Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology

S Alexander Haslam (Alex Haslam) is Professor of Psychology and Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland. Together with colleagues, he has written and edited 15 books and over 300 research articles and chapters. His most recent books are The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence and Power (with Steve Reicher and Michael Platow, 2nd ed. 2020) and Social Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies (edited with Joanne Smith, 2nd ed. 2017). He is former Chief Editor of the European Journal of Social Psychology and former President of the Psychology Section of the British Science Association. He is a recipient of the European Association of Social Psychology’s Kurt Lewin Medal for research excellence, and the International Society of Political Psychology’s Nevitt Sanford Award for contributions to political psychology. He has also received awards for distinguished contributions to psychological science from both the British Psychology Society and the Australian Psychology Society. In 2022 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia “for significant service to higher education, particularly psychology, through research and mentoring”. Craig McGarty is Professor of Psychology at Western Sydney University. He received his undergraduate training in psychology at the University of Adelaide and his PhD from Macquarie University in 1991 (where he was a tutor from 1985 until 1989). He spent 1990 as a lecturer in social psychology/social interaction at the University of Western Sydney and moved in 1991 to the Australian National University as a research associate. He was Reader and Head of the School of Psychology before moving to Murdoch University in Western Australia as the Director of the Centre for Social and Community Research and then Director of the Social Research Institute. He has worked on a wide range of topics in experimental social psychology, and his current research includes a social audit of the aspirations and solutions of a remote Indigenous community and studies of the reconciliation process in post-genocide Rwanda. His books include Stereotypes as Explanations (with Vincent Yzerbyt and Russell Spears, 2002) and Categorization and Social Psychology (1999). Tegan Cruwys is an Associate Professor and NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the Australian National University and a former Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow. Her research investigates how social relationships shape mental and physical health — work that is at the intersection of social, clinical and health psychology. She is passionate about the capacity our psychological theorising and methods to help us tackle big problems like discrimination, loneliness, and health inequality. She has authored over 140 papers on these topics, as well as The New Psychology of Health: Unlocking the Social Cure (with Catherine Haslam, Jolanda Jetten, Genevieve Dingle, and Alex Haslam, 2018) — winner of the British Psychology Society’s Textbook of the Year award in 2020. Niklas K. (Nik) Steffens is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Business and Organisational Psychology in the School of Psychology at The University of Queensland. His research focuses on leadership and followership, group processes and teamwork, and health and well-being in applied contexts – research he has conducted in collaboration with over 100 researchers across the globe. He collaborates with and consults to organisations, community groups, and industry to use theory and evidence to solve applied problems and improve group and organisational functioning. He recently co-edited Organizational Psychology: Revisiting the Classic Studies (with Michelle Ryan and Floor Rink, 2022). In 2018 he was awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) by the Australian Research Council. For his work on leadership development around the 5R program (particularly with Alex Haslam, Kim Peters, and Blake McMillan), he received the Australian Psychology Society’s Workplace Excellence Award for Leadership Development in 2017 and was finalist of the 2023 Academy of Management’s MED evidence-based leadership development program award.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Research in Psychology: Objectives and Ideals
Chapter 3: Research Methods
Chapter 4: Experimental Design
Chapter 5: Survey Design
Chapter 6: Descriptive Statistics
Chapter 7: Some Principles of Statistical Inference
Chapter 8: Examining Differences between Means: The t-test
Chapter 9: Examining Relationships between Two Variables: Correlation
Chapter 10: Comparing Two or More Means by Analysing Variances: ANOVA
Chapter 11: Examining Relationships between Multiple Independent Variables and One Dependent Variable: Multiple Regression
Chapter 12: Analysing Other Forms of Data: Chi-square and Distribution-free Tests
Chapter 13: An Overview of High-Level Quantitative Methods
Chapter 14: Classical Qualitative Methods
Chapter 15: Contextual Qualitative Methods
Chapter 16: Research Ethics
Chapter 17: Conclusion: Managing Uncertainty in Psychological Research