Blog #16: Answer 2

1. What is your EQ?

What is the best way to conduct social psychology research to study different behavioral patterns?

2. What is your first answer?

The best way to conduct social psychology research to learn about behaviors is to conduct experiments with clear independent and dependent variables and as few confounding variables as possible.

3. What is your second answer?

The most effective way to conduct social psychology research is to create social psychology experiments with generalizable results.

4. List three reasons your answer is true with a real-world application for each.

I'm not sure how to go about this because the phrasing is a little confusing. But my the reasoning behind my answer 2 is because while I have a lesson on my first answer, I realized that a big problem when coming up with this research is confounding variables (or variables in the experiment that may affect the causation). But when I tried taking all the confounding variables out of the experiments, it ended up making the experiment not a real life situation so the outcome of the experiment is no longer generalizable and you can't apply it as a theory on how people work in real-life. So I realized that making sure the findings of your study have "real-world" applications is important in conducting the research and studying social psychology which is why I made that my second answer.

5. What source best supports your answer?

http://www.iwh.on.ca/wrmb/generalizability

6.  What other source supports your answer?

I learned a lot about the importance of causation in studies through my mentor. She also taught me that although a lot of studies are interesting, if they're not done correctly, they can't be applied to real-life therefor we didn't really learn much from them. 

7. Tie this together with a concluding thought. 

Good research is something that we can learn from and apply to every day life. If the study is too specific, or is to confined to a lab setting, it loses generalizability and we can no longer depend on those findings to represent the real-world population and everyday life rendering it almost useless. That's why I've decided that a good answer to my EQ would be to conduct an experiment with generalizable results.