Psychological Research: The Ideas Behind the Methods

this book is very easy to read and understand. The author uses lots of examples and puts every thing in laymens terms.

This text is the best written text I've read in all my years at college. It was required for an advanced research methods course in experimental psychology. The course was very fast-paced and required reading 2 chapters per week on average so that we'd finish the book mid-semester and allocate the rest of the semester to designing and implementing our own research designs. I am thankful that Mook's writing style is so fluid and that his way of conveying ideas is so clear that it is almost as if he is sitting right there next to you and explaining it to you face-to-face. It is for this reason that it was so effortless to keep up with the readings and do well on quizzes and to later show the competency to implement scientific design and methods in a final psychological experiment of my own.

I’ve been teaching Research Methods in Psychology from this text for three years now and am so satisfied I plan to continue using it indefinitely. Some virtues of the book: Except in certain of the sections on statistics, the writing is accessible to my state-college students and crystal clear. Mook delivers information superbly well, even on highly technical matters. The frequent diagrams help; the one on p. 225 knocked me over, it’s so good. Mook also uses the occasional footnote well—on p. 193, for example. He has a genius for explication. I applaud his strategy for achieving gender neutrality in the writing (varying between "she" and "he"), and it’s executed well. The examples come from a wonderful variety of areas, and almost all are interesting to my students. As a social psychologist, I’m especially glad he chose to illustrate the power of the situation and employed it to illustrate the ladder of principles. The emphasis on experimentation is most welcome in my course; I share his prejudice in favor of this method and lament its decline in social psychology. Pp. 25-26 are a stellar introduction to the experimental testing of a theory. Mook offers considerable information on practitioners, whose epistemological problems constitute a topic of special concern to my students and me. According to a list I made as I read the book the first time, he makes reference to practitioners on pp. 3, 7, 9, 10, 44-47, 59-61, 74, 81, 258-261+266, 277-278, 279-280, 357-362, and 473-476, plus the section on "The Intuitive Psychologist" (pp. 476-490). Wow! Mook covers almost everything my students need to know for their personal projects. (I ask them to design, conduct, analyze, and report an empirical investigation and encourage all to use an experimental method.) I wish he had more on measurement, though. And he addresses larger issues. There’s much more to the book than the nuts and bolts of methodology. The treatment of the topics covered in Keith Stanovich’s book "How To Think Straight About Psychology" is so thorough that I’ve stopped assigning it. "Making Friends with Statistics" is a great title for the sections on quantification: warm, inviting. My only important complaint about the book is that some of these sections are too brief to be clear. So let’s hope they get expanded in a second edition. Gordon Bear, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology School of Science Ramapo College of New Jersey (This is an unsolicited review.)