INTRODUCTION: CORE CONCEPTS AND METHODS

A. Changing Patterns of Disease and Death
1. The data
  a. Life expectancy and infant mortality
  b. Leading causes of death
    (1) From acute to chronic
    (2) From accidental to preventable
2. Factors influencing the changes
  a. Medical and public health victories over infection
  b. Increasing importance of psychosocial factors
    (1) Emotions
    (2) Behavior and lifestyle
    (3) Environment (e.g. toxins, pollutants)
  c. Individual and group differences
    (1) Age, race, ethnicity, SES, etc.
    (2) Personality, life history, attitudes and beliefs, etc.
3. The Cost
  a. Per-capita expenditures
  b. Costs of treatment vs. prevention

B. Changing Conceptions of Health
1. Definitions: passive state vs. active process
2. Biomedical vs. biopsychosocial perspectives
3. The emergence of health psychology
  a. Psychosomatic medicine
  b. Behavioral medicine
  c. Behavioral health
  d. Health psychology
    (1) The scientist-practitioner model
    (2) The cybernetic assumption

C. The Importance of Science
1. Becoming a skilled research consumer
  a. Popular ignorance and misunderstanding (B&F, page 21; Rice, Exercise 2.1)
  b. Science and critical thinking
    (1) Empiricism
    (2) Evaluating evidence (B&F, page 36)
  c. Common errors
    (1) Small and/or biased samples
    (2) Testimonial evidence
    (3) ‘Post hoc, ergo propter hoc’
    (4) Correlation does not prove causation
    (5) Confounds and alternative explanations
    (6) Overlooking chance and coincidence
2. The process of science
  a. Research questions and hypotheses
    (1) Theory and previous research
    (2) Educated guesses
  b. Choosing the research design
  c. Identifying variables
    (1) Independent vs. dependent
    (2) Predictor or risk vs. criterion or outcome variables
  d. Selecting and creating measures (psychometrics)
    (1) Reliability and validity
    (2) Objective tests vs. self-report measures (interviews and questionnaires)
  e. Obtaining a good sample
    (1) Community samples
    (2) Samples of convenience
  f. Carrying out the procedure to collect the data
  g. Reporting the results: descriptive statistics
  h. Drawing conclusions: inferential statistics
    (1) Probabilistic reasoning
    (2) The p value and the .05 confidence level
  i. Replicating the results
3. Research designs
  a. Case studies
  b. Surveys
  c. Correlational and comparative (ex post facto) designs
    (1) Cross-sectional (retrospective)
    (2) Longitudinal (prospective)
  d. Experimental designs
    (1) Necessary conditions
    (2) Single-subject designs
    (3) Pre-post designs
    (4) The double-blind placebo design
    (5) Factorial and repeated measures
  e. Quasi-experimental designs
    (1) Ex post facto designs
    (2) Natural experiments
  f. Meta-analysis
4. Epidemiology
  a. Morbidity and mortality
  b. Prevalence and incidence
  c. Risk factors: relative and absolute risk
5. Determining causation
  a. Explanation, prediction and control
  b. Contextual-organistic thinking vs. formistic-mechanistic
  c. Proximal and distal causes
  d. Precipitating and predisposing causes
  e. Multiple causes and reciprocal causes
6. Research issues
  a. Using animals
  b. The laboratory vs. the real world
  c. Demonstrating causation without experimental proof (B&F, Table 2.1)
  d. Statistical vs. clinical significance

Copyright ©1998 Beverly J. Volicer and Steven F. Tello, UMass Lowell.  You may freely edit these pages  for use in a non-profit, educational setting.  Please include this copyright notice on all pages.