Quantitative psychology

TEXT 4

Developmental psychology

TEXT 3

Mainly focusing on the development of the human mind through the life span, developmental psychology seeks to understand how people come to perceive, understand, and act within the world and how these processes change as they age. This may focus on intellectual, cognitive, neural, social, or moral development. Researchers who study children use a number of unique research methods to make observations in natural settings or to engage them in experimental tasks. Such tasks often resemble specially designed games and activities that are both enjoyable for the child and scientifically useful, and researchers have even devised clever methods to study the mental processes of small infants. In addition to studying children, developmental psychologists also study aging and processes throughout the life span, especially at other times of rapid change (such as adolescence and old age).

1. Answer the following questions:

1. What does developmental psychology focus on?
2. What does developmental psychology seek to?
3. In what a way do the researchers study children?
4. How do educational tasks look like?
5. What else do the researchers study except children?

1. Retell the text using the questions from exercise 1.

Quantitative psychology involves the application of mathematical and statistical modeling in psychological research, and the development of statistical methods for analyzing and explaining behavioral data. The term quantitative psychology is relatively new and little used, and it loosely covers the longer standing subfields psychometrics and mathematical psychology.

Psychometrics is the field of psychology concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement, which includes the measurement of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, and personality traits. Measurement of these unobservable phenomena is difficult, and much of the research and accumulated knowledge in this discipline has been developed in an attempt to properly define and quantify such phenomena. Psychometric research typically involves two major research tasks, namely:

- the construction of instruments and procedures for measurement;

- the development and refinement of theoretical approaches to measurement.

Whereas psychometrics is mainly concerned with individual differences and population structure, mathematical psychology is concerned with modeling of mental and motor processes of the average individual. Psychometrics is more associated with educational psychology, personality, and clinical psychology. Mathematical psychology is more closely related to psychonomics/experimental and cognitive, and physiological psychology and (cognitive) neuroscience.

Basic research encompasses the study of behavior for use in academic settings, and contains numerous areas: abnormal psychology, biological psychology, cognitive psychology, comparative psychology, developmental psychology, health psychology, personality psychology, social psychology and others. Quantitative psychology is contrasted with applied psychology.

1. Answer the following questions:

2. What does quantitative psychology involve?

3. What is psychometrics?

4. What two major research tasks does psychometric research involve?

5. What is psychometrics concerned with?

6. What areas does basic research contain?

2. In which aspects are you interested most of all? Would you like to read additional literature on this issue?

Дата добавления: 2014-12-27