Research Methods

An accurate and accessible foundation for any research methods course.

With over two decades of classroom experience, Michael Passer knows how to guide students through the ins and outs of research methods in ways they can actually understand and put into practice. In this remarkable text, Passer’s experience leads to chapters filled with clear explanations, resonant examples, and contemporary research from across the breadth of modern psychology, all while anticipating common questions and misunderstandings. Features

• Promotes student understanding throughout the text with Learning Objectives and Concept Check questions for each subsection.
• Supports students as they learn the basics of scientific writing with an added appendix, annotated papers and integrated content to reflect the APA Style.
• Each chapter features useful infographics summarising important concepts, definitions of key terms and end of chapter questions that help students to review what they have learned.
• A set of exercises at the end of each chapter provides an in-depth challenge for students to demonstrate their understanding and apply their knowledge.

New in this Edition

• Includes the latest APA Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct to ensure students are up to date with the current standards psychologists use to guide ethical decisions in practice and research.
• New illustration and photographic figures throughout the text give students a stronger visual dimension to help grasp key concepts.
• References and data are updated for many existing figures and tables to keep the information current.

About the Author

Michael W. Passer is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Washington. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, he entered the University of Rochester fully expecting to be a physics or chemistry major, but he became hooked on psychological science after taking introductory psychology and a seminar course on the nature of the mind. He got his start as an undergraduate researcher under the mentorship of Dr. Harold Sigall, was a volunteer undergraduate introductory psychology Teaching Assistant, and received a Danforth Foundation Fellowship that partly funded his graduate studies and exposed him to highly enriching national conferences on college teaching.

Dr. Passer received his Ph.D. from UCLA, where he conducted laboratory research on attribution theory under the primary mentorship of Dr. Harold Kelley and gained several years of field research experience studying competitive stress, self-esteem, and attributional processes among boys and girls playing youth sports, mainly working with Dr. Tara Scanlan in the Department of Kinesiology. At the University of Washington he has conducted hypothesistesting field research on competitive stress with youth sport participants, collaborated on several applied research projects in the fi eld of industrial-organizational psychology, and for the past 20 years has been a Senior Lecturer and faculty coordinator of U.W.’s introductory psychology courses. In this role, he annually teaches courses in introductory psychology and research methods, developed a graduate course on the teaching of psychology, and is a U.W. Distinguished Teaching Award nominee. With his colleague Ronald Smith, he has coauthored five editions of the introductory textbook Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behavior (McGraw-Hill), and has published more than 20 scientific articles and chapters, mostly on attribution theory and competitive stress.