Fernald/Chapter2

	2 RESEARCH METHODS
CHAPTER INTRODUCTION NATURALISTIC OBSERVATION Types of Observation Uses and Cautions SURVEY METHOD Use of Questionnaires Sampling Procedures Unobtrusive Measures CASE STUDY Interviews and Tests Case History EXPERIMENTAL METHOD Classical Experiment Design of Experiments Multifactor Studies RESEARCH IN PERSPECTIVE Research Ethics Comparison of Methods SUMMARY	N HIGH SCHOOL, THEY CALLED HIM SMART STANLEY. HE READ THE NEW YORK TIMES, EDITED THE SCIENCE MAGAZINE, AND KNEW THE ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS THAT puzzled his classmates.
	A lean teenager full of ambition, he was intellectual more than social. Early in life, he began to study questions for which there were no answers (Zimbardo, 1992). Growing up in New York City, Stanley Milgram was a city person. He loved cities. He observed the movement of crowds, behavior of bystanders, and reactions of strangers. He marveled at the coordination among millions of city dwellers as they read the morning newspapers simultaneously, walked the streets together, and arrived at places on time, all in a relatively confined area. He watched people compete for seats on the subway, positions in waiting lines, machines at the laundromat and, of course, parking spaces.
	Growing up during World War II, Milgram was deeply concerned about human aggression, grieving over the destruction of millions of people in Nazi concentration camps. At age 16, just three years after the war, he demonstrated his concern, as well as his capacity for finding out about things. He published his first research article, describing the effects of radiation from the atomic bomb. "It was as easy as breathing,'' he said of his research. "I tried to understand how everything worked'' (Milgram, 1992). Afterward, Milgram became a part-time photographer, amateur songwriter, inventor of gadgets, and finally a social psychologist. Observing people became his life's work. No matter where he traveled, he used his inquiring mind and roving eye, the tools of his trade. He studied people on the sidewalks, in the streets, and at cafes, as well as in the laboratory. People in any context could serve as his subjects. In planning an investigation, Milgram sought direct, simple procedures, approaching research as an excursion into the unknown. "It is tentative, indeterminate, something that may fail,'' he said. It might yield only a confirmation of the obvious, reflecting what we think we already know through common sense. Or it might yield highly significant, unexpected insights (Milgram, 1992). For two reasons, important research findings in psychology are often considered common sense.	First, we are all amateur psychologists more than we are amateur physicists, chemists, or biologists because psychological issues--our personal relations, individual achievements, emotional experiences, and so forth--are generally more important to us than are the impersonal elements of our environment. Second, common sense supplies several answers for most psychological questions. In most situations, almost any human reaction is conceivable. Thus, the task for scientific psychology is to determine which common sense beliefs are relevant, which are not, and to reconcile contradictions among them. Common sense is sometimes supported by research (Kelley, 1992). This chapter concerns the ways in which psychologists conduct research, showing how they collect or gather information. Specifically, it describes four basic methods: naturalistic observation, the survey method, case study, and the experimental method. As noted in the closing discussion on research in perspective, each of them makes its own special contribution. This chapter does not include the so-called correlational approach, which is not a method for collecting information. It is a later phase of the research process, a statistical procedure for analyzing and interpreting information after it has been gathered. Correlation is therefore considered briefly at the end of this chapter and extensively in a later chapter on statistics.

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