Psychologists use scientific research methods in order to understand people’s feelings, actions and thoughts. There are various ways to conduct research. There are three main research methods, the descriptive, correlational and experimental. What sets them apart and what are their similarities? Watching people behave is better known as observation, and in descriptive approach this is the major vehicle for gathering data. The methods used in the descriptive can be: case studies (detailed examination of a person), surveys (asking questions to a sample population) and naturalistic observation (behaviour studied in its natural setting).
An example of a survey can be to go out and assemble a group of people that represents the population and ask them how well they sleep and then adapt the results to the main population. The meaning with the descriptive approach in psychology is to observe events where the variables cannot be controlled. The main advantages with descriptive research are that it provides detailed information and yields data that can be adapted to a general population.
However, there is no cause-effect relation shown from the data acquired and the gathering of a population may not go well as it should and leads to an unrepresentative sample. A vast amount of information collected in applied psychology is not gathered in the laboratory. Most data is correlational, this means that the variables are controlled and the strength of their relation is calculated. This can be best described with an example; a student with a high pre-exam confidence correlated with following exam success.
This means that a person with a high value on one measure (confidence) also scored highly on the other measure (exam grade). Correlation is the degree of relation between pairs of scores. The benefit with the correlational research method is that it allows prediction and that it examines issues that have an ethical cause to them and that otherwise cannot be experimented on. The major difficulty with this approach is that there is a great chance for bi-directional problems: does x affect y or does y affect x?