Читать книгу Methods in Psychological Research - Annabel Ness Evans - Страница 101

As we mentioned earlier, at our school, we offer an applied psychology degree program. One of our objectives is to prepare students for graduate work in applied areas. Imagine that we classified our graduates over the past 10 years into two groups: (1) students who were accepted into graduate school and (2) students who were not. We could use discriminant function analysis to predict acceptance into graduate school using grade point average and workshop attendance, for example. Our analysis might help us determine how grade point average and workshop attendance individually predict acceptance into graduate school and how a combination of both predicts acceptance.

This is the idea behind discriminant function analysis. Of course, we might have many more variables, and the analysis allows us to determine the predictive ability of each variable alone and in combination with other variables. If discriminant function analysis sounds like logistic regression, it is because they are related. They have similar applications, but discriminant function analysis is calculated as ANOVA with more than one DV (MANOVA). The various DVs are used to predict group membership.

This analysis, like the others discussed in this section, is much more complex than this, but, again, we hope our brief discussion gives you an inkling of the use of these techniques, so that when you read the literature, you will have some understanding about the research outcomes.

We hope that this chapter has prepared you, on a conceptual level, to understand the literature you will be reading as you continue with your social science studies. We now turn to a topic that is so important in social science research that we have devoted an entire chapter to it: research ethics.