Everyday Research Methods

Observing Temper Tantrums

Psychologists can study any interesting behavior!  This story presents a video and interview with a researcher who studies temper tantrums in young children. 

Watch the video associated with the story, listening to the narration provided.  The authors are describing the child's behavior at each stage of her short tantrum.

This is an example of observational research, described in Chapter 6. 

a) What are the concerns of researchers who conduct observational research?  How do you think the Drs. Potegal and Green addressed or controlled for these concerns in their study on tantrums?  Specifically, how did they observe and measure tantrum noises without being intrusive? 

b) What kind of reliability would be needed?  How would you empirically establish this form of reliability?

The story reports that the researchers analyzed  audio data from over 100 temper tantrums.

They found that different tantrum sounds had very distinct audio signatures. When the sounds were laid down on a graph, the researchers found that different sounds emerged and faded in a definite pattern. Unsurprisingly, sounds like yelling and screaming usually came together.

"Screaming and yelling and kicking often go together," Potegal said. "Throwing things and pulling and pushing things tend to go together. Combinations of crying, whining, falling to the floor and seeking comfort — and these also hang together."

c) How might researchers have used correlations to discover which sounds "hang together?"  Try sketching a scatterplot (or some other kind of graph) that would illustrate the results mentioned above.

Ways to raise your IQ

This recent feature in the Wall Street Journal reviews several studies on how IQ changes over time.

The studies were conducted by a variety of researchers using a variety of methods.  Here is one example:

A 30-year study at the National Institute of Mental Health found that people whose work involves complex relationships, setting up elaborate systems or dealing with people or difficult problems, tend to perform better over time on cognitive tests. Test scores of people whose jobs are simple and require little thought actually tend to decline, according to the research, published in 1999 in Psychology and Aging.

a) This seems to be a quasi-experiment.  What type is it?  What are the main variables?  Can you sketch the results described above?

Here is another study explained in the article: 

New tasks stimulate the brain most. When researchers at the University of Hamburg subjected 20 young adults to one month of intense training in juggling, they found an increase in the corresponding gray matter in the brain as early as seven days after the training began. The added gray matter receded when the training was stopped, although the participants were still able to juggle, says the study....

b) What kind of dependent measures were used in this study--self-report, behavioral, or observational?

c) The design of the study is difficult to discern from this description alone.  The journalist does not mention a comparison group, so we might wonder if there is only be one group in the study--the group that learned to juggle.  What are the problems with using only one group in a study like this?  How might the researchers control for these internal validity threats? (You can look up the original study to find out what the real design was!)

d) Assume that the study above is an example of an interrupted time series design.  Sketch a graph of the results, based on the description given by the journalist.