"My goal for this text is to provide a step-by-step, student-friendly introduction to conducting research in behavioral science. In organizing the text, I have drawn on my experiences over the past 25+ years teaching methods courses, as well as on the hands-on approach I take with this topic in the classroom. The text describes the steps in the research process to help students understand not only how to apply knowledge of research to their daily lives, but also how to of develop, conduct, and present a research study. To this end, concepts important for developing research ideas, conducting a literature review, reading journal articles, subject sampling, and ethics are covered in early chapters of the text along with an overview of data collection techniques, research designs, variables, and measurement presented in Chapters 4 and 5. More detailed coverage of these topics is included in the "More about" chapters, which are written to be inserted in any order according to instructor preference and the level of coverage the instructor chooses for their course. For example, Chapter 7, where descriptive and inferential statistics are introduced, can easily be assigned earlier or later in the term based on instructor preference. This is also true of Chapter 3 on ethics: some instructors prefer to cover this topic early in the term, others prefer to cover it later"--.
The Process of Research in Psychology