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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Psychological methodology > General
The Handbook of Research Methods in Human Memory presents a collection of chapters on methodology used by researchers in investigating human memory. Understanding the basic cognitive function of human memory is critical in a wide variety of fields, such as clinical psychology, developmental psychology, education, neuroscience, and gerontology, and studying memory has become particularly urgent in recent years due to the prominence of a number of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's. However, choosing the most appropriate method of research is a daunting task for most scholars. This book explores the methods that are currently available in various areas of human memory research and serves as a reference manual to help guide readers' own research. Each chapter is written by prominent researchers and features cutting-edge research on human memory and cognition, with topics ranging from basic memory processes to cognitive neuroscience to further applications. The focus here is not on the "what," but the "how"-how research is best conducted on human memory.
Signal detection theory--as developed in electrical engineering and
based on statistical decision theory--was first applied to human
sensory discrimination 40 years ago. The theoretical intent was to
provide a valid model of the discrimination process; the
methodological intent was to provide reliable measures of
discrimination acuity in specific sensory tasks. An analytic method
of detection theory, called the relative operating characteristic
(ROC), can isolate the effect of the placement of the decision
criterion, which may be variable and idiosyncratic, so that a pure
measure of intrinsic discrimination acuity is obtained. For the
past 20 years, ROC analysis has also been used to measure the
discrimination acuity or inherent accuracy of a broad range of
practical diagnostic systems. It was widely adopted by
methodologists in the field of information retrieval, is
increasingly used in weather forecasting, and is the generally
preferred method in clinical medicine, primarily in radiology. This
book attends to both themes, ROC analysis in the psychology
laboratory and in practical diagnostic settings, and to their
essential unity.
Written for social science scholars who want to learn more about
the qualitative way of thinking, this book addresses the full
continuum of issues about the qualitative methodologies. At one end
of that continuum are the deeply philosophical concerns of ontology
and epistemology. At the other -- concrete -- end of that continuum
are the practical issues of what is considered evidence: How does
one go about gathering evidence? Where, when, and how does one
analyze evidence? What are the alternative ways of dealing with
tone and voice in writing qualitative research? The attention to
practical, concrete issues makes this book useful as a handbook
providing a great deal of vital information to scholars who want a
guide to making decisions as they navigate their research questions
through the qualitative realm.
The model of therapy described in this book places the client firmly at the centre of the therapeutic process. Adjusted to the developmental life-pattern of the client, it shows how structured agreements related to both the duration and focus of a particular therapeutic relationship can be adapted to the client's needs at any one time. It offers clients the possibility of a flexible range of encounters with different practitioners and therapists, an ethical solution to contemporary dilemmas about short-term treatment. Including an insert card outlining key stage agreements, and linked case scenarios illustrating the personal development of nine characters. The book is intended for practitioners of all psychological therapies who are looking for a rigorous but flexible approach to empowering their clients.
Starting a research project, however large or small can be a daunting prospect. New researchers can be confronted with a huge number of options not only of topic, but of conceptual underpinning. It is quite possible to conduct research into say, memory, from a number of research traditions. Psychology also has links with several other disciplines and it is possible to utilise their techniques; the difficulty is quite simply the wide variety of methodological approaches that psychological research embraces. In this collection, authors have been recruited to explain a wide range of different research strategies and theories with examples from their own work. Their successes as well as the problems they encountered are explained to provide a comprehensive and practical guide for all new researchers. The collection will be a great help to undergraduates about to start final year projects and should be required reading for all those thinking of graduate level research.
See How to Use Statistics for New Testament Interpretation The Synoptic Problem and Statistics lays the foundations for a new area of interdisciplinary research that uses statistical techniques to investigate the synoptic problem in New Testament studies, which concerns the relationships between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. There are potential applications of the techniques to study other sets of similar documents. Explore Hidden Markov Models for Textual Data The book provides an introductory account of the synoptic problem and relevant theories, literature, and research at a level suitable for academic and professional statisticians. For those with no special interest in biblical studies or textual analysis, the book presents core statistical material on the use of hidden Markov models to analyze binary time series. Biblical scholars interested in the synoptic problem or in the use of statistical methods for textual analysis can omit the more technical/mathematical aspects of the book. The binary time series data sets and R code used are available on the author's website.
"When a Child Has Been Murdered: Ways You Can Help the Grieving Parents" is a concise, easy- to-read guide that begins with a general discussion of the types of grief that result from death and non-death losses. Then, using statements made by parents whose children were murdered, it discusses the specifics of murdered-child grief including: the complex emotions felt by the grieving parents, how the necessity of interacting with the criminal justice system can alter and enhance these emotions, short- and long-term methods these parents employ to work through the grieving process and to reconstruct their shattered lives, and how anyone who comes in contact with the parents can help them survive their grief.
