Applied Abnormal Psychology: Anecdotal Research Techniques

A great failing of modern psychology is the laboratory. Over the past century, a great many tests have been conducted on human and animal test subjects with the same flaw. What good does it do us to test the behavior of of a subject within a laboratory or other test facility? What we need to know is how a subject will respond to a stimulus not in a controlled-environment, but in the real world.

Osric University is one of just a handful of pioneering universities world-wide that is pushing the boundaries of psychological research outside of sterile labs and into a the environment where we actually live our lives. Our anecdotal research techniques take observations about real people, in real situations, and analyze the data to arrive at new conclusions that would be impossible to find in the confines of a lab.

In this course, we will look at data collection settings and formats, exploring multimedia data collection, and broad-sample, self-selecting group techniques and methodologies such as Internet-based surveys and interviews. We will address correspondent integrity issues, as well as read-between-the-lines analysis issues. Your grade will be based on 2 quizzes, 1 exam, and 1 anecdotal research project. The project will involve collecting 50+ datasets and then performing text-scan and manoselect analyses.

Required textbooks:

• How to Lie with Statistics, by Darrel Huff and Irving Geis (illustrator)

Updated 12-06-2005. Problems? Contact chris@osric.com