Psychology2016

24 CHAPTER 1

the infant to the equipment, controlling the number of infants and their ages, as well as

everything else that goes on in the laboratory.

As mentioned previously, laboratory settings have the disadvantage of being an

artificial situation that might result in artificial behavior—both animals and people often

react differently in the laboratory than they would in the real world. The main advantage

of this method is the degree of control that it gives to the observer.

Both naturalistic and laboratory observations can lead to the formation of hypothe-

ses that can later be tested.

CASE STUDIES Another descriptive technique is called the case study, in which one

individual is studied in great detail. In a case study, researchers try to learn everything

they can about that individual. For example, Sigmund Freud based his entire theory of

psychoanalysis on case studies of his patients in which he gathered information about

their childhoods and relationships with others from the very beginning of their lives to

the present. to Learning Objective 13.2.

The advantage of the case study is the tremendous amount of detail it provides. It may

also be the only way to get certain kinds of information. For example, one famous case study

was the story of Phineas Gage, who, in an accident, had a large metal rod driven through his

head and survived but experienced major personality and behavioral changes during the

time immediately following the accident (Damasio et al., 1994; Ratiu et al., 2004; Van Horn et

al., 2012). Researchers couldn’t study that with naturalistic observation, and an experiment is

out of the question. Imagine anyone responding to an ad in the newspaper that read:

Wanted: 50 people willing to suffer nonfatal brain damage for scientific

study of the brain. Will pay all medical expenses.

You certainly wouldn’t get many volunteers. Case studies are good ways to study

things that are rare.

The disadvantage of the case study is that researchers can’t really apply the results

to other similar people. In other words, they can’t assume that if another person had the

same kind of experiences growing up, he or she would turn out just like the person in

their case study. People are unique and have too many complicating factors in their lives

to be that predictable. So what researchers find in one case won’t necessarily apply or

generalize to others. Another weakness of this method is that case studies are a form of

detailed observation and are vulnerable to bias on the part of the person conducting the

case study, just as observer bias can occur in naturalistic or laboratory observation.

SURVEYS Sometimes what psychologists want to know about is pretty personal—like

what people do in their sexual relationships, for example. (I’m pretty sure naturalistic

observation of human sexual behavior could end in an arrest!) The only way to find out

about very private (covert) behavior is to ask questions.

In the survey method, researchers will ask a series of questions about the topic they

are studying. Surveys can be conducted in person in the form of interviews or on the

telephone, the Internet, or with a questionnaire. The questions used in interviews or on

the telephone can vary, but usually the questions in a survey are all the same for every-

one answering the survey. In this way, researchers can ask lots of questions and survey

literally hundreds of people. To gain a better understanding of what it is like to complete

a survey, try your hand at the survey Participating in a Research Survey on the next page.

That is the big advantage of surveys, aside from their ability to get at private infor-

mation. Researchers can get a tremendous amount of data on a very large group of peo-

ple. Of course, there are disadvantages. For one, researchers have to be very careful about

the group of people they survey. If they want to find out what college freshmen think

about politics, for example, they can’t really ask every single college freshman in the

entire United States. But they can select a representative sample from that group. They

Phineas Gage survived a steel tamping rod
going through his head after some explosive
powder went off unexpectedly. The steel
tamping rod entered above the left side of
his mouth, passed through his left frontal
lobe, and exited through the top of his skull.

case study
study of one individual in great detail.

representative sample
randomly selected sample of subjects
from a larger population of subjects.