Research Bias

Research Bias

One of the important aspects of being a good researcher is to take a neutral, unbiased perspective. It is especially difficult when we are passionate about a certain subject, or we believe we have observed something that proves our hypothesis. For example, if we are researching something that we have seen in our family, or experienced ourselves, it is much more difficult to take a good neutral perspective when researching it. Yet, it is often the thing we most want to research. For example, many researchers want to research childhood abuse because they themselves have experienced some sort of childhood abuse. In their minds, they have decided that there is a connection the abuse and something about the person or situation and their experience that must generalize to others as well. We call that anecdotal evidence. That simply means that it is a single case evidence. While that is meaningful to that person, it is not very good evidence of a widespread generalization of evidence. In other words, just because it happened in one case, or even several cases, does not mean that it is common for that there is a correlation between the two things broadly. But you can see how it might be difficult to take a neutral perspective.

For this discussion, choose any topic in psychology that could be researched, but that you would most likely have difficulty looking at from a neutral perspective. Feel free to include any personal reasons or experiences for that if you want, but do not feel you need to share personal experiences youre not comfortable sharing. Do share any bias you may have regarding your topic though. The purpose of this discussion is that you can recognize bias in yourself, and ways that you can overcome that. In your discussion, be sure to include a way that you would word your hypothesis, and research it in a way that would look for data that could go either way. That is, how would you research your hypotheses in a way that would allow for any result and be a neutral/unbiased perspective? One way to do this is to use the null/alternative hypothesis format. Basically, that says that you assume there is no difference between your two variables unless/until proven otherwise. Additionally, you must be very careful to avoid words such as prove, or cause, and other words that can often imply bias.

Your post should generally be at least 250 words, and cite any sources used.

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