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Chapter 1 The Role and Importance of Research

What You’ll Learn About in This Chapter:

• Who does research and why

• How research is defined and what some of its purposes are

• What a model of scientific inquiry is and how it guides research activities

• Some of the things that research is and some of the things that it isn’t

• What researchers do and how they do it

• The characteristics of good research

• How a method of scientific inquiry guides research activity

• The different types of research methods and examples of each

Say Hello to Research!

Walk down the hall in any building on your campus where social science professors have their offices to such departments as psychology, education, nursing, sociology, and human development. Do you see any bearded, disheveled, white-coated men wearing rumpled pants and smoking pipes, hunched over their computers and mumbling to themselves? How about disheveled, white-coated women wearing rumpled skirts, smoking pipes, hunched over their computers and mumbling to themselves?

Researchers hard at work? No. Stereotypes of what scientists look like and do? Yes. What you are more likely to see in the halls of your classroom building or in your adviser’s office are men and women of all ages who are hard at work. They are committed to finding the answer to just another piece of the great puzzle that helps us understand human behavior a little better than the previous generation of scientists.

Like everyone else, these people go to work in the morning, but unlike many others these researchers have a passion for understanding what they study and for coming as close as possible to finding the “truth.” Although these truths can be elusive and sometimes even unobtainable, researchers work toward them for the satisfaction of answering important questions and then using this new information to help others. Early intervention programs, treatments of psychopathology, new...