Distribution-free statistical methods enable users to make statistical inferences with minimum assumptions about the population in question. They are widely used, especially in the areas of medical and psychological research.
Compositional Data Analysis in Practice is a user-oriented practical guide to the analysis of data with the property of a constant sum, for example percentages adding up to 100%. Compositional data can give misleading results if regular statistical methods are applied, and are best analysed by first transforming them to logarithms of ratios. This book explains how this transformation affects the analysis, results and interpretation of this very special type of data. All aspects of compositional data analysis are considered: visualization, modelling, dimension-reduction, clustering and variable selection, with many examples in the fields of food science, archaeology, sociology and biochemistry, and a final chapter containing a complete case study using fatty acid compositions in ecology. The applicability of these methods extends to other fields such as linguistics, geochemistry, marketing, economics and finance. R Software The following repository contains data files and R scripts from the book https://github.com/michaelgreenacre/CODAinPractice. The R package easyCODA, which accompanies this book, is available on CRAN -- note that you should have version 0.25 or higher. The latest version of the package will always be available on R-Forge and can be installed from R with this instruction: install.packages("easyCODA", repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org").
This text focuses on the experimental methods and the associated
terminology encountered in the research literature of psychology.
Initially, the content is kept simple, so as not to distract from
the information on research technique and philosophy. Interesting
psychological questions from well researched areas are then
examined in detail, permitting a fuller discussion of the problems
encountered in specific paradigms. It is in this fashion that the
book offers both methods and content.
This book presents the reader with a set of diverse, carefully developed and clearly specified systems of transcription and coding, arising from contrasting theoretical perspectives, and presented as alternative choices, situated within the theoretical domain most natural to each. The perspectives represented include first and second language acquisition, interethnic and crosscultural interaction, information structure, and the study of discourse influences on linguistic expression. In the contributed chapters, the designers of these systems provide a distillation of collective experiences from the past quarter century, telling in their own words their perspectives on language processes, how these perspectives have shaped their choice of methodology in transcription and coding of natural language, and describing their systems in detail. Overview chapters by the editors then provide design principles and guidelines concerning issues pertinent to all systems, including such things as reliability, validity, ease of learning, computational tractability, and robustness against error. The final chapter is a compendium of existing computerized archives of language data and information sources together with details concerning data access and use.
Software is cut-and-dried - every button you press has a predictable effect - but qualitative analysis is open-ended and unfolds in unpredictable ways. This contradiction is best resolved by separating analytic strategies - what you plan to do - from software tactics - how you plan to do it. The Five-Level QDA (R) method unpacks the process so that you can learn it consciously and efficiently. In this three-volume set covering ATLAS.ti, NVivo and MAXQDA, authors Nicholas Woolf and Christina Silver provide a comprehensive guide to qualitative data analysis using popular software packages. The first part of each book explains how the contradiction between analytic strategies and software tactics is reconciled by "translating" between them. The second part provides both an in-depth description of how the package works and comprehensive instruction in the five steps of "translation". these steps are illustrated with examples from a variety of research projects. The third part contains real-world qualitative research projects from a variety of disciplines, methodologies, and kinds of qualitative analysis, all illustrated in the software package using the Five-Level QDA method. Each book is accompanied by three sets of video demonstrations on the Companion Website: https://www.qdaservices.co.uk/five-level-qda
These two companion volumes provide a comprehensive review and
critical evaluation of the major DSM-III and DSM-III-R child
disorders. Their major goal is to provide diagnostic and assessment
guidelines that are based on scientific literature in specific
clinical domains. Each chapter contains a discussion of the
historical background of a particular diagnosis, definitional
issues, a critical but selective review of the literature
addressing the diagnosis in question, proposed changes in the
diagnostic criteria based on the available literature, and proposed
assessment models and methods based on the designated criteria.
Given the scientific bases for many of these discussions of
diagnostic criteria, these two volumes will serve professionals and
graduate students in a wide variety of fields: clinical child
psychology, child psychiatry, pediatrics, pediatric and school
psychology, special education, social work, and other child mental
health specialties.
