but also engage as critical thinkers in the many diverse situations one encounters in everyday life.

The content is accurate, error free, and unbiased. It explains both quantiative and qualitative methods in an unbiased manner. It is a bit slim on qualitative. It would be nice to have a bit more information on, for example, creating interview questions, coding, and qualitative data anaylisis.

The text is up to date, having just been revised. This revision was authored by Rajiv Jhangiani (Capilano University, North Vancouver) and includes the addition of a table of contents and cover page that the original text did not have, changes to Chapter 3 (Research Ethics) to include a contemporary example of an ethical breach and to reflect Canadian ethical guidelines and privacy laws, additional information regarding online data collection in Chapter 9 (Survey Research). Jhangiani has correcte of errors in the text and formulae, as well as changing spelling from US to Canadian conventions. The text is also now available in a inexpensive hard copy which students can purchase online or college bookstores can stock. This makes the text current and updates should be minimal.

The text is very easy to read and also very interesting as the authors supplement content with amazing real life examples.

The text is internally consistent in terms of terminology and framework.

This text is easily and readily divisible into smaller reading sections that can be assigned at different points within a course. I am going to use this text in conjunction with the OER OpenStax Psychology text for my Honors Psychology course. I currently use the OER Openstax Psychology textbook for my Positive Psychology course as well as my General Psychology course,

The topics in the text are presented in logical and clear fashion. The way they are presented allows the text to be used in conjuction with other textbooks as a secondary resource.

The text is free of significant interface issues. It is written in a manner that follows the natural process of doing research.

The text contained no noted grammatical errors.

The text is not culturally insensitive or offensive and actually has been revised to accomodate Canadian ethical guidelines as well as those of the APA.

I have to say that I am excited to have found this revised edition. My students will be so happy that there is also a reasonable priced hard coopy for them to purchase. They love the OpenStax Psychology text with the hard copy available from our bookstore. I do wish there were PowerPoints available for the text as well as a test bank. That is always a bonus!

Reviewed by Alyssa Gibbons, Instructor, Colorado State University on 1/7/16

This text covers everything I would consider essential for a first course in research methods, including some areas that are not consistently found in introductory texts (e.g., qualitative research, criticisms of null hypothesis significance... read more

This text covers everything I would consider essential for a first course in research methods, including some areas that are not consistently found in introductory texts (e.g., qualitative research, criticisms of null hypothesis significance testing). The chapters on ethics (Ch. 3) and theory (Ch. 4) are more comprehensive than most I have seen at this level, but not to the extent of information overload; rather, they anticipate and address many questions that undergraduates often have about these issues.

There is no index or table of contents provided in the PDF, and the table of contents on the website is very broad, but the material is well organized and it would not be hard for an instructor to create such a table. Chapter 2.1 is intended to be an introduction to several key terms and ideas (e.g., variable, correlation) that could serve as a sort of glossary.

I found the text to be highly accurate throughout; terms are defined precisely and correctly.

Where there are controversies or differences of opinion in the field, the author presents both sides of the argument in a respectful and unbiased manner. He explicitly discourages students from dismissing any one approach as inherently flawed, discussing not only the advantages and disadvantages of all methods (including nonexperimental ones) but also ways researchers address the disadvantages.

In several places, the textbook explicitly addresses the history and development of various methods (e.g., qualitative research, null hypothesis significance testing) and the ways in which researchers' views have changed. This allows the author to present current thinking and debate in these areas yet still expose students to older ideas they are likely to encounter as they read the research literature. I think this approach sets students up well to encounter future methodological advances; as a field, we refine our methods over time. I think the author could easily integrate new developments in future editions, or instructors could introduce such developments as supplementary material without creating confusion by contradicting the test.

The examples are generally drawn from classic psychological studies that have held up well over time; I think they will appeal to students for some time to come and not appear dated.

The only area in which I did not feel the content was entirely up to date was in the area of psychological measurement; Chapter 5.2 is based on the traditional view and not the more comprehensive modern or holistic view as presented in the 1999 AERA/APA Standards for Educational and Psychological Measurement. However, a comprehensive treatment of measurement validity is probably not necessary for most undergraduates at this stage, and they will certainly encounter the older framework in the research literature.

