PSYC 804 The Utilization of Psychological Research

A primary goal of this course is to enable participants to be more discriminating consumers of psychological research. Two prerequisites to attaining that goal are: (a) the ability to distinguish between and among popular approaches used in psychological research; and (b) a working knowledge of basic statistics. It is assumed that students would have had some systematic exposure to basic statistics before taking this course. Accordingly, a brief review of basic descriptive and inferential statistics is provided. It is assumed that students taking this course would have had little or no systematic exposure to research approaches. Consequently, more time is spent on that topic. The lion share of the course is devoted to reviewing and critiquing psychological research studies.