Designed for a graduate course in applied statistics, Nonparametric Methods in Statistics with SAS Applications teaches students how to apply nonparametric techniques to statistical data. It starts with the tests of hypotheses and moves on to regression modeling, time-to-event analysis, density estimation, and resampling methods. The text begins with classical nonparametric hypotheses testing, including the sign, Wilcoxon sign-rank and rank-sum, Ansari-Bradley, Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Friedman rank, Kruskal-Wallis H, Spearman rank correlation coefficient, and Fisher exact tests. It then discusses smoothing techniques (loess and thin-plate splines) for classical nonparametric regression as well as binary logistic and Poisson models. The author also describes time-to-event nonparametric estimation methods, such as the Kaplan-Meier survival curve and Cox proportional hazards model, and presents histogram and kernel density estimation methods. The book concludes with the basics of jackknife and bootstrap interval estimation. Drawing on data sets from the author's many consulting projects, this classroom-tested book includes various examples from psychology, education, clinical trials, and other areas. It also presents a set of exercises at the end of each chapter. All examples and exercises require the use of SAS 9.3 software. Complete SAS codes for all examples are given in the text. Large data sets for the exercises are available on the author's website.
Writing with Clarity and Style, 2nd Edition, will help you to improve your writing dramatically. The book shows you how to use dozens of classical rhetorical devices to bring power, clarity, and effectiveness to your writing. You will also learn about writing styles, authorial personas, and sentence syntax as tools to make your writing interesting and persuasive. If you want to improve the appeal and persuasion of your speeches, this is also the book for you. From strategic techniques for keeping your readers engaged as you change focus, down to the choice of just the right words and phrases for maximum impact, this book will help you develop a flexible, adaptable style for all the audiences you need to address. Each chapter now includes these sections: Style Check, discussing many elements of style, including some enhanced and revised sections Define Your Terms, asking students to use their own words and examples in their definitions. It's in the Cloud, directing students to the Web to locate and respond to various rhetorically focused items, including biographies and speeches. Salt and Pepper, spicing up the study of rhetoric by stretching students' thinking about how their writing can be improved, sometimes by attending to details such as punctuation, and sometimes by exploring the use of unusual techniques such as stylistic fragments. Review Questions, providing an end-of-chapter quiz to help cement the chapter ideas in long-term memory. Questions for Thought and Discussion, a set of questions designed for either in-class discussion or personal response. New to the Second Edition Additional examples of each device, including from world personalities and the captains of industry More and longer exercises, with a range of difficulty Advice from classical rhetoricians including Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Cicero, and Quintilian.
This popular text describes the processes of doing teacher action research. But it is much more than a dry presentation of "methods." Filled with examples of teacher action research projects, provided by teachers themselves, the book places teachers at the heart of the action research process. Teachers' own writing about their work and research questions is featured in 11 examples of teacher action research conducted in a range of settings, grade levels, and content areas. The second edition of Teachers Doing Research is fully updated and substantially reorganized and revised, including four totally new chapters and six new teacher stories. This edition: provides more specifics on teacher action research processes and a variety of methodological options for teachers who do research in their classrooms and schools (Chapters 1-5); includes more specifics on data collection and interpretation methods (Chapter 3); balances a detailed introduction to technology for novice researchers with discussion of issues and questions related to technology-based teacher research (Chapter 4). Information on Web sites related to topics addressed in the chapters and teacher research stories is integrated throughout the book. A new Teachers Doing Research Web site (www.teachersdoingresearch.com) invites readers, teacher research participants, preservice candidates, and teacher educators to participate in dialogue with the authors and editors of this text, and with each other; gives expanded attention to teacher action research with preservice teachers and to university/school collaboration (especially in Chapter 6); examines the connections between teacher action research and the larger arena of educational research (Chapter 8); broadens the context for teacher action research, through discussion of its influence on school reform both in the United States and internationally. International examples of urban teacher research are includ
This book consists of the reports of 13 urban elementary teacher researchers' year-long inquiries around literacy topics--conducted as part of a collaborative school-university action research project. The focus is on how they attempted to transform their teaching practices to meet the needs of students from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, and how their inquiry efforts resulted in developing more collaborative styles of teaching. These teachers explore how collaborative classroom interactions occur when teachers move away from teaching-as-transmission approaches to ones in which they share power and authority with their students--viewing them not as 'at risk' but instead as 'at promise.' Because the everyday interactions between teachers and students are realized by social talk in the classroom, classroom discourse was analyzed to study and document the teacher researchers' efforts to make changes in the locus of power in literacy teaching and learning. Their chapters are filled with classroom discourse examples to illustrate their points. The volume includes teacher inquiries conducted in elementary classrooms from kindergarten through eighth grade. Three took place in bilingual classrooms, one in a special education class. These inquires cover a range of literacy topics, including reading-aloud, language richness, writing, literature discussion groups, drama, and 'pretend' reading. The background and theoretical underpinnings of the project are discussed in an introduction written by the editors; in the conclusion they pull together the major themes in the teacher researchers' chapters and discuss the political implications of their efforts to change literacy teaching and learning in their urban classrooms.
