Psychological research

Psychological research refers to research that psychologists conduct to research and analyse the experiences' and behaviours of individuals or groups. Their research can have educational, occupational, and clinical applications.

Psychologists use many research methods, and categorical distinctions of these methods have emerged. Methods can be categorized by the kind of data they produce: qualitative or quantitative—and both these are used for pure or applied research.

Psychology tends to be eclectic, applying knowledge from other fields. Some of its methods are used within other areas of research, especially in the social and behavioural sciences.

The field of psychology commonly uses experimental methods in what is known as experimental psychology. Researchers design experiments to test specific hypotheses (the deductive approach), or to evaluate functional relationships (the inductive approach).

The method of experimentation involves an experimenter changing some influence—the independent variable(IV)— on the research subjects, and studying the effects it produces on an expected aspect—the dependent variable (DV)— of the subjects behaviour or experience. Other variables researchers consider in experimentation are known as the extraneous variables, and are either controllable or confounding (more than one variable at play).

...
Wikipedia