Doing Collaborative Research in Psychology: A Team-Based Guide

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Subjects Psychology -- Research -- Methodology. Summary Doing Collaborative Research in Psychology offers an engaging journey through the process of conducting research in psychology. Using an innovative team-based approach, this hands-on guide will assist undergraduates with their research-in their courses and in collaboration with faculty or graduate student mentors. Contents Machine generated contents note: Statistics as "Principled Argument" The Basics: How Should You Incorporate Feedback? Includes bibliographical references and index. View online Borrow Buy Freely available Show 0 more links Set up My libraries How do I set up "My libraries"?

These 12 locations in All: John and Alison Kearney Library. Open to the public ; BF Open to the public ; Open to the public.

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La Trobe University Library. Bendigo Campus, Heyward Library. Kelvin Grove Campus Library. The University of Melbourne Library. University of Western Australia Library. University of Wollongong Library. These 3 locations in New South Wales: These 2 locations in Queensland: These 6 locations in Victoria: Open to the public Book English Show 0 more libraries This single location in Western Australia: Similarly, Bob Norwood's in-class question stimulated my pioneering research on shyness in adults.

Bob, a shy student himself, helped me develop this line of research and coauthored the project's Psychology Today article.

Doing Collaborative Research in Psychology: A Team-Based Guide

The bottom line for me, and my message to my colleagues everywhere, is to inspire inquiry and curiosity in undergraduate students, while also empowering them to be active creators of knowledge and understanding. Some of these students will go on to an academic career in psychology, but many others will translate the lessons of psychology and their experience as creators into inspired accomplishments in a host of other fields and in their personal lives as well. Among the hundreds of students in my research teams and the thousands I taught in many different classes, two stood out as special.

Jerusha Detweiler was the smartest kid in the class, smashing the uppermost grade barriers, and she was one of the most sensitive neophyte researchers I had encountered. So imagine what these two could do in collaboration! I did imagine it, and so I did everything I could to make this vision into a reality, into a permanent unity of the Detweiler-Bedells. And so here we have this guide to team-based research, one of the best labors of love that I have ever seen. It is written in an accessible, even charming style, filled with interesting material, exciting adventures for students and mentors, and a detailed exposition of how to get from a clueless here to clue-filled there.

You will find that it covers all the essential steps in the research endeavor. Where do good ideas come from? How do you design a logically convincing study and then execute it in a way that stands up to the messy realities of implementing any research design? And how do you analyze the data generated by your research so that your findings provide meaningful evidence in support of equally meaningful conclusions? These steps culminate in the take-home message of your research, which you must preach to the world—not just to your choir.

This means becoming a polished speaker and presenter. It also means writing up your research as a technical report, thesis, or poster for a conference, and ideally as an article for submission to a professional journal. This book will walk you through the process of making your oral presentations and write-ups accurate, meaningful, and interesting. In this way, your hard work can achieve the highest goal—of being memorable. What is so unique and special about this guidebook is that it spells out the how and why of organizing undergraduates into effective research teams, enabling students to share their energy, naive excitement, and dedication to the goal of creating new knowledge in ensembles of like-minded peers.

Undergraduates are continually expanding their own intellectual boundaries, and working together in teams they have the ability to expand the available knowledge in our field, perhaps in unexpected ways. That is the lesson of this book. What more could a student, teacher, or reader of this extraordinary book want? Not much more—from my view as a former student, ancient teacher, and current reader of this very timely team-based guide.

When colleagues or friends ask what we enjoy most about our jobs as professors, the answer comes quickly and easily. When we were undergraduates two decades ago at Stanford University, we had the great fortune of being mentored by professors who were passionate about the process of learning, not just about the content of their courses.

They taught us that learning should be immersive and fun, and, above all else, they taught us that learning should be a collaborative endeavor. Within psychology, this type of learning happens when professors and students work together doing science. This means conducting research in the classroom and in the lab. Our professors at Stanford instilled in us the belief that undergraduates have amazing potential and can grow rapidly into promising researchers. Now that we are professors ourselves, we think of our students as our youngest, most vibrant colleagues, and these colleagues are the best part of our jobs.

This spirit of collaboration is essential because psychological research is a team effort. As undergraduates, we worked closely with graduate students and their faculty advisers. Our regular team meetings ushered research projects from start to finish. During these meetings, each team member, including the undergraduates, had the ability to make key contributions to a project's success. Later, as doctoral students, we collaborated with one another. Our marriage and children have been long-term side effects of what began as a purely academic relationship.

As we worked together, we reached up to faculty mentors and down to undergraduate assistants to help us pursue our lines of research. This team-based approach to research is the norm at larger universities, where professors, graduate students, postdoctoral students, and undergraduates all work together to conduct research.

In such an environment, teams form naturally as people with different skills and different levels of experience and expertise interact. After we earned our doctorates, we found ourselves on a long drive from Connecticut to Oregon. As we drove, our minds kept returning to our best experiences in learning and conducting research.

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In every case, these experiences were collaborative. The line between teaching and learning was often blurred, and the line between learning and research seemed artificial. Doing science was doing science, period. These musings led us to a clear vision of how we would involve undergraduates in collaborative research. We planned to do so systematically , engaging ourselves and our students in collaborative research both in the classroom and in our research lab.

Together with our students, we wanted to own the ideas and questions of psychology. We have been pursuing this goal for more than 10 years. In classes ranging from Community Psychology to Advanced Statistics, we ask our students to work in teams in order to tackle challenging, real-world research questions. Similarly, in our lab, we [Page xvi] have developed a laddered, team-based method of collaborating with our students.

