CrystalShadow said:
Sigmund Av Volsung said:
CrystalShadow said:
Sigmund Av Volsung said:
CrystalShadow said:
Sigmund Av Volsung said:
Done.
Ditto on the above posts. Also some questions repeat themselves, though I get the feeling that was intentional >_>
Yeah, that would be a standard psychology strategy... You ask the same thing repeatedly in different ways, usually as many times as possible.
The idea is if someone is deliberately trying to hide what they actually think, you'll wear them down and the end result will be closer to the truth...
Though I think it doesn't really work if you aren't repeating the questions often enough...
Oh I know, I study psychology, but you never know if it was or wasn't intentional, as shown with "while playing online multiplayer(e.g. call of duty) do you like to work as part of a team or working alone" question
If anything, repeating questions can lead to demand characteristics, where the participant gains knowledge into the aim of the study and adjusts their behaviour as they might perceive to be appropiate. This is also problematic when it's an open questionnaire because you don't control for individual differences such as pre-emptive knowledge.
Also technically that should mean that we might have had to disclose this foreknowledge, as the results might've been influenced by unnecessary extraneous variables.
Ah. Psychology... Good thing I'm not a student of psychology. I don't have the patience for this degree of vagueness.
Biology is already too vague for me...
Probably not a surprise to learn then that once upon a time I was a physics student.
A lot less ambiguous most of the time... XD
Psychology isn't too vague, just that it isn't as comprehensive neither as susceptible to Occham's Razor as the other sciences, though that's due to the variety and intricacy of human behaviour. Though it does help in understanding how people interact with one another, but when it comes to deriving clear cause/effect relationships, things are still in the Wild West, since anyone with a degree can conduct a study using any approach and design they want(though that's a necessity of what's at play: behaviour is rarely that upfront or that simple)
Similar to a biologist's dilemma, "If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we'd be so simple we couldn't".
I suppose that's a reasonable point.
What I find, looking at it (from the outside admittedly) is that it is a subject plagued by people taking their own pet theory of how things work, and trying to find statistical data that supports it.
That leads to a lot of questionable 'proofs' of things because there's enough ambiguity in a lot of the data to lead to a very large number of conclusions if you fill in the blanks with whatever theory you personally think is valid...
More generally (and perhaps less insultingly. XD), it suffers (along with biology in general) from extreme issues with complexity and emergent behaviour.
It's great to study small things in isolation, but if the behaviour of a system as a whole is more complex than the sum of it's parts it becomes quite difficult to study effectively.
And most biological systems seem to exhibit a very large degree of emergent behaviour that makes it very difficult to relate the whole to the individual parts...
Of course, physics has stuff like that too. Chaos theory and emergent behaviour was after all an extension of trying to understand the weather, which in theory should be an obvious extension of some very simple principles governing fluid dynamics and gas laws, yet in practice is highly unpredictable and chaotic to the extent that models rarely predict reality with any degree of reliability.
And of course as you've said, correlation vs causation is a very big issue somehow in medicine, biology, psychology and the like. It's easy to spot patterns, but it's much less straighforward to determine if those patterns really mean anything or not...
There are few pet theories, at least from what I have studied. To be sure, a lot of psychology is derived from personal experiences and introspection(the father of the cognitive approach, Beck, used his own experiences in high school to consider how conditions such as depression come about, and how they are perpetuated) but there is still a strong framework of approaches to use. Some tend to mix and match in application(such as with criminal profiling: employing behaviourist and social theory) but it's rare that someone just gets to think up a theory and have it be acceptable in the community. To put it simply, the days of Freud are long gone: approaches start out as hypotheses and through experimentation and observation become theories.
And whilst it can be difficult to be precise, it is simply the nature of studying humans that is the limiting factor. Conducting mega-studies where you observe someone from infancy into adulthood are expensive and time-consuming, but even when a piece of research is simplistic and only derives a basic conclusion, it is rarely used by itself to prove or implement.
To give an example, we are currently studying forensic psychology, and the unit on "turning to crime" has a section on development. The studies used there include Farrington's "The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development" and Wikstrom's "Peterborough Adolescent Development Study". Farrington's observed 400 males across 50 years from childhood into old age, and managed to conclude several risk factors associated with personality. It is quite comprehensive, as it employed self-report techniques(questionnaires) and interviews not only on the participants themselves, but also on the parents, teachers, parole officers(if any) and it observed their criminal record. However, it doesn't stress the importance of environmental factors neither their interaction with individual differences(personalities). That's where Wikstrom's study comes in, which observed teenagers over the space of 3 years and concluded that depending on the criminogenic level of the environment(poor social cohesion and poor informal social control), even those who were from well-off families and exemplified no aggressive or anti-social behaviour could go on to commit crime in said environment.
It's quite wordy, but the gist is that in order to implement measures and build comprehensive theories, you rarely rely on one study and you are advised to use as many as possible. In the community, studies which limit behaviour to one single factor or state that an individual has no control over their actions are discouraged(if general and not in highly controlled settings) and frowned upon.
To me it smacks more of university level mathematics(or what I hear of it), where you are encouraged to assemble a toolkit of formulae and approaches in order to tackle complex problems. There's always the possibility of inaccuracy, but that's determined by how many perspectives you employed and how you have repeated the process.
The problem with public perception of psychology is that the general public usually just thinks of Freud and the psychodynamic approach(couch, dream analysis, notebook, etc.), when it is way more broad than that. The 20th century itself saw a multitude of emergent theories that has led to more ethical and effective treatments, such as CBT(cognitive therapy, as devised by Beck and Ellis), Systematic Desensithisation(which employs behaviourist theory as first developed by the likes of Pavlov, Skinner, Watson & Raynor) Drug Therapy(more of a thing in the US, but otherwise derived from Twin studies(observing genetically identical twins) and due, in no small part, to co-operation with biology) and many more.
