 Hey everyone it's Professor Howard. I want to take a moment just to talk about what it means to be a science and to describe our four major goals of psychology as a science. Now to preface when we're talking about psychology there's a misconception that social sciences are somehow less rigorous, less controlled, and to some extent less valuable to the world than harder sciences like biology and chemistry and things of that sort. And I think that's simply not the case. The difference really is that in psychology the phenomena under study vary more quickly, they're measured in different ways, you can get quite a bit more variability than you might when trying to measure something concrete and in some ways unchanging like a physical substance. So we have to deal with the fact that our phenomena and our interest is far more complex. Now like all sciences we want to understand the human experience. We want to know about the behavior and mental processes of all of us healthy, unhealthy, normal, abnormal, etc. And there are four major ways that we're going to understand and get information about this particular subject. The first stage of any science is simply description. You're describing what's going on. So for example if I take my dog to the dog park and I see there are three labs and four beagles, I'm just telling you what happened. This is what I saw. So you see that when we're describing things we're really talking about methods of observation. These can be direct methods of observation where you bring people into an experimental study and you see what they're doing. This could be naturalistic observation if I was doing a study on interactions between dog owners and their pets then I could go to the dog park and you know surreptitiously take notes. This could even be indirect observation like when I do a survey of incoming freshmen and ask them what kind of dogs do they like. In this case I'm not attempting to explain anything. I'm just describing what I find. But if we just describe things it doesn't help us better understand the circumstances under which they occur and when they don't. So you might find that the next stage of the scientific process is trying to explain why things happen. So going to the dog park three labs four beagles. Maybe I say there are more beagles today because this family with four beagles came right. So I'm coming up with possible explanations. I'm coming up with hypotheses that might fit my theory. Now the trouble is here that these are untested but we're coming up with ways that we could potentially get more information. As soon as you try to put together two variables you say if this happens then this happens then you're starting to try to explain why these things occur. The next stage of the scientific process is to predict when it will come again. So for instance if I know that one family has four beagles then I could say anytime the Judd family comes to the dog park there will be more beagles than labs. And it's an if then statement it's a prediction. So this is actually much closer to a real hypothesis than we have an explanation because it's falsifiable. As soon as you start predicting if this happens then this will occur. You're getting closer to a science. The hardest most rigorous form of science is that control. And when we say control we don't mean 1984 big brother we're gonna make you do certain things. We're simply saying that if these variables are made present then another thing will happen. If the Judds can be enticed to come right if they get a gift card for coming to the park on Tuesdays then there are more beagles than anybody else. Or if I teach parents to do active reading practices with their child then their child will develop better reading skills. These are things that we demonstrate when this variable is present then this outcome occurs. Control is the hardest the most difficult level of scientific understanding. And you can only determine whether control or causal relation exists between two variables with an experiment. You can do this with traditional between subjects designs experiments between groups designs experiments. Or if you're talking about smaller scale studies you might have to use something like a time series or single subject design. But you have to be able to demonstrate that when the independent variable the treatment is present then there's a change in the dependent variable that we can predict. And when that independent variable is absent that change in the dependent variable did not occur. So those are the four major goals of scientific understanding description explanation prediction and control. And that's how they relate to the larger field of science as a whole. Looking forward to hearing what you have to think let me know if you have any questions.