The textbook does an excellent job of presenting concepts in simple, accessible language without introducing error by oversimplification. The author consistently anticipates common points of confusion, clarifies terms, and even suggests ways for students to remember key distinctions. Terms are clearly and concretely defined when they are introduced. In contrast to many texts I have used, the terms that are highlighted in the text are actually the terms I would want my students to remember and study; the author refrains from using psychological jargon that is not central to the concepts he is discussing.

I noticed no major inconsistencies or gaps.

The division of sections within each chapter is useful; although I liked the overall organization of the text, there were points at which I would likely assign sections in a slightly different order and I felt I could do this easily without loss of continuity. The one place I would have liked more modularity was in the discussion of inferential statistics: t-tests, ANOVA, and Pearson's r are all covered within Chapter 13.2. On the one hand, this enables students to see the relationships and similarities among these tests, but on the other, this is a lot for students to take in at once.

I found the overall organization of the book to be quite logical, mirroring the sequence of steps a researcher would use to develop a research question, design a study, etc. As discussed above, the modularity of the book makes it easy to reorder sections to suit the structure of a particular class (for example, I might have students read the section on APA writing earlier in the semester as they begin drafting their own research proposals). I like the inclusion of ethics very early on in the text, establishing the importance of this topic for all research design choices.

One organizational feature I particularly appreciated was the consistent integration of conceptual and practical ideas; for example, in the discussion of psychological measurement, reliability and validity are discussed alongside the importance of giving clear instructions and making sure participants cannot be identified by their writing implements. This gives students an accurate and honest picture of the research process - some of the choices we make are driven by scientific ideals and some are driven by practical lessons learned. Students often have questions related to these mundane aspects of conducting research and it is helpful to have them so clearly addressed.

Although I didn't encounter any problems per se with the interface, I do think it could be made more user-friendly. For example, references to figures and tables are highlighted in blue, appearing to be hyperlinks, but they were not. Having such links, as well as a linked, easily-navigable and detailed table of contents, would also be helpful (and useful to students who use assistive technology).

I noticed no grammatical errors.

Where necessary, the author uses inclusive language and there is nothing that seems clearly offensive. The examples generally reflect American psychology research, but the focus is on the methods used and not the participants or cultural context. The text could be more intentionally or proactively inclusive, but it is not insensitive or exclusive.

I am generally hard to please when it comes to textbooks, but I found very little to quibble with in this one. It is a very well-written and accessible introduction to research methods that meets students where they are, addressing their common questions, misconceptions, and concerns. Although it's not flashy, the figures, graphics, and extra resources provided are clear, helpful, and relevant.

Reviewed by Moin Syed, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota on 6/10/15

The text is thorough in terms of covering introductory concepts that are central to experimental and correlational/association designs. I find the general exclusion of qualitative and mixed methods designs hard to defend (despite some researchers’... read more

The text is thorough in terms of covering introductory concepts that are central to experimental and correlational/association designs. I find the general exclusion of qualitative and mixed methods designs hard to defend (despite some researchers’ distaste for the methods). While these approaches were less commonly used in the recent past, they are prevalent in the early years of psychology and are ascending once again. It strikes me as odd to just ignore two whole families of methods that are used within the practice of psychology—definitely not a sustainable approach.

I do very much appreciate the emphasis on those who will both practice and consume psychology, given the wide variety of undergraduate career paths.

One glaring omission is a Table of Contents within the PDF. It would be nice to make this a linked PDF, so that clicking on the entry in a TOC (or cross-references) would jump the reader to the relevant section.

I did not see an errors. The chapter on theory is not as clear as it could be. The section “what is theory” is not very clear, and these are difficulte concepts (difference between theory, hypothesis, etc.). A bit more time spent here could have been good. Also, the discussion of functional, mechanistic, and typological theories leaves out the fourth of Pepper’s metaphors: contextualism. I’m not sure that was intentional and accidental, but it is noticeable!

This is a research methods text focused on experimental and association designs. The basics of these designs do not change a whole lot over time, so there is little likelihood that the main content will become obsolete anytime soon. Some of the examples used are a bit dated, but then again most of them are considered “classics” in the field, which I think are important to retain (and there is at least one “new classic” included in the ethics section, namely the fraudulent research linking autism to the MMR vaccine).

