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[SOUND] Hello, my name
is Anderson Smith, people call me Andy and I'm the instructor in this course.
The course is Descriptive Research Methods in Psychology.
I am a research Psychologist.
I have been in Georgia Tech for 40 years studying memory and
we're going to talk now about what makes research psychologists different from
everybody else.
If you think about it, all of us have been trying to understand and
control behavior since we were little tots.
The title of the course is Descriptive Research Methods in Psychology.
And it's part of a two course sequence on Research Methods in Psychology.
The first one dealing with descriptive methods, the course you're in now.
Then there's a second course that deals with experimental methods.
The difference is primarily whether you can make causal inferences
from the research you're doing.
Descriptive methods, just like it says, is descriptive.
And experimental methods allow you to make causal inferences about
the relationships that affect behavior.
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Now, the course is divided into five sections.
And the five sections are first, Psychology as a Science.
What does make psychologist different from everybody else's study behavior?
Observational methods,
one of the techniques of descriptive methods that we used to look at behavior.
Surveys and polls, the most common way of measuring behavior to surveys.
We'll look at sampling.
How do we go about sampling the group that we want to measure and
then we'll talk about correlational studies.
Looking at the relationship among variables,
between variables if we have two variables, they relate to each other.
What is the relationship between IQ in school performance, that's a correlation.
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The text reading assignments are located on the syllabus.
But there come two different texts.
The All Psych texts,
both of these are online texts that you will find on the web.
But you can also see the readings on this website itself.
From the All Psych Research Methods course and
then from the Open Textbook Library Research Methods course.
Both of them online courses that are available for everything, so
nothing you have to buy.
The grade in the course will be determined by a short quiz
as taken after each section in the course.
So there are 5 sections of the course,
12 points each, that's 60 points of the grade.
And then the final grade, part of the grade,
40 points from the final exam, which will be given at the end of the course.
If you get a 94 to 100, you'll get an A, 85 to 93,
you get a B, 77 to 84, you get a C, 70 to 76, a D.
And then you have to make a 70 in the course to pass the course.
Everything about the course is spelled out in the syllabus, and you should be able to
get everything you need to take the course and enjoy it from that syllabus.
Thank you and look forward to seeing you in the next video.
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Dr. Anderson D. SmithRegents’ Professor Emeritus
