Chapter Two: Research Methods (and how wrong they can be)

The way psychologists collect, analyze and present data is all through certain research methods; which can lead to completely outlandish conclusions or to an educated and precise conclusion. Many ways that psychologists record accurate data is to make sure that no one, participants or experimenter, can have a bias on the hypothesis, unconscious or consciously. They also have to be wary of where and from what background they are taking participants from. Even if they have done all of their preemptive steps correctly they still have to present the data they collect in a correct way that it will pass through multiple peer reviews to be published.
Some of the more interesting and interesting ways your research can go wrong includes unconsciously changing the outcome of a study because of your unconscious bias. This causes experimenters to take precautions such as having double blind studies, where both the participants and the experimenters are told of the independent variable but not told which group will receive the variable, an example of this would be a group of participants who are given a real pill and a placebo pill and neither examiner nor patient knows who got which. There are so many ways that your research and data could be inaccurate. One of the most important things to do in a research study is to check your processes of collecting participants, creating your procedure to collect data, how you interpret your data, show your data and present it.