The text is extremely clear and accessible. In fact, it may even be *too* simple for undergraduate use. Then again, students often struggle with methods, so simplicity is good, and the simplicity can also make the book marketable to high school courses (although I doubt many high schools have methods courses).

Yes, quite consistent throughout. Carrying through the same examples into different chapters is a major strength of the text.

I don’ anticipate any problems here.

The book flows well, with brief sections. I do wonder if maybe the sections are too brief? Perhaps too many check-ins? The “key take-aways” usually come after only a few pages. As mentioned above, the book is written at a very basic level, so this brevity is consistent with that approach. It is not a problem, per se, but those considering adopting the text should be aware of this aspect.

No problems here.

I did not detect any grammatical errors. The text flows very well.

The book is fairly typical of American research methods books in that it only focuses on the U.S. context and draws its examples from “mainstream” psychology (e.g., little inclusion of ethnic minority or cross-cultural psychology). However, the text is certainly not insensitive or offensive in any way.

Nice book, thanks for writing it!

Reviewed by Rajiv Jhangiani, Instructor, Capilano University on 10/9/13

The text is well organized and written, integrates excellent pedagogical features, and covers all of the traditional areas of the topic admirably. The final two chapters provide a good bridge between the research methods course and the follow-up... read more

The text is well organized and written, integrates excellent pedagogical features, and covers all of the traditional areas of the topic admirably. The final two chapters provide a good bridge between the research methods course and the follow-up course on behavioural statistics. The text integrates real psychological measures, harnesses students' existing knowledge from introductory psychology, includes well-chosen examples from real life and research, and even includes a very practical chapter on the use of APA style for writing and referencing. On the other hand, it does not include a table of contents or an index, both of which are highly desirable. The one chapter that requires significant revision is Chapter 3 (Research Ethics), which is based on the US codes of ethics (e.g., Federal policy & APA code) and does not include any mention of the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement.

The very few errors I found include the following: 1. The text should read "The fact that his F score…" instead of "The fact that his t score…" on page 364 2. Some formulae are missing the line that separates the numerator from the denominator. See pages 306, 311, 315, and 361 3. Table 12.3 on page 310 lists the variance as 288 when it is 28.8

The text is up-to-date and will not soon lose relevance. The only things I would add are a brief discussion of the contemporary case of Diederik Stapel's research fraud in the chapter on Research Ethics, as well as some research concerning the external validity of web-based studies (e.g., Gosling et al.'s 2004 article in American Psychologist).

Overall, the style of writing makes this text highly accessible. The writing flows well, is well organized, and includes excellent, detailed, and clear examples and explanations for concepts. The examples often build on concepts or theories students would have covered in their introductory psychology course. Some constructive criticism: 1. When discussing z scores on page 311 it might have been helpful to point out that the mean and SD for a set of calculated z scores are 0 and 1 respectively. Good students will come to this realization themselves, but it is not a bad thing to point it out nonetheless. 2. The introduction of the concept of multiple regression might be difficult for some students to grasp. 3. The only place where I felt short of an explanation was in the use of a research example to demonstrate the use of a line graph on page 318. In this case the explanation in question does not pertain to the line graph itself but the result of the study used, which is so fascinating that students will wish for the researchers' explanation for it.

The text is internally consistent.

The text is organized very well into chapters, modules within each chapter, and learning objectives within each module. Each module also includes useful exercises that help consolidate learning.

As mentioned earlier, the style of writing makes this text highly accessible. The writing flows well, is well organized, and includes excellent, detailed, and clear examples and explanations for concepts. The examples often build on concepts or theories students would have covered in their introductory psychology course. Only rarely did I feel that the author could have assisted the student by demonstrating the set-by-step calculation of a statistic (e.g., on page 322 for the calculation of Pearson's r)

The images, graphs, and charts are clear. The only serious issues that hamper navigation are the lack of a table of contents and an index. Many of the graphs will need to be printed in colour (or otherwise modified) for the students to follow the explanations provided in the text.

The text is written rather well and is free from grammatical errors. Of course, spellings are in the US convention.

The text is not culturally insensitive or offensive. Of course, it is not a Canadian edition and so many of the examples (all of which are easy to comprehend) come from a US context.

