Scientific Investigation

Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? What for? Because of who? Whose? Did it really? How come? Oh really?

These questions are all part of a scientific investigation!

• What is a scientific investigation?
• What is an example of a scientific investigation?
• What are the different types of scientific investigation?
• Why is scientific investigation important?

Scientific Investigation Definition

Scientific investigation is the process through which scientists pose a research question and then observe and test varying phenomena. It also refers to the data collection and analysis after the experiment, and the guidelines psychologists abide by when conducting research.

However, scientific investigations are also daily instances when we make an observation and try to figure out the solution. Scientific investigations allow us to think critically about the world around us, especially in sciences and psychology.

Although scientific investigations are sometimes seen as synonymous with the scientific method, they should be viewed as the umbrella term under which the scientific method falls.

Scientific Investigation Steps

The method of scientific investigation follows a couple of steps that help ensure that the research being conducted is as reliable and replicable as possible. Its sibling, the scientific method, has more structural and rigid steps to be followed.

For scientific investigation, a couple of key parts of the study need to be done to have it follow the steps of the scientific investigation. Researchers must ensure they design and execute an experiment following the scientific method, analyze their data, and ensure that all ethical guidelines are met.

Scientific Investigation Example

Chances are, you use aspects of scientific investigation every single day simply by asking a question and trying to figure out the answer.

An example of scientific investigation is one of the most famous (or infamous) psychological studies, the Little Albert Experiment. The experimenters were curious about the effects of conditioning – the concept that a person or animal can be conditioned (trained) to elicit a response from an unrelated stimulus – on a human.

Ivan Pavlov showed that animals could be conditioned in the late 1800s, and the Little Albert experimenters wanted to see if the same would be possible with an infant. So they paired something the baby was scared of, the noise of a hammer hitting a steel bar, with the visual stimulus of a rat. After exposing him to this multiple times, Little Albert eventually began to show signs of fear when he saw a rat. Interestingly, he also got scared when he saw things that had similar traits to the rat – a dog, cotton, and a Santa Claus mask.

While the experiment was true to scientific investigation in terms of testing a hypothesis and conducting an experiment, there are two aspects where this experiment falls short.

Limitations of the Little Albert Study

What about the ethics of this experiment? Was it ethical to condition an infant to be afraid of an animal? Would there be long-lasting impacts of this conditioning? Unfortunately, people are unsure what became of Little Albert, with some reports stating that he passed away from hydrocephalus when he was six years old.

However, even though Little Albert never lived long enough to see if there were lasting effects, it was still a highly unethical experiment. Pavlov conditioned a dog to salivate when he heard a bell ring; he did not condition the negative emotion of fear. This feature guaranteed this experiment's notoriety.

Furthermore, due to the unethical nature of this experiment, it cannot be replicated. So how do we know for sure that this produced evidence for his theory? Was it just a fluke? Since the current ethical guidelines would not allow this study to be reproduced, it’s hard to tell. We know that that specific baby, stimuli, and situations led to those results, but we should not take the results at face value since conditioned fear will never be tested again.

Fg. 1 Little Albert experiment.

Types of Scientific Investigation

There are three main types of scientific investigation – descriptive, comparative, and experimental. Looking for answers to research questions is what these three types have in common. However, there are distinct differences that set them apart from one another.

Descriptive Investigations

A key aspect of descriptive investigations is right there in the name – descriptions. Descriptive investigations are concerned with describing the world around us. They rely on highly detailed observations to bolster the investigation. This type of investigation does not need a hypothesis since it is simply based on observations.

An example of a descriptive investigation would be observing the stars. You can’t actually conduct a typical scientific study on stars (also known as an experimental investigation), so your investigation would rely on detailed observations. Although there is a research question driving the study, there’s no hypothesis able to be made since you can’t create independent and dependent variables with the stars.

Comparative Investigations

Comparative investigations focus on collecting data from different populations and then comparing the data. Unlike the descriptive, these investigations need a hypothesis since there is something to compare. An example of a comparative investigation would be gathering data on high school seniors across different high schools. There would be no control group since the data from the two populations is just being compared. However, your experiment would still have a research question, hypothesis, predictions, and evidence collection.

Experimental Investigations

Experimental investigations are probably the investigations you first think of when someone mentions an experiment. These investigations require the scientific method, variables, and a hypothesis. It requires the psychologist, scientist, or researcher to design a study that will fairly test the hypothesis. An example of an experimental investigation would be determining how much attention someone thinks they’re getting if they’re wearing a T-shirt with an embarrassing image. The researchers must design an experiment using the scientific method, including a research question, hypothesis, and predictions, and collect evidence.

Importance of Scientific Investigation

This structured scientific investigation is the backbone of furthering our knowledge of psychology.

Without the scientific method and a regulated way of conducting experiments, there would be no accurate way of determining if experiments produce consistent results. It is these results on that we base our understanding of psychology. For example, a psychologist decides to study the impact of inconsistent sleep on memory. Then, they decide to test this by having participants vary their amount of sleep. On the first night, the participants sleep for four hours. The next night they sleep for nine and carry on this pattern for two weeks.

Fg.2 How do you reliably test sleep? pixabay.com/ddimitrova

If another psychologist wants to study the same theory but has the participants vary their sleep by only one hour a night, would this be testing the same theory as the first psychologist? What if the other psychologist kept the sleep pattern the same but tested for six months instead of two weeks? It would still be studying the effect of inconsistent sleep on memory but not the identical relationship to the original study.

This aspect of scientific investigation allows for a continued collection of data to bolster existing experiments.

Additionally, it ensures that the participants in the study remain physically and mentally safe not only during the study but also after. The American Psychological Association (APA) has guidelines to ensure the participants are safe and that there are no long-lasting effects from any experiments in which they participate. These guidelines were first implemented in 2003, with the latest revision in 2017.