Psychology Statistics: 10 Steps In Conducting A Psychology Experiment

To succeed in your psychology class or when you’re performing a psychology experiment, what you need to know about psychology statistics and how to do it yourself? It’s a major part of psychology because it allows you to interpret the information that you have.

Statistics and psychology are both partners which means that you won’t succeed if you don’t perform one of them.

Considering that you’ll get a large volume of data for your study, you will need a way to interpret them. By using the right statistical method, you may extract the data for your study.

How many people were you able to include in your study? How many people eat their breakfast? How many people go to work? With all the questions in your survey, you will need to understand how the result changes depending on the valuables that you have.

What you need to know about psychology statistics? It will allow you to answer the over strength of the valuables and their relationships. 

Importance of Statistics in Psychology

By using statistics for your study, you will be able to answer all the questions that you have on your survey. Psychologists will be able to:

• Organize Data

It’s easy to become overwhelmed with all the data and information that you have for your study. Using a statistical formula, a psychologist will allow you to present and comprehend the data that you have for you to easily understand it.

Visual displays like pie charts, scatterplots, graphs, and frequency distributions allow researchers to have a better view of the patterns and data that you have.

• Describe Data

Once you organize all the data and information that you have, you will be able to use descriptive statistics to interpret the data and summarize all the facts.

You will be able to know how many men or women answered your survey, the children that are included, the children included, and many more.

• Make inferences based on the data

Inferential statistics allow you to infer the research that you have. It allows psychologists to test the hypothesis that they have to depend on their study.

Using the information that you got when organizing your data and being able to interpret it, you will be able to accept or reject the hypothesis that you have.

How to Conduct a Psychology Experiment

When conducting a psychological experiment, it’s important that you understand how complicated, intimidating, and long the process is. When it’s your first time experimenting, you should consider that you might get confused and not know where to begin. 

Like any other experiment, you need to use a scientific method to answer all your conclusions and provide evidence. When experimenting, you should learn the seven basic steps. These are:

1. Ask the Question or Find the Problem

With so many topics to choose from, you must choose the right problem for your study. When choosing a topic, here are some things to consider:

• Investigate

When finding a topic, you should first investigate a common problem in your environment or society. You can conduct a survey to know the right problem to ask and the hypothesis that you need for your research. 

• Review psychology literature

One of the many ways to verify your research is by reviewing the available psychology literature. Some authors will also mention that their study will need further research to answer their ultimate questions.

• Think about current problems

Explore the current problems that you, the people around you, or the environment around you face every day. Explore the questions that you have on the problems that you have raised and strategize on how you can perform different strategies to solve them.

2. Define Your Valuables

Valuables are the things that will impact the result of your study. You must know how to correctly define your valuables for you to correctly answer your questions.

For example, if your study is about sleep deprivation which results in lesser quality on your study, that means your valuables need to know how many students deprive themselves of sleep, and the corresponding results to their studies. 

3. Develop a Hypothesis

After having the right problems and knowing how to define your valuables, the next thing that you need to do is to develop a hypothesis. You should consider that the valuables that you have should answer your provided hypothesis.

If you derive yourself to a null hypothesis, then that would mean there’s no difference in whatever treatment that you have for your hypothesis. The null hypothesis is also valid because it means that you have contradicted your results.

4. Conduct a Background Research

Once you have a testable hypothesis, it’s the best time to do research for your study. What do previous researchers already know about the study that you have? What are the possible questions that you have discovered?

Knowing all these questions will help you learn the previous research done by other people including journal articles, newspapers, books, websites, and online databases.

After conducting your research, it’s important to know that you can alter the original hypothesis that you have. This will help you narrow down your hypothesis and articulate it even further on your topic.

5. Select an Experimental Design

There are three experimental designs for you to conduct your research and answer your hypothesis. The next step that you need to take is to develop an experimental design that you have to take. The three experimental designs that you have to take are:

• Pre-experimental design

A pre-experimental design will only include a single group and without any comparison to control groups and treatment groups. Some examples would include pre-test/post-test studies and case studies.

• Quasi-experimental design

A quasi-experiment design would include a control group, but not a randomization group.

• True experimental design

A true experimental design would include both pre-and quasi-experimental designs which means that it would include single groups, control groups, and random assignment.

6. Standardize Your Procedures

Once you’ve started your experiments, it’s important to consider treating all groups with the same formula and strategy. It’s important to treat all treatments with the same conditions and the same survey.

7. Choose Your Participants

Now that you’ve set your hypothesis and procedures the same way, it’s now time to choose the participants that will be included in your survey. When choosing the participant for your experiment, there are two techniques that you can choose to use. These are:

• Simple random sample – These are individuals who you randomly select from a given group.
• Stratified random sample – These are individuals that are chosen from a random population. They may differ in race, age, sex, and socioeconomic status.

8. Conduct the Necessary Tests and Collect the Data

Once you’ve selected the participants for your experiment, it’s now time to conduct the tests that you’ve prepared and collect all the data that you’ve received. Here are some tips that you can use before you conduct any tests:

• You need to ensure that the testing procedures that you’ve prepared are ethical. Make sure that you get approval from the proper groups like the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to perform tests on human beings. 
• Once you’ve received approval, the next thing that you would want to do is to present informed consent to all your participants. You will need to inform them that the information that you receive will be used for a study.

Once both of these steps are completed, you can now perform the experiments.

9. Analyze the Results

Now that you have all the data and information that you need, the next thing that you need to do is to analyze it. Use statistical methods to provide the right summary from the data and answer the hypothesis that you originally concluded. 

Inferential statistics for a large amount of data that are collected from random samples for a large population. There are more statistical methods that you can use that would depend on how large the data that you have.

10. Share the Result

After concluding your hypothesis, the next thing that you need to do is to share the result. By sharing your experiment, you can inform the other scientific communities about your research. Remember that a lab report or professional journal article should include the following:

• Title page
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Method
• Results
• Discussion
• References
• Tables and figures

Conclusion

Using the right statistical method in your psychological research is important to ensure that you come up with the right hypothesis and conclusion. Remember the steps we’ve mentioned above so that you will know how to properly do it at the time of your research.