The purpose of this course has been to teach you the basics of research so
you can be a more critical consumer of the research in positive psychology.
And think about how to use and apply it to your work, and your life.
The videos for
this week will bring together what we've learned to reach these goals.
They will be broken up into three parts.
the first video, this video,
will provide an overview of different types of research design.
In the second video we will talk about the key pieces of a research study and
how to use the abstract to identify key ideas without reading the full study.
And then the third and final video we'll review the key questions to ask yourself
when you're reviewing a media article that discussed the research study.
There are three types of research designs.
Experimental design, quasi-experimental or correlational design, and
non-experimental design.
First, experimental design.
The primary question in an experimental design is did the treatment or
intervention have an effect on the outcome?
Or put another way, does the treatment or intervention work as intended?
So, for example let's say you implemented the gratitude intervention where you asked
youth to think of people that appreciate but
have not expressed their gratitude too.
And you have them write a letter of gratitude and
perhaps you even have them share the letter of gratitude to the individuals and
person that they wanted to thank.
Your goal is to see if this gratitude intervention has an impact
on the well being of those who participated.
For this to be an experimental design, a number of conditions need to be met.
First, there has to be a control group.
So all experimental studies are performed by comparing two groups, a treatment or
intervention group that is exposed to some kind of intervention.
And a control group that does not receive the intervention.
The control group exist because it allows for a comparison to be made.
It gives the people doing the research and
insight on to how the treatment group would have theoretically behaved,
if they had never received the intervention at all.
Second, participants have to either be randomly assigned to participate
in the intervention or
randomly assigned to the control group who did not receive the intervention.
The fact that they are randomly assigned means
everything else can be considered equal.
And you can actually say that the intervention caused the outcomes.