There are two types of questions we want answered:
| Type of Question | Examples of This Type of Question |
|---|---|
| 1. Description/Prediction Questions | What are people doing or thinking? What is happening? What do people do in a certain situation? |
| 2. Explanation/ Understanding/Control Questions | What causes (influences, makes) people to do or think what they do?
Why is it happening? How can giving participants different instructions or different drugs change their behavior? |
Click here to get practice on the key distinction between description/prediction questions and explanation/understanding questions.
Why does it matter what type of question we are asking?
Because we have to use different research methods depending on the type of question we ask.
| Type of Question | Examples of This Type of Question | Research Method Needed to Answer This Type of Question |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Description/Prediction Questions | What are people doing or thinking? What is happening? What do people do in a certain situation? | Non-experimental/ descriptive/correlational research. |
| 2. Explanation/ Understanding/Control Questions | What causes (influences, makes) people to do or think what they do?
Why is it happening? How can giving participants different instructions or different drugs change their behavior? | Only experiments. |
So, to review, before we know whether we can even consider trusting a study's answer to a question, we need to ask a couple of questions (see diagram below):