I have covered most of these issues in my earlier comments. The only things left to mention are that the author should have clearly distinguished between mundane and psychological realism, and that, in my opinion, the threats to internal validity could have been grouped together and might have been closer to an exhaustive list. This review originated in the BC Open Textbook Collection and is licensed under CC BY-ND.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: The Science of Psychology
• Chapter 2: Overview of the Scientific Method
• Chapter 3: Research Ethics
• Chapter 4: Psychological Measurement
• Chapter 5: Experimental Research
• Chapter 6: Non-experimental Research
• Chapter 7: Survey Research
• Chapter 8: Quasi-Experimental Research
• Chapter 9: Factorial Designs
• Chapter 10: Single-Subject Research
• Chapter 11: Presenting Your Research
• Chapter 12: Descriptive Statistics
• Chapter 13: Inferential Statistics

Ancillary Material

• Kwantlen Polytechnic University

About the Book

This fourth edition (published in 2019) was co-authored by Rajiv S. Jhangiani (Kwantlen Polytechnic University), Carrie Cuttler (Washington State University), and Dana C. Leighton (Texas A&M University—Texarkana) and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Revisions throughout the current edition include changing the chapter and section numbering system to better accommodate adaptions that remove or reorder chapters; continued reversion from the Canadian edition; general grammatical edits; replacement of “he/she” to “they” and “his/her” to “their”; removal or update of dead links; embedded videos that were not embedded; moved key takeaways and exercises from the end of each chapter section to the end of each chapter; a new cover design.

About the Contributors

Dr. Carrie Cuttler received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of British Columbia. She has been teaching research methods and statistics for over a decade. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Washington State University, where she primarily studies the acute and chronic effects of cannabis on cognition, mental health, and physical health. Dr. Cuttler was also an OER Research Fellow with the Center for Open Education and she conducts research on open educational resources. She has over 50 publications including the following two published books:  A Student Guide for SPSS (1st and 2nd edition)  and  Research Methods in Psychology: Student Lab Guide.  Finally, she edited another OER entitled  Essentials of Abnormal Psychology. In her spare time, she likes to travel, hike, bike, run, and watch movies with her husband and son. You can find her online at @carriecuttler or carriecuttler.com.

Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani is the Associate Vice Provost, Open Education at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia. He is an internationally known advocate for open education whose research and practice focuses on open educational resources, student-centered pedagogies, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Rajiv is a co-founder of the Open Pedagogy Notebook, an Ambassador for the Center for Open Science, and serves on the BC Open Education Advisory Committee. He formerly served as an Open Education Advisor and Senior Open Education Research & Advocacy Fellow with BCcampus, an OER Research Fellow with the Open Education Group, a Faculty Workshop Facilitator with the Open Textbook Network, and a Faculty Fellow with the BC Open Textbook Project. A co-author of three open textbooks in Psychology, his most recent book is  Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science (2017). You can find him online at @thatpsychprof or thatpsychprof.com.

Dr. Dana C. Leighton is Assistant Professor of Psychology in the College of Arts, Science, and Education at Texas A&M University—Texarkana. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas, and has 15 years experience teaching across the psychology curriculum at community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and research universities. Dr. Leighton’s social psychology research lab studies intergroup relations, and routinely includes undergraduate students as researchers. He is also Chair of the university’s Institutional Review Board. Recently he has been researching and writing about the use of open science research practices by undergraduate researchers to increase diversity, justice, and sustainability in psychological science. He has published on his teaching methods in eBooks from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, presented his methods at regional and national conferences, and received grants to develop new teaching methods. His teaching interests are in undergraduate research, writing skills, and online student engagement. For more about Dr. Leighton see http://www.danaleighton.net and http://danaleighton.edublogs.org

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Overview of the Scientific Method

8 Finding a Research Topic

Learning objectives.

• Learn some common sources of research ideas.
• Define the research literature in psychology and give examples of sources that are part of the research literature and sources that are not.
• Describe and use several methods for finding previous research on a particular research idea or question.

Good research must begin with a good research question. Yet coming up with good research questions is something that novice researchers often find difficult and stressful. One reason is that this is a creative process that can appear mysterious—even magical—with experienced researchers seeming to pull interesting research questions out of thin air. However, psychological research on creativity has shown that it is neither as mysterious nor as magical as it appears. It is largely the product of ordinary thinking strategies and persistence (Weisberg, 1993) [1] . This section covers some fairly simple strategies for finding general research ideas, turning those ideas into empirically testable research questions, and finally evaluating those questions in terms of how interesting they are and how feasible they would be to answer.