As we developed and refined this approach to teaching and learning, it became clear to us that our focus on teamwork and many of the skills we were teaching our students were not emphasized in standard research methods texts. Students should know what goes on behind the scenes of research. They should learn to work effectively with their peers and their professors, and they should develop a clear understanding of how to move a project from a vague set of ideas to a polished presentation of data.

These skills require a concrete understanding of collaborative research. In other words, students master research only through doing it. This type of hands-on learning calls for careful guidance. Our goal in this book is to offer guidance to undergraduates who are actively involved in research, whether in their courses or in collaboration with faculty or graduate student mentors. The book is designed to lead students on an engaging journey through the process of conducting collaborative research. We emphasize an approach that promotes effective teamwork and reflects the collaborative nature of experimental psychology.

Students will learn to work as a team to generate creative research ideas, design studies, recruit participants, collect and analyze data, write up results in APA style, and prepare and give formal research presentations. We conclude the book with something most undergraduates crave: The book's first chapter introduces students to the virtues of team-based learning and teaching, and we emphasize three principles of effective collaboration that we revisit throughout the book: After reading this first chapter, students can read Chapters 2 through 12 either sequentially or separately.

Instructors and research mentors have the flexibility of assigning particular chapters that are most relevant to the current state of a research project or the content of a course. Regardless of the order in which the chapters are read, each chapter builds on the theme of how research is enhanced by effective teamwork, and we use examples from classic and contemporary research studies to bring research concepts to life. Chapter 2 focuses on creative idea generation, including step-by-step guidance on how to brainstorm effectively.

Chapter 3 teaches students how to develop testable predictions by first grounding their ideas in relevant theories and research. This chapter includes many details about the nuts and bolts of successful literature searches using databases such as PsycINFO. In Chapter 4 , we focus on ethical issues, paying particular attention to the use of human participants in research, and we provide detailed guidance on preparing an institutional review board application.

Chapter 5 transitions to the concrete aspects of research design. This chapter focuses on translating predictions into elegant research methodologies and selecting or designing effective outcome measures.

Chapter 6 offers a primer on statistics and data, highlighting how the best experimenters pay attention to what their data will look like during the design phase of a study, well before data collection ever begins. We then devote the entirety of [Page xvii] Chapter 7 to something that is often overlooked in traditional research methods texts: Chapter 8 focuses on conducting a study and includes detailed discussions of recruiting and running participants.

Chapter 9 transitions to advice on how to present research findings. In this chapter, we discuss research talks and poster presentations. We then devote Chapter 10 to the process of writing an APA-style paper, focusing on the importance of peer editing in addition to the mechanics of good writing.

The book's two final chapters discuss how students can extend and make the most of their research experiences. In Chapter 11 , we describe how a student can link his or her research interests with those of a faculty or graduate student mentor in order to develop and carry out a student-initiated project.

Finally, in Chapter 12 , we reflect on the many benefits of undergraduate research. We emphasize how much a student learns from and is shaped by a team-based research experience, and we describe how the benefits of such an experience generalize outside the research lab and well beyond college. We conclude the book by discussing how students can assess their experiences and market their skills to potential employers and graduate programs. We designed this text as a hands-on, explanatory guide to conducting research, with a focus on the skills needed to collaborate effectively.

We cover many of the traditional topics of research methodology, but we also provide detailed advice, backed by numerous research findings, concerning the nuts and bolts of the research process. Moreover, we introduce students to the practical issues of day-to-day, team-based research.

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This emphasis on team-based research is unique, as is the assumption that students will be doing research while they are reading the book. This text is aimed at undergraduates taking basic and advanced courses in research methodology, as well as students enrolled in courses requiring independent or collaborative research theses. An equally ideal audience is the undergraduate research assistant or student collaborator who is working with a professor or a graduate student research mentor in a laboratory setting.

It is a high-level text for first-year or second-year undergraduates, and it is particularly well suited to juniors and seniors. Although the text is written with the undergraduate psychology student in mind, it may be equally appealing to master's-level psychology students as well as students working toward degrees in health sciences, education, behavioral economics, experimental philosophy, or public health.

In beginning and advanced psychology methodology courses for undergraduates, this text would be a supplement to a traditional research methods text. Likewise, it would be a supplementary text in lab courses in any of the subdisciplines of psychology i. As a supplement, the text would play a central role as students design and conduct original experiments as part of their course work.

In more advanced research courses such as independent research or honors research, instructors can rely on our book as a primary text. Alternatively, instructors can use it as a stand-alone text in career-oriented courses such as those focused on professional issues [Page xviii] or careers in psychology. Faculty or graduate students who run research labs with undergraduate assistants will also find it useful as a stand-alone text because it quickly immerses students in the day-to-day practice of collaborative research.

Indeed, the book is designed to help students and research mentors alike develop more effective collaborations with one another. In this vein, it also can be used in graduate-level teaching development courses, such as those concerning pedagogical issues in psychology, to give graduate students a template for mentoring undergraduates to be more effective research assistants. Unlike some traditional research methods texts, this book is purposely engaging and conversational in tone.

Our goal is to treat the reader as if she or he were sitting in the classroom or laboratory with us. To enhance this experience and to make the text as useful as possible to students, we include the following pedagogical features:. Writing this book has been a labor of love in many ways.

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