Focus groups are a qualitative research method that involves a facilitated group discussion to elicit the perspectives of participants. They use group dynamics and encourage communication among research participants. Thus, focus groups are particularly useful for brainstorming ideas and to understand the reasons for differing opinions. They also have broad applicability in social and behavioral science, and the resulting findings can be used to inform practice and policy. This chapter provides an overview of focus group methods, including design, participant selection, conduct, and analysis. It also provides a guide to ensure rigor in conducting and reporting focus group studies. Considerations in conducting focus groups in specific populations, including children and culturally and linguistically diverse populations, will also be discussed along with considerations for using online platforms to conduct such studies.

Building a successful research career often requires being adept at the methods and tools of the time. For social and behavioral scientists today, that means navigating online participant platforms and the tools used to create online studies. In this chapter, we describe how Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) can be leveraged as a source for participant recruitment. We provide a brief history of MTurk’s usage by researchers, describe the challenges researchers have faced with the site, and summarize the status of issues like data quality, sample representativeness, and ethics in online research. Along the way, we provide tips for how researchers can use MTurk to collect high-quality data and to start and advance a research career.

This chapter focuses on adolescents’ use of strategies to conceal information about their whereabouts, behaviors, and activities from parents. The chapter describes the concealing strategies assessed by researchers, adolescents’ relative use of strategies, and adolescents’ reasons for concealing information from parents. Concealment strategies range from partial disclosure to secrecy to lying. Most adolescents use partial and passive concealment strategies (e.g. omitting details) more often than active concealment strategies (e.g. lying). Adolescents conceal activities they believe to be personal and to avoid punishment. The chapter also summarizes research on potential implications of concealment for both the parent–adolescent relationship and the adolescent’s adjustment. Research evidence links the use of concealing strategies with poorer quality parent–adolescent relationships and with poorer behavioral and psychological adjustment. Recommended future directions include integrating research on concealment with the literatures on self-disclosure, lying, and secrecy outside the parent–child relationship, and further tests of the hypothesized benefits of concealment.

Language is the natural currency of most social communication. Until the emergence of more powerful computational methods, it simply was not feasible to measure its use in mainline social psychology. We now know that language can reveal behavioral evidence of mental states and personality traits, as well as clues to the future behavior of individuals and groups. In this chapter, we first review the history of language research in social personality psychology. We then survey the main methods for deriving psychological insights from language (ranging from data-driven to theory-driven, naturalistic to experimental, qualitative to quantitative, holistic to granular, and transparent to opaque) and describe illustrative examples of findings from each approach. Finally, we present our view of the new capabilities, real-world applications, and ethical and psychometric quagmires on the horizon as language research continues to evolve in the future.

This chapter reviews research on disclosure and secrecy in Turkish adolescents’ relationships with their parents in comparison with research from other cultures. Research on the topics, targets, and justifications of, and demographic differences in adolescent disclosure to and secrecy from their parents show that adolescents across cultures are more similar than different in managing their privacy with their parents. With development, adolescents construct their private and communal self, through selecting the topics to disclose, to whom to disclose, and the extent of disclosure. Disclosure and secrecy are similarly associated with parenting behaviors and well-being across cultures. Variations, however, stem from socioeconomic differences of families. Future research may consider going beyond broad categorizations of cultures (e.g. individualism and collectivism) and focus on the extent of convergence between the worldviews of adolescents and parents, which is likely to determine the scope and the frequency of sharing information with parents.

This chapter describes the use of eyetracking as an advanced research tool in the social and behavioral sciences. It covers the correlation of eye movements to behavior, the basic anatomy of the eye and its movements, and different kinds of eyetrackers that can be used to capture a range of behaviors. It also explains how one should select an eyetracker, and how to obtain good-quality data. Data quality always affects the final result, and this chapter explains how the accuracy and precision of gaze data affect behavioral analysis along with giving examples about the real-life application of eyetracking in social and behavioral research. The potential of eyetracking as a technology is vast, providing a window to the visual perception which is likely to make eyetracking a very important tool in the years to come.

The validity of conclusions drawn from specific research studies must be evaluated in light of the purposes for which the research was undertaken. We distinguish four general types of research: description and point estimation, correlation and prediction, causal inference, and explanation. For causal and explanatory research, internal validity is critical – the extent to which a causal relationship can be inferred from the results of variation in the independent and dependent variables of an experiment. Random assignment is discussed as the key to avoiding threats to internal validity. Internal validity is distinguished from construct validity (the relationship between a theoretical construct and the methods used to operationalize that concept) and external validity (the extent to which the results of a research study can be generalized to other contexts). Construct validity is discussed in terms of multiple operations and discriminant and convergent validity assessment. External validity is discussed in terms of replicability, robustness, and relevance of specific research findings.

Although lying is frequently associated with problem behaviors, recent research also suggests that lying to parents is part of a normative developmental process that serves important functions for the growth and maintenance of adolescent autonomy and reflects complex and mature moral reasoning. This chapter examines adolescent lie-telling as an information management strategy and a form of everyday resistance that adolescents engage in as they strive for autonomy and increased independence in their relationships with parents. Connections between adolescent lie-telling and the development of their autonomy and moral evaluations are considered in detail. The chapter examines adolescent lying as a concealment strategy and situates lying among other information management techniques discussed in this volume. Literature on the developmental trajectory of lying is discussed, with an eye toward the changing alchemy of the adolescent–-parent relationship as children enter and move through adolescence.

This chapter focuses on the study of organizations as complex and dynamic social systems. We start our discussion of quantitative organizational research by outlining what organizations are and why we need to study them. We dive into doing research in organizations with specific focus on using theory to guide research methods and three critical organizational dimensions that should inform research design choices: units and levels of analysis, structures and hierarchies, and time and change. We then present and analyze the potential and limitations of descriptive, correlational, and experimental designs in organizational research, using contemporary examples of research to ground our analysis. We also cover data collection considerations, sampling strategies, and sources of organizational data. We close this chapter with discussions of equity issues, in particular ethics, diversity, and inclusion in organizational research.

Recent research endeavors have demonstrated the immense promise of team science to move the field of social and personality psychology forward. In this chapter, we introduce readers to the concept of team science as a model in which diverse teams collaborate on larger-scale research projects. These teams can bring people together from multiple labs, academic disciplines, or sectors to answer a shared question. Working in teams offers a number of benefits, allowing us to increase access and representation in our research, implement different methods and tools, answer more complex questions, and have greater social impact. We offer an overview of different models of team science and how researchers can expand their own teams, adhering to the principles of open communication, commitment to diversity and inclusion, clear roles and expectations, and cooperative decision-making. We also address some of the challenges inherent to team science and how to overcome them in order to make our science as efficient, fair, and impactful as possible.