Finding Inspiration

Research questions often begin as more general research ideas—usually focusing on some behavior or psychological characteristic: talkativeness, learning, depression, bungee jumping, and so on. Before looking at how to turn such ideas into empirically testable research questions, it is worth looking at where such ideas come from in the first place. Three of the most common sources of inspiration are informal observations, practical problems, and previous research.

Informal observations include direct observations of our own and others’ behavior as well as secondhand observations from non-scientific sources such as newspapers, books, blogs, and so on. For example, you might notice that you always seem to be in the slowest moving line at the grocery store. Could it be that most people think the same thing? Or you might read in a local newspaper about people donating money and food to a local family whose house has burned down and begin to wonder about who makes such donations and why. Some of the most famous research in psychology has been inspired by informal observations. Stanley Milgram’s famous research on obedience to authority, for example, was inspired in part by journalistic reports of the trials of accused Nazi war criminals—many of whom claimed that they were only obeying orders. This led him to wonder about the extent to which ordinary people will commit immoral acts simply because they are ordered to do so by an authority figure (Milgram, 1963) [2] .

Practical problems can also inspire research ideas, leading directly to applied research in such domains as law, health, education, and sports. Does taking lecture notes by hand improve students’ exam performance? How effective is psychotherapy for depression compared to drug therapy? To what extent do cell phones impair people’s driving ability? How can we teach children to read more efficiently? What is the best mental preparation for running a marathon?

Probably the most common inspiration for new research ideas, however, is previous research. Recall that science is a kind of large-scale collaboration in which many different researchers read and evaluate each other’s work and conduct new studies to build on it. Of course, experienced researchers are familiar with previous research in their area of expertise and probably have a long list of ideas. This suggests that novice researchers can find inspiration by consulting with a more experienced researcher (e.g., students can consult a faculty member). But they can also find inspiration by picking up a copy of almost any professional journal and reading the titles and abstracts. In one typical issue of  Psychological Science , for example, you can find articles on the perception of shapes, anti-Semitism, police lineups, the meaning of death, second-language learning, people who seek negative emotional experiences, and many other topics. If you can narrow your interests down to a particular topic (e.g., memory) or domain (e.g., health care), you can also look through more specific journals, such as  Memory & Cognition  or  Health Psychology .

Reviewing the Research Literature

Once again, one of the most common sources of inspiration is previous research. Therefore, it is important to review the literature early in the research process. The  research literature  in any field is all the published research in that field. Reviewing the research literature means finding, reading, and summarizing the published research relevant to your topic of interest. In addition to helping you discover new research questions, reviewing the literature early in the research process can help you in several other ways.

• It can tell you if a research question has already been answered.
• It can help you evaluate the interestingness of a research question.
• It can give you ideas for how to conduct your own study.
• It can tell you how your study fits into the research literature.

The research literature in psychology is enormous—including millions of scholarly articles and books dating to the beginning of the field—and it continues to grow. Although its boundaries are somewhat fuzzy, the research literature definitely does not include self-help and other pop psychology books, dictionary and encyclopedia entries, websites, and similar sources that are intended mainly for the general public. These are considered unreliable because they are not reviewed by other researchers and are often based on little more than common sense or personal experience. Wikipedia contains much valuable information, but because its authors are anonymous and may not have any formal training or expertise in that subject area, and its content continually changes it is unsuitable as a basis of sound scientific research. For our purposes, it helps to define the research literature as consisting almost entirely of two types of sources: articles in professional journals, and scholarly books in psychology and related fields.

Professional Journals

Professional journals  are periodicals that publish original research articles. There are thousands of professional journals that publish research in psychology and related fields. They are usually published monthly or quarterly in individual issues, each of which contains several articles. The issues are organized into volumes, which usually consist of all the issues for a calendar year. Some journals are published in hard copy only, others in both hard copy and electronic form, and still others in electronic form only.

