This page offers library resources for Senior Seminar. Senior Seminar will integrate theory and research from a variety of psychology’s core areas. The course implements a meta-analytic (e.g. “thinking about thinking”) approach to the development of critical reasoning skills by illustrating, exploring, and discussing how major findings in psychology have real-world application. Special impediments to sound reasoning identified by researchers in psychology as well as classical errors in reasoning, logical fallacies, and common problems in the proper interpretation of research findings will be illustrated and discussed focusing on their impact in four areas: (a) personal decision making, (b) functioning in close relationships, (c) implications for clinical practice, and (d) being a good consumer of research.
Mertens, D. M. (2020). Research and evaluation in education and psychology: Integrating diversity with quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods.
1. Identify a research topic.
2. Review secondary sources to get an overview of the topic.
3. Develop a search strategy and use appropriate preliminary sources and primary research journals.
4. Conduct the search and select specific articles to review.
5. Obtain full text references.
6. Read articles and prepare bibliographic information and notes on each article.
7. Evaluate the research reports.
8. Synthesize your findings.
9. Use the literature review to formulate research questions, hypotheses, or both.