Welcome

Book cover image with the title “A Modern Guide to Understanding and Conducting Research in Psychology.” The background shows a photograph of a cluster of green and yellow balloons with happy and sad faces drawn on them. Note to readers: Every image in this book includes a text description like this one for compatibility with screen readers and other assistive technologies. This is the only description visible in the book; the rest are embedded in the images and accessible to assistive technology.
Book cover image with the title “A Modern Guide to Understanding and Conducting Research in Psychology.” The background shows a photograph of a cluster of green and yellow balloons with happy and sad faces drawn on them. Note to readers: Every image in this book includes a text description like this one for compatibility with screen readers and other assistive technologies. This is the only description visible in the book; the rest are embedded in the images and accessible to assistive technology.

License

This textbook is an adaptation of Psychology Research Methods: Core Skills and Concepts licensed under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 license without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensee.

The following portions of the book were adapted from Introduction to Modern Statistics First Edition by Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel and Johanna Hardin, licensed under a Creative Commons by-sa 3.0 license: Sampling plots; Intro and Anecdotal Evidence portions of Sampling chapter.

This adaptation is authored by Celeste Pilegard (University of California, San Diego) and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Cover photo by Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash. Icons by Eucalyp on Flaticon.

Revisions

Throughout the book: Chapter formatting updated using bookdown package; glossaries restored; references formatted with BibTeX. Photographs refreshed with more recent examples; figures recreated for visual alignment with book design; plots recreated in Base R. Broken links updated or removed. Organization and topic groupings changed by chapter.

  • Developing Research Ideas and Reviewing the Research Literature sections moved from Getting Started chapter to appendix.
  • Qualitative Research section moved from Nonexperiments to Getting Started
  • Sampling chapter created from Survey Research subsection; remaining survey research details moved to Nonexperiments

Appendices: Guidelines on presenting research have been updated to align with the 7th edition of the APA Publication Manual, including citation rules, figure/table formatting examples, and the student/professional paper distinction. The sample APA-style paper has been replaced with an adapted preprint of Pilegard & Mayer (2016) formatted for APA 7. Jitter plots added to data visualization examples. Advice from Bem (2003) deemphasized or removed.

Revisions to portions from Çetinkaya-Rundel & Hardi: Changes in formatting. Stratified random sampling figure adapted to proportionate stratified random sampling.

Accessibility

The HTML version of this book is built to conform with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA, including alt text, keyboard navigability, and heading structure. If you encounter a barrier or have a suggestion for improvement, please open an issue on GitHub.

The PDF version does not support alt text or other accessibility features. To access the HTML version, visit pilegard.github.io/psychmethods.