Most articles in professional journals are one of two basic types: empirical research reports and review articles.  Empirical research reports  describe one or more new empirical studies conducted by the authors. They introduce a research question, explain why it is interesting, review previous research, describe their method and results, and draw their conclusions. Review articles  summarize previously published research on a topic and usually present new ways to organize or explain the results. When a review article is devoted primarily to presenting a new theory, it is often referred to as a theoretical article . When a review article provides a statistical summary of all of the previous results it is referred to as a  meta-analysis .

Most professional journals in psychology undergo a process of  double-blind peer review . Researchers who want to publish their work in the journal submit a manuscript to the editor—who is generally an established researcher too—who in turn sends it to two or three experts on the topic. Each reviewer reads the manuscript, writes a critical but constructive review, and sends the review back to the editor along with recommendations about whether the manuscript should be published or not. The editor then decides whether to accept the article for publication, ask the authors to make changes and resubmit it for further consideration, or reject it outright. In any case, the editor forwards the reviewers’ written comments to the researchers so that they can revise their manuscript accordingly. This entire process is double-blind, as the reviewers do not know the identity of the researcher(s) and vice versa. Double-blind peer review is helpful because it ensures that the work meets basic standards of the field before it can enter the research literature. However, in order to increase transparency and accountability, some newer open access journals (e.g., Frontiers in Psychology ) utilize an open peer review process wherein the identities of the reviewers (which remain concealed during the peer review process) are published alongside the journal article.

Scholarly Books

Scholarly books  are books written by researchers and practitioners mainly for use by other researchers and practitioners. A  monograph  is written by a single author or a small group of authors and usually, gives a coherent presentation of a topic much like an extended review article.  Edited volumes have an editor or a small group of editors who recruit many authors to write separate chapters on different aspects of the same topic. Although edited volumes can also give a coherent presentation of the topic, it is not unusual for each chapter to take a different perspective or even for the authors of different chapters to openly disagree with each other. In general, scholarly books undergo a peer review process similar to that used by professional journals.

Literature Search Strategies

Using psycinfo and other databases.

The primary method used to search the research literature involves using one or more electronic databases. These include Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, and ProQuest for all academic disciplines, ERIC for education, and PubMed for medicine and related fields. The most important for our purposes, however, is PsycINFO, which is produced by the American Psychological Association (APA). PsycINFO is so comprehensive—covering thousands of professional journals and scholarly books going back more than 100 years—that for most purposes its content is synonymous with the research literature in psychology. Like most such databases, PsycINFO is usually available through your university library.

PsycINFO consists of individual records for each article, book chapter, or book in the database. Each record includes basic publication information, an abstract or summary of the work (like the one presented at the start of this chapter), and a list of other works cited by that work. A computer interface allows entering one or more search terms and returns any records that contain those search terms. (These interfaces are provided by different vendors and therefore can look somewhat different depending on the library you use.) Each record also contains lists of keywords that describe the content of the work and also a list of index terms. The index terms are especially helpful because they are standardized. Research on differences between females and males, for example, is always indexed under “Human Sex Differences.” Research on note-taking is always indexed under the term “Learning Strategies.” If you do not know the appropriate index terms, PsycINFO includes a thesaurus that can help you find them.

Given that there are nearly four million records in PsycINFO, you may have to try a variety of search terms in different combinations and at different levels of specificity before you find what you are looking for. Imagine, for example, that you are interested in the question of whether males and females differ in terms of their ability to recall experiences from when they were very young. If you were to enter the search term “memory,” it would return far too many records to look through individually. This is where the thesaurus helps. Entering “memory” into the thesaurus provides several more specific index terms—one of which is “early memories.” While searching for “early memories” among the index terms still returns too many to look through individually—combining it with “human sex differences” as a second search term returns fewer articles, many of which are highly relevant to the topic.

Depending on the vendor that provides the interface to PsycINFO, you may be able to save, print, or e-mail the relevant PsycINFO records. The records might even contain links to full-text copies of the works themselves. (PsycARTICLES is a database that provides full-text access to articles in all journals published by the APA.) If not, and you want a copy of the work, you will have to find out if your library carries the journal or has the book and the hard copy on the library shelves. Be sure to ask a librarian if you need help.

