Understanding I/O Psychology and Research Methods

Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology:

The application of psychological principles and theories to the workplace.

Scientist/Practitioner Model:

An approach used to train I/O psychologists maintaining that because I/O psychologists are both generators and consumers of knowledge, training must be focused on both theory and application.

Competencies:

The skills, behaviors, and capabilities that allow employees to perform specific functions.

Dissertation:

A unique piece of scholarly research that is usually the last hurdle before obtaining a PhD.

My Alpha and Army Beta:

Mental ability tests developed by I/O psychologists during World War I that were used to select and classify army personnel.

Science:

A process or method for generating a body of knowledge.

Theory:

A set of interrelated constructs (concepts), definitions, and propositions that present a systematic view of a phenomenon by specifying relations among variables, with the purpose of explaining and predicting the phenomenon.

Induction:

An approach to science that consists of working from data to theory.

Deduction:

An approach to science in which we start with theory and propositions and then collect data to test those propositions—working from theory to data.

Causal Inference:

A conclusion, drawn from research data, about the likelihood of a causal relationship between two variables.

Independent Variable:

A variable that is systematically manipulated by the experimenter or, at the least, measured by the experimenter as an antecedent to other variables.

Dependent Variable:

The variable of interest, or what we design experiments to assess.

Extraneous Variable:

Anything other than the independent variable that can contaminate our results or be thought of as an alternative to our causal explanation; also called a confounding variable.

Internal Validity:

The extent to which we can draw causal inferences about our variables.

External Validity:

The extent to which the results obtained in an experiment generalize to other people, settings, and times.

Hypothesis:

A tentative statement about the relationship between two or more variables.

Experimental Methods:

Research procedures that are distinguished by random assignment of participants to conditions and the manipulation of independent variables.