Quantitative Psychological Research

Quantitative Psychological Research: The Complete Student's Companion, expertly guides the reader through all the stages involved in undertaking quantitative psychological research: designing a study, choosing a sample of people, undertaking the study, analysing the data, and reporting the research. Accessibly written and clearly presented, the book is designed for anyone learning to conduct quantitative psychological research as well being a reference work for professional psychologists. It covers the full research process, from the original idea to reporting the completed study, emphasizing the importance of looking beyond statistical significance in evaluating data. The book provides step-by-step guidance on choosing, interpreting and reporting the appropriate analysis, featuring worked examples and extended calculations as appendices for readers who wish to delve further. This edition features a new chapter examining ideas on how causality might be identified when data is not obtained from an experiment and has been thoroughly updated throughout to reflect latest research practices. Care has been taken to avoid tying the book to any specific statistical software, providing readers with a thorough grounding in the basics no matter which package they go on to use. This is a must read for professional psychologists as well as students and researchers of Psychology, Statistics and Research Methods. This book is also invaluable for anyone interested in conducting quantitative psychological research.

David Clark-Carter is Professor Emeritus of Psychological Research Methods at Staffordshire University and a Consulting Editor of the British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology. In 2016 he was awarded the lifetime achievement award by the Education and Public Engagement Board of the BPS. His research has included psychological aspects of sensory impairment, health psychology and the use made by psychologists of research methods.

Detailed contents of chapters Preface Part 1 Introduction 1 The methods used in psychological research Part 2 Choice of topic, measures and research design 2 The preliminary stages of research 3 Variables and the validity of research designs 4 Research designs and their internal validity Part 3 Methods 5 Asking questions I: Interviews and surveys 6 Asking questions II: Measuring attitudes and meaning 7 Observation and content analysis Part 4 Data and analysis 8 Scales of measurement 9 Summarising and describing data 10 Going beyond description 11 Samples and populations 12 Analysis of differences between a single sample and a population 13 Effect size and power 14 Parametric and non-parametric tests 15 Analysis of differences between two levels of an independent variable 16 Preliminary analysis of designs with one independent variable with more than two levels 17 Analysis of designs with more than one independent variable 18 Subsequent analysis after ANOVA or -2 19 Analysis of relationships I: Correlation 20 Analysis of relationships II: Regression 21 Analysis of relationships III: Logistic regression 22 Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) 23 Screening data 24 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) 25 Multivariate analysis 26 Meta-analysis 27 Bayesian statistics 28 Cause and effect Part 5 Sharing the results 29 Reporting research Appendixes I. Descriptive statistics (linked to Chapter 9) II. Sampling and confidence intervals for proportions (linked to Chapter 11) III. Comparing a sample with a population (linked to Chapter 12 and Chapter 11) IV. The power of a one-group z-test and finding sample sizes via confidence intervals (linked to Chapter 13) V. Data transformation and goodness-of-fit tests (linked to Chapter 14) VI. Seeking differences between two levels of an independent variable (linked to Chapter 15) VII. Seeking differences between more than two levels of an independent variable (linked to Chapter 16) VIII. Analysis of designs with more than one independent variable (linked to Chapter 17) IX. Subsequent analysis after ANOVA or -2 (linked to Chapter 18) X. Correlation and reliability (linked to Chapter 19) XI. Linear Regression (linked to Chapter 20) XII. Logistic regression (linked to Chapter 21) XIII. ANCOVA (linked to Chapter 22) XIV. Evaluation of measures: Item and discriminative analysis, and accuracy of tests (linked to Chapter 6) XV. Unbalanced designs (linked to Chapter 23) XVI Exploratory Factor Analysis (linked to Chapter 24) XVII. Meta-analysis (linked to Chapter 26) XVIII. Bayesian statistics (linked to Chapter 27) XIX. Probability tables XX. Power tables XXI. Miscellaneous tables References Glossary of symbols Author index Subject index