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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Psychological methodology
ESSENTIALS OF STATISTICS FOR THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, 10th Edition delivers straightforward instruction, hands-on learning tools and real-world examples to help you go beyond memorizing formulas to truly understanding the hows and whys of statistics.
Giving extra focus to the topics students typically struggle with most, the authors take time to fully explain statistical concepts. Integrated applications reinforce concepts, offering further support to ensure that even those with a weak background in mathematics can fully grasp statistics.
The authors also illustrate how an understanding of statistical procedures will help you comprehend published findings -- ultimately leading you to become a savvy consumer of information.
Assessment is an important part of any psychologist's role and the
outcome can have consequences, positive and negative, for the
person being assessed. The principles and practice of psychological
assessment is a guide to drawing up, administering and interpreting
assessment procedures, and judging whether the techniques used are
theoretically and procedurally sound. It also takes a special look
at assessment from an organisational perspective, because although
many of the technical and scientific issues with respect to
psychological assessment are common to all areas of applied
psychology, there are numerous issues and applications that are
unique to the organisational context. The principles and practice
of psychological assessment is more of a "how to" than a critical
text, but includes some background information and in-depth
theorising for more problematic issues. A glossary of terms and a
unique cognitive map of psychological tests are provided. Changes
in this third edition include a new chapter on the history of
assessment in South Africa, and the dominant narrative in some
quarters that industrial psychologists set out deliberately to
ensure the failure of some segments of the workforce. The
principles and practice of psychological assessment is aimed at
third year and honours students of psychology and industrial
psychology as well as practitioners.
Research today demands the application of sophisticated and
powerful research tools. Fulfilling this need, The Oxford Handbook
of Quantitative Methods in Psychology is the complete tool box to
deliver the most valid and generalizable answers to today's complex
research questions. It is a one-stop source for learning and
reviewing current best-practices in quantitative methods as
practiced in the social, behavioral, and educational sciences.
Comprising two volumes, this handbook covers a wealth of topics
related to quantitative research methods. It begins with essential
philosophical and ethical issues related to science and
quantitative research. It then addresses core measurement topics
before delving into the design of studies. Principal issues related
to modern estimation and mathematical modeling are also detailed.
Topics in the handbook then segway into the realm of statistical
inference and modeling with chapters dedicated to classical
approaches as well as modern latent variable approaches. Numerous
chapters associated with longitudinal data and more specialized
techniques round out this broad selection of topics. Comprehensive,
authoritative, and user-friendly, this two-volume set will be an
indispensable resource for serious researchers across the social,
behavioral, and educational sciences.
Evidence-based practice has become the benchmark for quality in
healthcare and builds on rules of evidence that have been developed
in psychology and other health-care disciplines over many decades.
This volume aims to provide clinical neuropsychologists with a
practical and approachable reference for skills in evidence-based
practice to improve the scientific status of patient care. The core
skills involve techniques in critical appraisal of published
diagnostic-validity or treatment studies. Critical appraisal skills
assist any clinician to evaluate the scientific status of any
published study, to identify the patient-relevance of studies with
good scientific status, and to calculate individual
patient-probability estimates of diagnosis or treatment outcome to
guide practice. Initial chapters in this volume review fundamental
concepts of construct validity relevant to the assessment of
psychopathology and cognitive abilities in neuropsychological
populations. These chapters also summarize exciting contemporary
development in the theories of personality and psychopathology, and
cognitive ability, showing a convergence of theoretical and
clinical research to guide clinical practice. Conceptual skills in
interpreting construct validity of neuropsychological tests are
described in detail in this volume. In addition, a non-mathematical
description of the concepts of test score reliability and the
neglected topic of interval estimation for individual assessment is
provided. As an extension of the concepts of reliability, reliable
change indexes are reviewed and the implication of impact on
evidence-based practice of test scores reliability and reliable
change are described to guide clinicians in their interpretation of
test results on single or repeated assessments. Written by some of
the foremost experts in the field of clinical neuropsychology and
with practical and concrete examples throughout, this volume shows
how evidence-based practice is enhanced by reference to good
theory, strong construct validity, and better test score
reliability.
