research method

• The abstract is the first section in a psychological report or journal. It includes a summary of the aims, hypothesis, method, results and conclusions, and thus provides an overview of the entire report.
• Structured interviews, like questionnaires, are straightforward to replicate due to their standardised format. The format also reduces differences between interviewers.
• Structured interviews are made up of a pre-determined set of questions that are asked in a fixed order. Basically like a questionnaire but conducted face-to-face (or over the phone/internet) in real time, i.e. the interviewer asks the questions and waits for a response.
• The biggest issue with an independent groups design is that the participants who occupy the different groups are not the same in terms of participant variables. These differences may act as a confounding variable, reducing the validity of the findings. To deal with this problem researchers use random allocation.
• To address the problem of participant variables in an independent groups design, participants should be randomly allocated to the different experimental conditions. Random allocation attempts to evenly distribute participant characteristics across the conditions of the experiment using random techniques.
• Random allocation example: pieces of paper with A or B written on them are placed in a 'hat' and the researcher selects them one at a time to assign participants to groups