Description
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Step 1: Concept maps
You’ll be preparing three topics that you might be interested in pursuing. Your homework is to start turning them into good, answerable, psychological questions, and we’ll do that by making them more specific and more psychological. How we can do that is by fitting them into the framework for psychological thinking that I presented, with three possible levels (neuroscience, cognitive science, and social science) and three possible methods (development, abnormal, and individual differences) of psychological analysis.
First, simply state the topic you’re interested in. For instance, “alcohol use.” From there, come up with an approach that you could take based on each of the three different methods: one for individual differences, one for abnormal, and one for developmental. For instance, a possible individual difference for alcohol use could be different settings of alcohol use (with friends, at parties, alone, etc.); an abnormal approach could focus on comparing people with alcohol use disorders (addictions) vs. non-disordered people; and a developmental approach could focus on change that occurs over the span of time from when someone first starts drinking to when they’re an experienced drinker.
Next, for each of the methods you’ve come up with, pick one of the three levels (neuroscience, cognitive science, or social science), and briefly state what you could focus on. For instance, going off the previous example, if I’m focusing on different circumstances of alcohol use, I could pick the cognitive level by focusing on how people monitor their own alcohol intake in these different circumstances, or the social level by focusing on how alcohol affects how they socialize differently in these different circumstances, or the neuroscience level by seeing how the brain responds to alcohol differently in different settings. [You only need to pick one level for each of the methods, you can re-use levels, and you don’t have to use all of them.] See below for an example of a concept map based on these ideas.
Note about neuroscience: Since neuroscience focuses on the biological and chemical aspects of psychology, it’s recommended that you only pick a neuroscience question if you’re already familiar with these areas and feel comfortable reading and writing about biology and chemistry.
Step 2: Turning it into a question
Finally, pick the level/method that you like best, and state this as a full question. Again, based on the example above, I could pick an individual differences/cognitive approach and say: “How do people’s abilities to monitor their alcohol use change in different situations?”
Ultimately, you’ll be doing this for 3 different topics, meaning you should end up with 3 total questions.
Concept map example:
- Topic: Alcohol use
o Methods:
- Ind. diff.: different settings of consumption
- Abnormal: alcohol use disorder
- Developmental: change over becoming an experienced drinker
o Level:
- Social: socialization w/ others
- Cognitive: monitoring of alcohol use
- Cognitive: attitudes towards alcohol consumption
o Question: “How does consuming alcohol in different settings affect how people socialize?”