DPSY5103 - Research methods in professional psychology

1. This unit equips students with the necessary skills they need to design research and analyse data for their thesis, placements, and employment. After completing this unit successfully, students should be able to undertake a comprehensive program evaluation as well as a single subject design, and complete their thesis, confidently, competently, and independently.

Specifically, students should be able to:

• Understand and design the main phases of the key research approaches, including program evaluations, single subject designs, experiments, quasi-experiments, and qualitative projects;
• Accommodate the considerations and complications of these approaches, such as sampling biases, spurious variables, common method variance, suppressors, non-recursive relationships, confounds, consequential validity, asymmetric transfer, mediators, moderators, stakeholder needs, economic evaluation, family wise errors, power, autocorrelation, and nonlinear dynamics;
• Apply multivariate statistics techniques to address some of these complications, such as ANCOVA, discriminant function analysis, logistic regression analysis, multiple regression analysis, canonical correlation, and factor analysis;
• Recognize the fundamental principles of more advanced concepts, which can then be explored through additional reading, including HLM, grounded theory, survival analyses, meta-analyses, catastrophe theory, signal detection theory, ARIMA, interim designs, Bayesian theory, and structural equation modelling;
• Develop creative and insightful methods to maximise the utility of research; and
• Justify and report the procedures and techniques that were utilised.