Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Background Check

In order to form a good hypothesis and design an effective experiment in psychology, you must first complete a literature review. A literature review is where you search for articles that have been peer reviewed and published about existing research relating to your topic. This allows the field to expand because researchers can see what’s out there already and then build upon it with their new research. The easiest way to look up articles is using a research article data base such as PsycINFO or PsycARTICLES. By searching keywords you can easily find articles that relate to all aspects of what variables you are testing. For example, if you type in “facebook” into the search bar on PsycARTICLES you will find an article about facebook and personality and also one about facebook and academics. If your hypothesis was about personality and academics then both of these articles would be useful combined into your literature review section of your research project. The first couple literature reviews you do are the hardest, because after that you know what to look for and become better at searching key terms over time.

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