Overview

Developing Research Skills: Key Readings and Critical Thinking Exercises provides students with thought-provoking readings, insightful discussion questions, and critical thinking exercises designed to help them become enlightened consumers of psychological science. The text encourages students to critically evaluate psychological studies, rather than immediately accepting research findings at face value. Through identifying the strengths and weaknesses of various research methodologies, learning to understand a study's inherent limitations, assessing potential variables in the given data, and more, students learn to shrewdly assess various research methods used to produce psychological studies. The carefully selected readings provide students with concrete examples of fundamental research methods concepts, and each reading is complemented by discussion questions that bridge the gap between the learned concept and real-world practice. Emphasizing the need for highly developed critical thinking skills and astute analysis in the field of psychological research, Developing Research Skills is ideal for research methods in psychology courses. Vincent Trofimoff is a social-personality psychologist and lecturer in the Department of Psychology at California State University, San Marcos. He has taught research methods in psychology courses for over 20 years, and also has extensive experience teaching statistics, personality, and social psychology courses. He received his master's degree and doctorate, both in social-personality psychology, from the University of California, Riverside.