Main research methods in environmental psychology PDF

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Main research methods in environmental psychology...

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Main research methods in environmental psychology As mentioned there are different kind of designs that can be used to research (table 1.1). Questionnaire studies These are meant to describe behaviour and gather perspectives, opinions, attitudes and beliefs. It is used to create a relationship between two or more variables. Often it is not possible to establish causality because of the weak internal validity. It is possible that a third variable is involved and influencing the results/effect. Also the direction is not clear, the effect can go both ways. The manipulation of conditions is unethical and impossible. External validity is often high, which is very important in environmental studies. The costs of these experiments are low. Laboratory experiments These are designed to establish causal relationships between variables. This is possible due to manipulation and random assignment. The internal validity is high in these experiments. The strong control causes the external validity to be low because of the artificial situations and is hard to generalize to the real world. Computer simulation studies Aspects of the environment of humans are simulated as accurate as possible. It can give the participant a realistic impression of a particular environment. It makes it possible to have some control and therefor the internal validity increases. The external validity is not that compromised by it. Field studies To create higher external validity without compromising internal validity psychologist have created field studies. They are conducted in real life settings and have a high validity because of that. The internal validity can be kept high because of the control that can be created by manipulating independent variables (placing or removing bins). It can be quite certain that the differences between the groups can be attributed to the differences in the conditions. It is hard to control confounding variables (weather and interruptions). Random assignment is not possible. Case studies This is a in depth examination in a particular situation. The method involves exploratory and qualitative examinations. It is to explore and understand the meaning an individual or a group describes to a phenomenon. People are studied in their own context within natural settings. The external validity is very high and the data is rich. The internal validity is low (so many other variables?), it is time demanding and it is not really generalizable....