Psychological assessment is practiced in wide-ranging settings to
address the varied clinical and administrative needs of veteran
populations. Such assessment blends record review, clinical
interviews of the veteran and collateral sources of information,
behavioral observations, and psychological testing.
This book promotes the care and well-being of veterans by bringing
together knowledgeable and experienced psychologists to discuss a
range of psychological assessment methods and procedures. It aims
to help patients and their families, healthcare providers, and
concerned citizens gain an improved understanding of veterans'
cognitive functioning, emotional states, personality traits,
behavioral patterns, and daily functioning.
The book begins with a history of the psychological assessment of
veterans and investigates its efficacy in different settings,
including outpatient mental health, long-term care, primary care,
home-based primary care, and telemental health. Later chapters
address assessment of a variety of disorders or presenting
problems, including substance use disorders, psychotic disorders,
mood disorders and suicidal thoughts and behavior, PTSD and other
anxiety disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder,
dementia, pain and pain-related disorders, and polytrauma. The book
concludes with important special considerations, including
assessment of symptom and performance validity, assessment of
homeless veterans and health-related quality of life, and ethical,
legal, and professional issues.
Psychological Assessment of Veterans provides an essential
reference and guide for clinical psychologists, including those
working in the subspecialties, and psychology trainees who work
with veterans.
Research is finding a way to measure the problem. This seminal
2-volume book contains hundreds of the most useful measurement
tools for use in clinical practice and in research. All measures
are critiqued by the editors, who provide guidance on how to select
and score them and the actual measures are wholly reproduced. This
second volume, focusing on measures for use with adults, whose
conditions of concerns are not focused on family relationships or
couple relationships, includes an introduction to the basic
principles of measurement, an overview of different types of
measures, and an overview of the Rapid Assessment Inventories
included herein. Volume II also contains descriptions and reviews
of each instrument, as well as information on how they were
selected and how to administer and score them. This book is
designed as the definitive reference volume on assessment measures
for both practice and research in clinical mental health. This
fifth edition of Corcoran and Fischer's Measures for Clinical
Practice and Research is updated with a new preface, new scales,
and updated information for existing instruments, expanding and
cementing its utility for members of all the helping professions,
including psychology, social work, psychiatry, counseling, nursing,
and medicine. Alone or as a set, these classic compendiums are
powerful tools that clinicians and researchers alike will find an
invaluable addition to - or update of - their libraries.
Comprehensive yet accessible, this text provides a practical
introduction to the skills, attitudes, and methods required to
assess the worth and value of human services offered in public and
private organizations in a wide range of fields. Students are
introduced to the need for such activities, the methods for
carrying out evaluations, and the essential steps in organizing
findings into reports. The text focuses on the work of people who
are closely associated with the service to be evaluated, and is
designed to help program planners, developers, and evaluators to
work with program staff members who might be threatened by program
evaluation.
Qualitative interviewing is among the most widely used methods in
the social sciences, but it is arguably the least understood. In
The Science and Art of Interviewing, Kathleen Gerson and Sarah
Damaske offer clear, theoretically informed and empirically rich
strategies for conducting interview studies. They present both a
rationale and guide to the science-and art-of in-depth interviewing
to take readers through all the steps in the research process, from
the initial stage of formulating a question to the final one of
presenting the results. Gerson and Damaske show readers how to
develop a research design for interviewing, decide on and find an
appropriate sample, construct a questionnaire, conduct probing
interviews, and analyze the data they collect. At each stage, they
also provide practical tips about how to address the ever-present,
but rarely discussed challenges that qualitative researchers
routinely encounter, particularly emphasizing the relationship
between conducting well-crafted research and building powerful
social theories. With an engaging, accessible style, The Science
and Art of Interviewing targets a wide range of audiences, from
upper-level undergraduates and graduate methods courses to students
embarking on their dissertations to seasoned researchers at all
stages of their careers.
Wise Use of Null Hypothesis Tests is a user-friendly handbook meant
for practitioners. Rather than overwhelming the reader with endless
mathematical operations that are rarely performed by hand, the
author emphasizes concepts and reasoning. In Wise Use of Null
Hypothesis Tests, the author explains what is accomplished by
testing null hypotheses-and what is not. The author explains the
misconceptions that concern null hypothesis testing. He explains
why confidence intervals show the results of null hypothesis tests.
