Psychological research, especially empirical research, needs research design, which is usually an important part of the opening report. Research design is the overall structure and strategy of a research, involving the thinking and decision-making of various research elements. The following is a brief introduction to the related issues of psychological research design from five aspects.

1、 Purpose

Any psychological research has a specific purpose. Different research purposes, especially the different nature of research related to the purpose, may lead to different decision-making of research design. For example, researchers want to investigate the impact of mother's going out to work on the psychological development of rural left behind children, and hope to study the effect of maternal deprivation on 3-year-old children. This is a very meaningful research question, but such a research design can't be carried out, because researchers can't deprive children of their maternal love through artificial operation, and can't put forward profound questions for 3-year-old children that need to be answered. The best choice researchers can make is to observe the children in the state of parent-child separation. Of course, in the history of the development of psychology, some psychologists used animals instead of humans to carry out similar experimental research.

2、 Foundation

There is no doubt that psychological research is based on literature. The emphasis here is on the basis of research design, which mainly refers to the method part of existing research. Although carrying out psychological research needs to read a lot of literature, more realistically, a research design mainly refers to a limited number of articles (for example, 1-3 articles), which is the basis of research design. If the researcher wants to repeat an existing study, he / she needs to fully understand the original design and method of the study. If it is to expand the existing research, because it may need to add an experimental group or use a different design, then researchers need to really understand the existing research and make an appropriate research design. For example, researchers may want to repeat an effect found in the laboratory in a natural situation.

3、 Attitude

In fact, different psychological researchers have different understanding of psychology, which inevitably reflects the specific research. For example, there is controversy about what is an appropriate psychological research environment. Some researchers believe that psychological research should be carried out in a strictly controlled laboratory environment, imitating hard sciences such as physics and chemistry, accurately measuring variables and examining the relationship between variables in a state of separation. Some researchers prefer to carry out psychological research in the most real situation, such as community psychology. Some psychological researchers hope to use qualitative methods for psychological research. Different attitudes lead to different choices and decisions of research design.

4、 Resources

Psychological research needs to spend a certain amount of manpower, material and financial resources, that is, it needs certain resources. Therefore, the specific research design depends not only on the consideration of professional technology, but also on the consideration of other resources. For example, it is appropriate to do a long-term follow-up study, but researchers may not have the funds, personnel or time to do it (for example, graduate students have the time limit for study); The most suitable technical equipment may be too expensive to obtain; Researchers may not be able to test in the required cultural background due to limited conditions; If you want to do a research in a natural situation (for example, in a hospital), it may take too much time, or you can't get permission to do it in a laboratory instead. When we do psychological research design, we should consider the problem of resources, which can effectively avoid some fantasy and detours.

5、 Analysis

In the design of psychological research, analysis strategies and methods must be included. Psychological research needs to analyze the collected data or materials, so as to know what data or materials a research needs to obtain, how to obtain them, and how to analyze them after obtaining them. Thinking and making decisions on such problems are the proper meaning of research design. However, in the actual research, researchers implement a specific research design and procedures, collect data, and then find that these data are difficult to analyze.

For example, researchers want to examine people's attitudes towards corporal punishment and ask, "do you agree with beating and scolding as a way to punish children?" For the first kind of problem, he / she can't get useful information about people's attitude strength. Researchers ask questions that can only be answered with "yes" or "no". The researchers can ask the subjects to express their attitude towards beating and scolding children on a scale of 1 to 10. Although this is a rather rough measurement, he / she can at least describe the situation of two different groups in terms of average intensity, rather than just the frequency of "yes" and "no" answers. If a questionnaire contains questions such as "what do you think of beating and scolding children?" It's difficult for researchers to quantify the corresponding results. After all, researchers can't statistically analyze people's reported personal feelings.

If researchers do a qualitative study of people's attitudes toward corporal punishment, ask a series of "do you agree to beat and scold children?" This kind of question will only get the response of "agree" or "disagree", so it is useless.

In a word, to carry out psychological research, we need to design research. In this process, we should give full consideration to the purpose, basis, resources, researchers' own attitude towards psychological research, as well as the analysis techniques and methods of research data or data.