This book provides a general introduction to the R Commander graphical user interface (GUI) to R for readers who are unfamiliar with R. It is suitable for use as a supplementary text in a basic or intermediate-level statistics course. It is not intended to replace a basic or other statistics text but rather to complement it, although it does promote sound statistical practice in the examples. The book should also be useful to individual casual or occasional users of R for whom the standard command-line interface is an obstacle. tinyurl.com/RcmdrBookThe site includes data files used in the book and an errata list. http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Books/RCommander/Writing-Rcmdr-Plugins.pdf Writing R Commander Plug-in Packages
Shame remains at the core of much psychological distress and can eventuate as physical symptoms, yet experiential approaches to healing shame are sparse. Links between shame and art making have been felt, intuited, and examined, but have not been sufficiently documented by depth psychologists. Shame and the Making of Art addresses this lacuna by surveying depth psychological conceptions of shame, art, and the role of creativity in healing, contemporary and historical shame ideologies, as well as recent psychobiological studies on shame. Drawing on research conducted with participants in three different countries, the book includes candid discussions of shame experiences. These experiences are accompanied by Cluff's heuristic inquiry into shame with an interpretative phenomenological analysis that focuses on how participants negotiate the relationship between shame and the making of art. Cluff's movement through archetypal dimensions, especially Dionysian, is developed and discussed throughout the book. The results of the research are further explicated in terms of comparative studies, wherein the psychological processes and impacts observed by other researchers and effects on self-conscious maladaptive emotions are described. Shame and the Making of Art should be essential reading for academics, researchers, and postgraduate students engaged in the study of psychology and the arts. It will be of particular interest to psychologists, Jungian psychotherapists, psychiatrists, social workers, creativity researchers, and anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of this shame and self-expression.
This second edition of Design of Observational Studies is both an introduction to statistical inference in observational studies and a detailed discussion of the principles that guide the design of observational studies. An observational study is an empiric investigation of effects caused by treatments when randomized experimentation is unethical or infeasible. Observational studies are common in most fields that study the effects of treatments on people, including medicine, economics, epidemiology, education, psychology, political science and sociology. The quality and strength of evidence provided by an observational study is determined largely by its design. Design of Observational Studies is organized into five parts. Chapters 2, 3, and 5 of Part I cover concisely many of the ideas discussed in Rosenbaum's Observational Studies (also published by Springer) but in a less technical fashion. Part II discusses the practical aspects of using propensity scores and other tools to create a matched comparison that balances many covariates, and includes an updated chapter on matching in R. In Part III, the concept of design sensitivity is used to appraise the relative ability of competing designs to distinguish treatment effects from biases due to unmeasured covariates. Part IV is new to this edition; it discusses evidence factors and the computerized construction of more than one comparison group. Part V discusses planning the analysis of an observational study, with particular reference to Sir Ronald Fisher's striking advice for observational studies: "make your theories elaborate." This new edition features updated exploration of causal influence, with four new chapters, a new R package DOS2 designed as a companion for the book, and discussion of several of the latest matching packages for R. In particular, DOS2 allows readers to reproduce many analyses from Design of Observational Studies.
Since most datasets contain a number of variables, multivariate methods are helpful in answering a variety of research questions. Accessible to students and researchers without a substantial background in statistics or mathematics, Essentials of Multivariate Data Analysis explains the usefulness of multivariate methods in applied research. Unlike most books on multivariate methods, this one makes straightforward analyses easy to perform for those who are unfamiliar with advanced mathematical formulae. An easily understood dataset is used throughout to illustrate the techniques. The accompanying add-in for Microsoft Excel can be used to carry out the analyses in the text. The dataset and Excel add-in are available for download on the book's CRC Press web page. Providing a firm foundation in the most commonly used multivariate techniques, this text helps readers choose the appropriate method, learn how to apply it, and understand how to interpret the results. It prepares them for more complex analyses using software such as Minitab, R, SAS, SPSS, and Stata.
Designed for introductory research courses in the professional fields and social sciences, this text acquaints students and beginning researchers with a broad view of research methodologies and an understanding of the assumptions that inform each of these approaches. More experienced researchers will also find the book useful in acquainting them with methodologies and theoretical frameworks that are new to them. The text is distinguished by its avoidance of using the discreet categories of qualitative and quantitative methods to organize the chapters. While some chapter authors rely more on one or the other, many employ multiple methodologies to investigate particular problems and questions. Further, the book is not organized into single, contradictory positivist-interpretivist categories of research; chapter authors often situate methodologies within a variety of, and sometimes multiple, theoretical positions, particularly as these approaches are shaped by the historical context of social science research. Focus points in Foundations for Research: Methods of Inquiry in Education and the Social Sciences: research ethics.intertwined relationship of theory and research design. systematic examination of ways to design and implement high-quality, trustworthy research across varying research designs. specific methods for implementing research within various frameworks. pedagogical strategies. |
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