Lev Lazinskiy

Quality of Research Design

First of all let me just say that Funder’s Personality theories is the most biased textbook that I have ever read in my life. He has this arrogant first person view in which he completely seems to denounce all previous psychological theories and replaces then with his own. “Funder’s Laws”

Its a bunch of pretentious crap, and even the professor agrees.

On the other hand I just got done reading the chapter on research design, and along with the statistics course that I am taking this semester I am coming to the realization that there is not really much to research. In terms of generazibility or application to the rest of the world. This is why:

1. Most research subjects are college students - therefore not really a good sample of the rest of the population (i.e middle class, white, males)
2. Results are manipulated statistically and to the untrained eye may seem significant when really they are not.
3. No one can seem to agree what “statistical significance” truly is, therefore most research that is done is complete crap.

This just leads me to be much more careful when reading other peoples literature because you never know what they are trying to hide. That’s the main thing in statistics that I have learned, the methodology is simple no worse than a decent college algebra course, but the potential for application to the real world far surpasses any math class.

Statistics are a powerful thing that can be used for both good or evil, so it is important to ensure that they are in the right hands, and we need to view other peoples work with a critical eye in order to catch any deception that occurs within the numbers.