Good research ideas and hypotheses do not just magically exist, begging to be tested; they must be discovered and nurtured. Systematic methods can help. Drawing on relevant scholarly literatures (e.g., research on creativity) and on the published personal reflections of successful scientists, this chapter provides an overview of strategies that can help researchers to (1) gather research ideas in the first place, (2) figure out whether an idea is worth working on, and (3) transform a promising idea into a rigorous scientific hypothesis. In doing so, it provides pragmatic advice about how to get good ideas and make the most of them.

This chapter can serve either as a starting point or a recharging point for instructors who are preparing to teach research methods and/or statistics at the college or graduate level. Using empirical work and experience, I’ll discuss the importance of these classes and then provide a list of what I perceive to be the most important recommendations and biggest challenges related to teaching these courses. Because so many classes include projects, I have dedicated half of the recommendations and challenges to the ones that involve student projects. It is my hope that a person reading this takes away a set of ideas and feels empowered to teach these courses well. For all the challenges, teaching these classes can be rewarding for the instructor and transformative for the student.

This chapter illustrates how law and society scholars conduct empirical research to pursue questions and build theory about law in Asian societies. It is not a manual for how to use various research methods or for asking and answering research questions. Rather, its purpose is to provide examples of how Asian law and society scholars go about their work, what challenges they encounter, and how they address them. It features both classic and new and innovative approaches. One set of readings illustrates how researchers obtained access to their subjects and how they collected data. A second set of readings shows how researchers wrestled with aspects of their own identities in relation to the research site and the people whom they study. A third set illustrates law and society researchers practicing their craft in the digital age, using social media and other advancements in technologies to pursue their research questions. All the readings are drawn from studies that appear in earlier chapters. In this way, readers get a peek behind the curtain, so to speak, and gain a better understanding of how the authors featured in this book struggled with the challenges faced by all researchers—and how they overcame them.

Summarizes how psychologists define psychopathology. Discusses ways in which abnormality was viewed historically, and modern mental health care. Identifies the research methods that psychologists utilize.

As the breadth and scope of primate cognition research continues to evolve, it remains essential that the ethical considerations of such work do so as well. The evaluation of ethics is shaped by time and place and centers on a variety of factors, including the questions being asked, the methods used, the setting, and the species studied. Here, we take a pragmatic approach in examining ethical considerations as they relate to cognitive research with primates in both captive and wild settings. We encourage primatologists to consider how primates’ lives are impacted prior to, during, and following the research. In addition, we highlight the importance of considering how such research activities interface with the people who work or live alongside the primates. Thus, we aim to help guide those studying and working with primates to plan and conduct ethically sound research.

This chapter sets out the methodology of the approach to behavioral economics developed in this book, emphasizing its rejection of the static “as if” approach of conventional economics and the latter’s view of rationality. It introduced the idea of a decision cycle (problem recognition, search, evaluation, choice, implementation and hindsight review), while emphasizing that how decisions are taken depends on their context. This leads to a pluralistic analysis where alternative perspectives share the idea that everything we do is based upon systems of operating rules and routines. The chapter explores the research methods of behavioral economics, including the roles of anecdotes, introspection, textual sources, questionnaires, experiments and computer simulations. Before closing by outlining the rest of the book, it introduces the evolutionary economics and evolutionary psychology perspectives that are closely related to the pre-1980 approaches to behavioral economics and kept building upon them after 1980 when behavioral economics was refashioned by Thaler with a focus on “heuristics and biases” that took the conventional approach to economic rationality as its reference point.

Psychological research is often organized into three broad categories: true experiments, quasi-experiments, and nonexperiments. Evolutionary psychology is no exception to this. In this chapter, we define and describe these categories, and discuss various evolutionary psychological studies (and their results) within these categories. The benefits and limitations of these designs are also discussed. Evolutionary psychologists have employed a wide array of true experiments, quasi-experiments, and nonexperiments to examine sexual behaviors. These methods range from simple self-reports (both quantitative and qualitative) and validated scales to naturalistic observations, complex manipulations of participants’ environments, longitudinal studies, meta-analyses, and creative dependent measures of perception, preferences, and behavior. Journals that may serve as publication outlets for evolutionary perspectives on sexual psychology are also mentioned.

The development of the sociological imagination is central to undergraduate training in sociology. Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) are one powerful pedagogical approach to helping students critically observe and analyze the complexity of social life. This chapter (1) explores the roots of UREs in sociology; (2) examines the literature on infusing and scaffolding course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs), attending to successful models implementing CUREs in several types of sociology courses, across the curriculum, and as an integrated departmental approach; (3) details benefits and challenges of implementing CUREs from various stakeholder perspectives, and (4) shares thoughts on the path forward to further infuse undergraduate research in the sociology curriculum.

Political science (PSCI) is housed in the social sciences, which together “examine what it means to be a social being, ranging from the minutiae of human behavior … to large scale social movements, demographics, economics and politics” (European Science Foundation, 2016). Undergraduate research (UR) in PSCI, whether using quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods, helps students develop critical thinking skills and tools, whereby they can apply what they learn in class to the real world, rather than just memorizing facts and figures that are forgotten after they take each semester exam.

Disasters have short and long-term negative effects on a large array of physical and mental health outcomes. Epidemiology offers a variety of tools and methodologies for conducting a needs assessment, surveillance, and longitudinal research aimed at identifying adverse outcomes and developing strategies for preventing disease and promoting health. The application of epidemiological methods has advanced our understanding of pervasive morbidity and mortality often experienced in the aftermath of disasters. Findings from epidemiological studies have implications for improving the allocation of resources and developing interventions targeting these adverse outcomes. In this chapter, we briefly highlight developments in the epidemiology of disasters. We present common study designs employed in disaster response and research and provide examples of applications of these methods in studying the consequences of the 1988 Spitak earthquake in Armenia. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of recent developments in research methodology and their potential implications for disaster researchers and public health practitioners focusing on prevention and mitigation.

Research into MALL has proven to be somewhat complex when compared to much of the earlier research in the field of CALL, which is the focus of this chapter. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, by the nature of the device, there is an expectation that a significant proportion of learning through mobile devices will take place out of class. While this does not preclude using devices in classroom settings (and there have been several very interesting studies that have looked at the use of mobile devices in class), it is exponentially more difficult to determine how learners are using their mobile devices in uncontrolled and unsupervised settings. Secondly, learners are typically using their own devices,whereas early studies into mobile devices typically involved using loaned devices, meaning that it is not logistically possible to install tracking software on them. The purpose of this chapter is to outline the difficulties involved with undertaking research in MALL and to describe various innovative approaches that have been undertaken, illustrated through appropriate recent examples from the literature.

This chapter describes diverse research methods to study multimedia learning. In light of the wide range of methods to study learning with multimedia and to stay in line with the focus of this Handbook, I target experimental research where a variation of multimedia design is tested against (at least) a control design. Thus, I omit case studies, technical developments, design-based research, etc. Moreover, I only take into consideration research in which the main dependent measure was some sort of learning outcome, such as performance, retention, or transfer. In addition, I look into variables mediating the way to this learning outcome. In this way I come to the following structuring of measures: tests that a priori capture characteristics of learners, measures that online trace the process of learning, self-reports of how learners experienced this learning, and learning outcome measures. For each type of measure, I provide a description and concrete examples of their use in multimedia research. Lastly, I explore thus far, less-frequently used methods in multimedia research, that have, however, the potential to shed new light on multimedia learning.