Research Methods in Psychology Evaluating a World of Information 4th Ed. by Beth Morling (2020)

Research Methods in Psychology: Evaluating a World of Information, 4th Edition (2020) by Beth Morling — published by W. W. Norton & Company — is the widely adopted research methods text that teaches students to evaluate the credibility of claims they encounter in everyday life and in the scientific literature. Morling's celebrated framework gives students a durable mental model for becoming smart consumers and competent producers of psychological research.

Through clear writing, engaging real-world examples, and a focus on the four big validities, the fourth edition guides students through the foundational concepts of behavioral research design — from formulating empirical questions through conducting studies and communicating findings in APA style.

Topics covered: psychology as a way of thinking and the empirical approach; sources of information about behavior including journalism, intuition, and authority versus empirical research; the three claims (frequency, association, causal) and four validities (construct, external, statistical, internal); ethical research with human and animal participants and the IRB; reliable and valid measurement; surveys, observations, and physiological measures; sampling theory and frequency claims; correlational research, scatterplots, and association claims; multivariate correlational research and ruling out third variables; introduction to simple experiments and causal inference; complex experiments with more than one independent variable; experimental design issues including confounds and noise; quasi-experiments, small-N designs, and applied research; replication, meta-analysis, and the real world; and APA-style scientific writing.

Essential for: undergraduate research methods courses in psychology and behavioral sciences; experimental and quantitative psychology sequences; pre-graduate study preparation in clinical, cognitive, social, developmental, or industrial-organizational psychology; honors thesis preparation; and any social science course requiring foundational research design literacy.