This report describes and reflects upon an approach to embedding psychological literacy within the core Research Methods curriculum in a small university in the United Kingdom. Psychology students were involved in the 'Living Lab: Feeding the Campus' project, an interdisciplinary network of students and staff aiming to find solutions for local…

Researchers often rely on undergraduate students to participate in psychological studies and so ethical guidelines state that there must be educational value to their participation. In previous studies that have asked undergraduates whether they felt they learned something new from participating in research, students have generally said yes.…

Psychology Participant Pools (PPP) are known to be used within psychology departments in the United Kingdom as a way to promote understanding of psychological research and as a means to aid students and researchers to collect data. However, there is currently no information regarding the different practices undertaken in each department. This…

Attempts to understand "subjectivity" have historically involved distinguishing the strengths of subjective methods (e.g., survey ratings from informants) from those of alternative methods (e.g., observational/performance-based tasks). Yet, a movement is underway in Psychology that considers the merits of "intersubjectivity":…

This article gives a reflective account of lessons learned from the experiences of three cognitive developmental scientists conducting psychological research in educational settings. First, we describe and analyze four key cultural distinctions between traditional approaches to research in psychology and education: 1) different structures, 2)…

This paper presents a non-parametric imputation technique, named random forest, from the machine learning field. The random forest procedure has two main tuning parameters: the number of trees grown in the prediction and the number of predictors used. Fifty experimental conditions were created in the imputation procedure, with different…

This commentary was written while the author was visiting the 30th International Congress of Psychology in Cape Town, South Africa. Looking at the program, he could see that psychological research on non-Western populations and internationally comparative research seems to be much "en vogue"! However, much of the research he has seen…

People with a learning disability, the experts of their own experience are increasingly involved in research. We will be discussing in this paper their centrality in the development of a psychological therapy outcome measure for people with learning disabilities. Their involvement needs to go beyond giving their views to being included in the…

Differing theoretical approaches to the study of emotions are presented: emotions as private (psychodynamic approaches); emotions as sociocultural phenomena (social constructionist approaches); and a third perspective (interactionist approaches) transcending these two. These approaches have important methodological implications in studying…

From the perspective of the ''person-object-theory of interest'' (POI) the development of interest and interest-related motivational orientations can be explained at the level of functional principles by referring to a dual regulation system that consists of both, cognitive-rational and partly subconscious emotional control mechanisms. Within this…

Examines developments in empirical research in family therapy training since Kniskern and Gurman's (1979) review. Assesses present knowledge concerning training outcomes in marital and family therapy from six studies of the development of instruments for measuring the outcome of training and nine studies which actually evaluate training outcome.…

This paper argues that statistical inference practices in both educational and psychological research should be directed away from traditional significance tests in favor of Bayesian inferential methods. Regular use of exploratory data analytic methods is recommended in conjunction with computer intensive resampling methods. Approaches to…

The feminist biographical method is an in-depth interpretive methodology that is useful for research in the field of psychology. I believe that this qualitative method is an excellent tool for analyzing individual narratives of participants' lives in relation to the larger cultural matrix of the society in which they live. Although an oral…

Personal epistemological beliefs influence one's cognitive and metacognitive operations in a significant way. They also influence how teachers conceptualize teaching. It is therefore essential for teacher educators to understand the epistemological beliefs that pre-service teachers are holding to foster mature epistemological outlooks that could…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the literacy difficulties experienced by people with physical disabilities, and the factors that prevent them from improving their literacy skills. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 25 individuals with physical disabilities who defined themselves as having literacy difficulties. Four…