Most importantly, the author explains the Big Secret. Many-some say
all-null hypotheses must be false. But authorities tell us we
should test false null hypotheses anyway to determine the direction
of a difference that we know must be there (a topic unrelated to
so-called one-tailed tests). In Wise Use of Null Hypothesis Tests,
the author explains how to control how often we get the direction
wrong (it is not half of alpha) and commit a Type III (or Type S)
error.
This book will be written primarily for graduate students, advanced
undergraduates, and professionals in the fields of school
psychology, special education, and other areas of education, as
well as the health professions. We see the book as being a viable
textbook for courses in research design, applied statistics,
applied behavioral analysis, and practicum, among others. We would
not assume of the readers any prior knowledge about single subjects
designs, nor any prior statistical experience. We will provide an
introductory chapter devoted to basic statistical concepts,
including measures of central tendency (e.g., mean, median, mode),
measures of variation (e.g., variance, standard deviation, range,
inter-quartile range), correlation, frequency distributions, and
effect sizes. In addition, given that the book will rely heavily on
R software, the introductory chapter will also devote attention to
the basics of using the software for organizing data, conducting
basic statistical analyses, and for graphics. The R commands used
to carry out these analyses will be largely automated so that users
will only need to define the range for their data, and then enter
it into the R spreadsheet. We envision these tools being available
on the book website, with instructions for using them available in
the book itself. We envision the book as being useful either as a
primary text for a course in educational research designs, school
psychology practicum, applied behavioral analysis, special
education, or applied statistics. We also anticipate that
individuals working in schools, school districts, mental health
facilities, hospitals, applied behavioral analysis clinics, and
evaluation organizations, as well as faculty members needing a
practical resource for single subject design research, will all
serve as a market for the book. In short, the readership would
include graduate students, faculty members, teachers,
psychologists, social workers, counselors, medical professionals,
applied behavioral analysis professionals, program evaluators, and
others whose work focuses on monitoring changes in individuals,
particularly as the result of specific treatment conditions. We
believe that this book could be marketed through professional
organizations such as the American Educational Research Association
(AERA), the National Association of School Psychologists, the
National Association of Special Education Teachers, the Association
for Professional Behavior Analysis, the American Psychological
Association (APA), the Association for Psychological Science, and
the American Evaluation Association. Within AERA, the following
special interest groups would have particular interest in this
book: Action Research, Classroom Observation, Disability Studies in
Education, Mixed Methods Research, Qualitative Research, and
Special Education Research. The book could also be marketed to
state departments of education and their special education and
school psychology divisions. Currently, many state departments of
education require documentation for Response to Intervention (RtI)
and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) procedures for
individual students. The method taught in this proposed book would
allow educators and student support personnel to document the
effectiveness of interventions systematically and accurately.
This book presents procedures and research techniques that are
based on critical perspectives of Psychology and Education. The
content is characterized by innovations on the relationship between
the researcher and the investigated context, and it problematizes
different perspectives and approaches to the psychological
phenomenon proposing new understandings of the subject, the world,
the social and the field of investigation itself as a permanent
dialectical movement. The book reports to Marxist-based
perspectives - especially to Vygotsky's ideas and concepts.
Therefore, it assumes the comprehension that in order to understand
the phenomenon in its historical dimension it is necessary to put
it into motion seeking to access the genesis of the manifestations
evidenced at the moment of the investigation. That is, the
historicity that characterizes the process of constitution of the
human psyche can only be apprehended in its movement, thus, what
matters is the process and not the product of its development.
Nevertheless, apprehending phenomena in movement is a challenge for
researchers interested in human processes within the scope of
relationships or practices of professionals and/or subjects of
various scenarios, which leads to the need to problematize the
different moments of research and their dimension in the
theoretical and practical fields. Which methodological techniques
or procedures allow the apprehension of the meaning movement
produced by the subjects in the investigated scenarios? To what
extent does dialectical materialism derived from Marxism support
the apprehension and analysis of research information of this
nature? What other theoretical-methodological perspectives, related
to Cultural-Historical Psychology, offer subsidies to these
investigations? The theoretical perspectives based on the Social
and Cultural analysis focus on the understandings of collective
contexts precisely because of the subject view constituted in the
inter-subjective relations that it undertakes - which adds even
more complexity to the investigative processes. From this
perspective, both the subject and other participants transform
themselves during the investigation, such transformation needs to
be permanently reflected and included in the research objectives
and purposes, in order to follow the movement of the meanings in
the expressed phenomenon.
