Describe the steps involved in the scientific method
What will be an ideal response?
ANSWER:
- Define and describe the issue to be studied. You might hypothesize that college students who buy pitchers of beer tend to drink more than college students who purchase bottles of beer (a prediction). You study previous research in scientific journals on alcohol consumption.
- Form a testable hypothesis. Students who buy pitchers of beer tend to drink more than students who buy beer in bottles. This hypothesis must be phrased in a way that can be objectively measured—that is, in such a way that another person can test the same hypothesis to verify or replicate your results.
- Choose an appropriate research strategy. You choose a group of people to observe (college students) and a research method that allows you to mea- sure objectively how much beer students who buy pitchers drink versus how much beer students who buy bottles drink. You decide where your study will be conducted. Will it be in the environment where the behavior naturally occurs (such as the local college bar) or in a laboratory (a more controlled setting)? You decide who you will use as participants. Will you use animals or humans? If using humans, how will they be selected? If using animals, what species will you use?
- Conduct the study to test your hypothesis. Run the study and collect the data based on the decisions in steps 1–3.
- Analyze the data to support or reject your hypothesis. Researchers usually analyze their data using statistics. If the results do not support your hypothesis, you can revise the hypothesis or pose a new one. If the results do support your hypothesis, you can replicate your study (do the same one again) to increase your confidence that your findings support your hypothesis or make additional predictions and test them. Geller, Russ, and Altomari (1986) actually included this prediction in a larger study on beer drinking among college students and found support for the hypothesis that buying pitchers was associated with consuming larger amounts of beer.
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