Using Other Search Techniques

In addition to entering search terms into PsycINFO and other databases, there are several other techniques you can use to search the research literature. First, if you have one good article or book chapter on your topic—a recent review article is best—you can look through the reference list of that article for other relevant articles, books, and book chapters. In fact, you should do this with any relevant article or book chapter you find. You can also start with a classic article or book chapter on your topic, find its record in PsycINFO (by entering the author’s name or article’s title as a search term), and link from there to a list of other works in PsycINFO that cite that classic article. This works because other researchers working on your topic are likely to be aware of the classic article and cite it in their own work. You can also do a general Internet search using search terms related to your topic or the name of a researcher who conducts research on your topic. This might lead you directly to works that are part of the research literature (e.g., articles in open-access journals or posted on researchers’ own websites). The search engine Google Scholar is especially useful for this purpose. A general Internet search might also lead you to websites that are not part of the research literature but might provide references to works that are. Finally, you can talk to people (e.g., your instructor or other faculty members in psychology) who know something about your topic and can suggest relevant articles and book chapters.

What to Search For

When you do a literature review, you need to be selective. Not every article, book chapter, and book that relates to your research idea or question will be worth obtaining, reading, and integrating into your review. Instead, you want to focus on sources that help you do four basic things: (a) refine your research question, (b) identify appropriate research methods, (c) place your research in the context of previous research, and (d) write an effective research report. Several basic principles can help you find the most useful sources.

First, it is best to focus on recent research, keeping in mind that what counts as recent depends on the topic. For newer topics that are actively being studied, “recent” might mean published in the past year or two. For older topics that are receiving less attention right now, “recent” might mean within the past 10 years. You will get a feel for what counts as recent for your topic when you start your literature search. A good general rule, however, is to start with sources published in the past five years. The main exception to this rule would be classic articles that turn up in the reference list of nearly every other source. If other researchers think that this work is important, even though it is old, then, by all means, you should include it in your review.

Second, you should look for review articles on your topic because they will provide a useful overview of it—often discussing important definitions, results, theories, trends, and controversies—giving you a good sense of where your own research fits into the literature. You should also look for empirical research reports addressing your question or similar questions, which can give you ideas about how to measure your variables and collect your data. As a general rule, it is good to use methods that others have already used successfully unless you have good reasons not to. Finally, you should look for sources that provide information that can help you argue for the interestingness of your research question. For a study on the effects of cell phone use on driving ability, for example, you might look for information about how widespread cell phone use is, how frequent and costly motor vehicle crashes are, and so on.

How many sources are enough for your literature review? This is a difficult question because it depends on how extensively your topic has been studied and also on your own goals. One study found that across a variety of professional journals in psychology, the average number of sources cited per article was about 50 (Adair & Vohra, 2003) [3] . This gives a rough idea of what professional researchers consider to be adequate. As a student, you might be assigned a much lower minimum number of references to include, but the principles for selecting the most useful ones remain the same.

Video Attributions

• “ How to Develop a Good Research Topic ” by  KStateLibraries .  CC BY (Attribution)
• “ Sample PsycINFO Search on EBSCOhost ” by  APA Publishing Training . Standard YouTube Licence.
• “ Using Google Scholar (CLIP) ” by  clipinfolit .  CC BY (Attribution)
• Weisberg, R. W. (1993). Creativity: Beyond the myth of genius . New York, NY: Freeman. ↵
• Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67 , 371–378. ↵
• Adair, J. G., & Vohra, N. (2003). The explosion of knowledge, references, and citations: Psychology’s unique response to a crisis. American Psychologist, 58 , 15–23. ↵

All the published research in that field.

Are periodicals that publish original research articles.

Research reports that describe one or more new empirical studies conducted by the authors.

Articles that summarize previously published research on a topic and usually present new ways to organize or explain the results.

A review article that is devoted primarily to presenting a new theory.

A review article that provides a statistical summary of all of the previous results.

A process in which the reviewers of a research article do not know the identity of the researcher(s) and vice versa.

Books written by researchers and practitioners mainly for use by other researchers and practitioners.

A coherent written presentation of a topic much like an extended review article written by a single author or a small group of authors.

Books that are collections of chapters written by different authors on different aspects of the same topic, and overseen by one or more editors.

A comprehensive electronic database covering thousands of professional journals and scholarly books going back more than 100 years—that for most purposes its content is synonymous with the research literature in psychology.

Research Methods in Psychology Copyright © 2019 by Rajiv S. Jhangiani, I-Chant A. Chiang, Carrie Cuttler, & Dana C. Leighton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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