1.5:
Archival Research
Researchers do not need to interact with participants to carry out psychological research. Instead, they may find it more appropriate to answer certain research questions using material that was already collected and archived.
This method is known as archival research—the use of existing records and data sets for experimental purposes. This may include public records, databases of survey results, and even social media information.
For example, a researcher may be interested in exploring how students’ driving behavior changes when there’s a big college home game. Rather than watching students on the road—which would be dangerous—she can access police records and compare the number of speeding tickets given out on game days versus other days.
She may find that students are more likely to speed on game days because they are excited to get to the stadium. Using this method, she can be confident that the results were not affected by observational bias, because she didn’t interact with the participants herself.
In addition, because she doesn’t need to spend time and money collecting her own data, she can focus her attention on data analysis.
However, archival research also has a few drawbacks. Specifically, researchers cannot control the data collection process or what data were collected. For instance, the police records may not be able to confirm whether the speeding drivers were on their way to the game or not.
While researchers are therefore limited in the questions they can answer, the approach does allow them to carryout studies they might not otherwise be able to perform.
1.5:
Archival Research
Some researchers gain access to large amounts of data without interacting with a single research participant. Instead, they use existing records to answer various research questions. This type of research approach is known as archival research. Archival research relies on looking at past records or data sets to look for interesting patterns or relationships. For example, a researcher might access the academic records of all individuals who enrolled in college within the past ten years and calculate how long it took them to complete their degrees, as well as course loads, grades, and extracurricular involvement. Archival research could provide important information about who is most likely to complete their education, and it could help identify important risk factors for struggling students.
In comparing archival research to other research methods, there are several important distinctions. For one, the researcher employing archival research never directly interacts with research participants. Therefore, the investment of time and money to collect data is considerably less with archival research. Additionally, researchers have no control over what information was originally collected. Therefore, research questions have to be tailored so they can be answered within the structure of the existing data sets. There is also no guarantee of consistency between the records from one source to another, which might make comparing and contrasting different data sets problematic.
This text is adapted from OpenStax, Psychology. OpenStax CNX.