Limitations of Psychology Research

Limitations of Psychology Research

Many students who enroll in a psychology undergraduate program become very disappointed in the subject. The problem, aside from a certain disappointing inability to analyze people as many believe psychology courses confer, is that most arguments are open to debate. For example, in almost any theory in psychology there are other psychologists who argue the reverse. Of course, the statement applies much less to neurobiology or neuroscience, which are often taught in psychology programs as introductory courses.

Another problem is sampling bias. To be accurate, an experimenter must conduct what is known in research methods as random sampling. However, psychology research is often conducted on college undergraduate students creating a sampling bias. Thus, several aspects are affected: age, education level and knowledge of psychology in some cases. For instance, some psychology courses offer course credit (for example, 1%) in exchange for participation in psychological research. Naturally, students taking part in research for additional credit may differ from those who do not.

Researcher in psychology. Photo : Elena

Also, age groups differ in many aspects and college students tend to be young adults, in general. Therefore, results obtained in such studies may not be generalizable to all populations. Another limitation of research in psychology is the continuous reliance on self-reports. Questionnaires answered by people themselves may not always represent the truth. Not to imply that participants lie on administered self-reports, but the Hawthorne effect may take place; in addition, people may not always understand their own selves.

The Hawthorne effect resonates with behaving differently because you know you are being observed, or because of the trust that nothing can go wrong because it is a controlled, often laboratory, experiment. So much so, that the findings of psychology research may lose validity as a result. Another, perhaps frustrating, fact of psychological theory is that often psychologists disagree among themselves on a topic of discussion. Indeed, most peer-reviewed, academic articles have a literature review (introduction), a methodology, a results, a discussion and a limitations sections.