Understand research methods and their importance in psychological inquiryThis report will include Essay

Understand research methods and their importance in psychological inquiry.This report will include key terms in research, research principles and the research process. It will also include the qualities a good researcher should have and a critical evaluation of the qualities I have and how I can become a good researcher, to do a pilot study. The key issues I will be looking at are trends in health, mental health and mental functioning, how medicines and treatments have become more advanced and the cures and causes of behaviours and diseases.

Health psychology and health psychologists have helped issues in health trends as they have done research to discover that health and illness are a combination of social, psychological and biological factors (Nass et al., 2018). As a result of this research, doctors have more improved skills and can provide more personalised care for patients, with the help of technology and different medications. Research has helped show that children of imprisoned parents are at a greater risk of developing behavioural health problems (Thulstrup and Karlsson, 2017).

It is shown that these children have bad coping mechanisms, so they use desensitisation and de-identification (researchgate.net, 2017).Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) is a type of therapy that alters negative thoughts into more positive or neutral thoughts. This is used to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (Peterson et al., 2015). As well as CPT, different medication can be used, such as anti-anxiety medication, it calms the brain down. Prazosin medication lowers a person’s blood pressure and anti-depressants balances the chemicals in a person’s brain (Drugs.com,2018). Before research helped establish the causes and cures of PTSD, many people believe it was a result of calcium deficiency and so gave the patients a glass of milk and, in some cases, performed lobotomies (sciencedirect.com, 2016). From research, chemicals have been discover to help with the treatment and all of the patients have a choice to get treated for PTSD. Before ethical issues were considered, patients wouldn’t have a choice if they wanted to get treated and they would have been deceived. Mental functioning is defined as all the things someone can do with their minds, if someone has ill health, this means that they have an impairment in their mental functioning. Research has proven that counselling can help mental health (Rethink.org, 2018), along with medication. Research has helped significantly with mental health as in the Victorian times, the women were put into mental institutes and looked at by a doctor (Dual Diagnosis, 2018), but now, with new research, someone with a mental illness get help and support suited to their needs. The ethical considerations were poor in Victorian times as their ethics were breached. As a result of research, ethics are now carefully considered, along with culture. Studies have helped discover mindfulness, a tool to help mental health. Mindfulness is relatively new, but it is proven to have positive effects on mental health patients.Psychological stress can encourage changes in brain activities, this has helped prove that mental health and cancer are closely related. The ethical guidelines need to be closely considered as terminally ill patients need to have extra care given when they are asked sensitive questions. When a study is carried out and a new medicine is carried out, a psychologist observes so they can see what the side effects are and tell the doctors so the doctors can try and minimalize the effects. It has also been shown that psychologists can prevent events occurring again, such as criminal behaviour.In order to create a psychological experiment, a research process must be followed, with ethics taken into consideration. The research process ensures that all psychological experiments have a reason why they wanted to look into what they did, have considered ethics and have a hypothesis. First, a literature review must be done, looking at previous research papers may help form a hypothesis and a question as previous papers may show where there is gaps in research and what hasn’t been looked at before. This can help the researcher decide what they are doing their research on. As well as a literature review, a research design should be done. The research design will determine the sample size, the participants involved, the method of sampling which will be used, what the procedure will be, how the research will be measured and it will ensure the ethics of the participants have not been breached. The sample size mustn’t be too big, as this may the researcher confused, and it must be representative of the target population, so it can be referred back. Just like the sample size, the participants involved should be symbolic of the target population, for example, in Thulstrup and Karlsson’s (2017) investigation into children with imprisoned parents, their participants were children with imprisoned parents, so they could link it back to the target population. There are many different ways of selecting participants, volunteer sampling is time and cost efficient but the participants may then have demand characteristics. Random sampling gives everyone in the target population an equal chance of being selected, but can be time consuming. The experiment into treating PTSD (Peterson et al, 2015), used random sampling to minimise bias in the experiment. To determine the procedure the researcher must look at his hypothesis and their participants, then they will

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