Although science was originally broadly conceptualized as a
systematic, rigorous activity to produce trustworthy knowledge,
psychologists adopted a single philosophy of science and strictly
enforced natural science as the only proper "scientific"
psychology. Qualitative research has been part of modern psychology
from the beginning, but it was obscured for nearly a century as
positivist epistemology came to dominate the field. Building
culturally robust and intelligible theories capable of responding
more effectively to complex problems faced by a rapidly changing
world calls for openness in methodological diversity. Deeply rooted
in a hermeneutic tradition, cultural psychology has challenged the
appropriateness of seeking reductive knowledge because higher
mental processes such as religious beliefs, values, and choices are
bound by historical and cultural context. As greater
interdisciplinary integration and methodological innovations are
necessary to keep psychology of religion relevant, narrative
inquiry has emerged as a promising integrative paradigm.
Thinking Like a Researcher: An Engaged Introduction to
Communication Research Methods challenges students to assume the
role of a researcher to learn how to solve problems and analyze
relevant, real-world situations. The book presents students with an
array of research problems as seen through the eyes of four
different types of researchers: a college newspaper staff member;
an intern at a city government health agency; a political campaign
intern; and a recent college graduate working at a public relations
firm. Students adopt these roles and, in doing so, learn how to
apply research methods to a specific problem, analyze the resulting
data, and produce written research to communicate their findings.
The text is organized around extended examples that frame pairs of
chapters. The first chapter in each pair deals with methods ("What
would you do to gather data to answer the question?") and the
second with analysis ("What do you do with the resulting data?").
Throughout, students are prompted to fill in blanks, provide
responses, and guess the answers to questions. They learn how to
use appropriate and accessible tools to run analyses on real data
and cultivate results. Featuring a uniquely intuitive and immersive
approach, Thinking Like a Researcher is an exemplary textbook for
introductory courses in communication research and statistics.
Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and Beyondoffers an
in-depth and captivating step-by-step guide to the use of
semi-structured interviews in qualitative research. By tracing the
life of an actual research project-an exploration of a school
district's effort over 40 years to address racial equality-as a
consistent example threaded across the volume, Anne Galletta shows
in concrete terms how readers can approach the planning and
execution of their own new research endeavor, and illuminates
unexpected real-life challenges they may confront and how to
address them.The volume offers a close look at the inductive nature
of qualitative research, the use of researcher reflexivity, and the
systematic and iterative steps involved in data collection,
analysis, and interpretation. It offers guidance on how to develop
an interview protocol, including the arrangement of questions and
ways to evoke analytically rich data.Particularly useful for those
who may be familiar with qualitative research but have not yet
conducted a qualitative study, Mastering the Semi-Structured
Interview and Beyondwill serve both undergraduate and graduate
students as well as more advanced scholars seeking to incorporate
this key methodological approach into their repertoire.Anne
Gallettais Associate Professor at the College of Education and
Human Services at Cleveland State University.William E. Cross,
Jr.is the author of Shades of Black: Diversity in African-American
Identity.In theQualitative Studies in Psychologyseries
Social (psychological and sociological) systems present
considerable difficulties for modellers due to their complexity,
multidimensionality, uncertainty and irreducibility. The book
proposes that response functions (MRF) be used as a method of
constructing purposeful, credible and integrated social systems'
models from data and prior knowledge or information. For case
studies the authors have selected the problems usually studied by
psychologists and sociologists with statistical procedures, such as
investigation of variance and discriminant analysis based on the
general linear model or one of its multivariate generalisations
(structural equation models, etc.); disordered eating and obesity;
subjective well-being and alexithymia. An accompanying CD-ROM
contains the demonstration versions of three models that are
discussed in the various chapters. The Method of Response Functions
in Psychology and Sociology is aimed at Mathematical Psychologists;
Mathematical Sociologists; Applied Psychologists; Sociologists and
Social Practitioners. It will also be suitable for use on
undergraduate as well as graduate and postgraduate courses
specializing in these areas.
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