Contents

CHAPTER 2: The Scientific Method 43FIGURE 2.5Measures of accuracy of a country’s bank clocks, pedestrian walking speed, and the speedof postal clerks performing a routine task served to describe the pace of life in a country. Inthe graph a longer bar represents greater accuracy of clocks or greater speed of walking andperforming a task. (From Levine, 1990.)JapanUnited StatesEnglandTaiwanItalyIndonesiaBank clocks Walking speed Postal clerks’ speedis not threatened by our knowledge that that person’s heart, like the heartsof other human beings, is located in the upper left chest cavity. Similarly, wedo not deny a person’s individuality when we state that that person’s behavioris influenced by patterns of reinforcement (e.g., rewards, punishments).Researchers merely seek to describe what organisms are like in general on thebasis of the average performance of a group of different organisms.Some psychologists, notably Gordon Allport (1961), argue that the nomotheticapproach is inadequate—unique individuals cannot be described by anaverage value. Researchers who use the idiographic approach study the individualrather than groups. These researchers believe that although individualsbehave in ways that conform to general laws or principles, the uniqueness ofindividuals must also be described. A major form of idiographic research is thecase study method, which we will describe in Chapter 9.Depending on their research question, researchers decide whether to describegroups of individuals or one individual’s behavior. Although manyresearchers do mainly one or the other kind of research, others may do both.A clinical psychologist, for instance, may decide to pursue mainly idiographicinvestigations of a few clients in therapy but consider nomothetic issues whenattempting to answer research questions with groups of college students. Anotherdecision that the researcher must make is whether to do quantitative orqualitative research. Quantitative research refers to studies in which the findingsare mainly the product of statistical summary and analysis. Qualitative researchproduces verbal summaries of research findings with few statistical summariesor analysis. Just as psychological research is more frequently nomothetic thanidiographic, it is also more typically quantitative than qualitative.