Course Description & Objectives:

This course enhances postgraduate psychology students’ knowledge and skills for conducting, analyzing, and interpreting research in the field of psychology. Particular focus will be placed upon developing critical thinking, which is an essential part of a critical research consumer. For this reason, the course aims to answer questions such as ‘Why are we carrying out the research?’ and ‘How can we achieve the research objectives?’ This course focuses to develop an understanding of the basic framework of the research process. Main objectives of this course are to: develop an understanding of various research designs and techniques, identify various sources of information for literature review and data collection, distinguish between qualitative and quantitative research methods and their relationships, understand the qualitative and quantitative orientations that are important to viewing and interpreting research situations and analyze and interpret findings from qualitative and quantitative research. It will be useful for conducting research and as tools for professional practice.\

Learning Outcomes:

After successful completion of this course, the students will be able to

• Understand and  the basic framework of research process, various research designs and techniques.
•  Identify various sources of information for literature review and data collection.
• Develop an understanding of the ethical dimensions of conductingqualitative and quantitative  research.
• Critically analyze the components of scholarly published research  and evaluate its quality

Contents

1. Introduction to Research: Elements of Research & Types of Research
2. Classification of Research: Descriptive, Exploratory and Explanatory
3. Research Problem &  Literature Review
4. Theories  & Formulating the Hypotheses
5. Sampling: Sampling frame and Sampling Design, Probability and Non-Probability Sampling
6. Correlational Research Design
7.  Quasi-Experimental Design
8. Survey Research Design
9. Experimental & Factorial Design,
10. Ethical Issues in Conducting and Reporting the Research as per APA Manual 7th edition/ the latest one
11. Qualitative vs. Quantities Research,  Interviews: Structured, Semi-Structured, and Unstructured
12. Focus Groups,
13.  Unobtrusive Measures of Behavior,
14. Content and Thematic Analysis,
15. Grounded Theory

Recommended Texts

1. Goodwin, K. A., & Goodwin, J. C.  (2016). Research methods in psychology (8th ed.). New York: John Willy Sons
2. American Psychological Association (2019). Publication manual of APA (7th ed.). Washington DC: APA.
3. Neuman, W. L. (2014). Social research methods: Qualitative and quantitative approaches (7th ed.). Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.

Suggested Readings

1. Coolican, H., Coolican, H. (2014). Research methods and statistics in psychology. London: Psychology Press.
2. Smith, J. A. (2015). Qualitative psychology: A practical guide to research methods (3rd ed.). London: SAGE Publications