Psychological Research Methods

Tailor your training to your research interests and career goals, from clinical and cognitive to developmental and social psychology, as you study the latest techniques from published psychologists.

Course description

Throughout your course, you'll learn the latest techniques in cutting-edge psychological research from the psychologists who are using them in their published studies.

These include neuroimaging (EEG, fMRI), behavioural genetics, experimental methodologies, qualitative methods (including diary studies), systematic review and meta-analysis methodologies as well as specialist methods for working with infants, children and co-producing research with non-academic partners.

We'll teach you the skills you need and give you the opportunities to apply them to the area of psychology that you're interested in.

From week one, you'll begin training in a range of skills that are important for psychologists in academia and professional roles. You'll understand ethical issues in research, learn how to write a grant proposal, receive training in multivariate statistics, and develop your presentation skills ready to take part in our summer postgraduate students' conference.

The research project and literature review gives you the opportunity to focus on a chosen psychological research question in detail under the supervision of one of our world-class researchers. You can choose a supervisor from an area of psychology that matches your research interests and future career aspirations within cognitive, developmental, social or clinical psychology.

This project gives you the opportunity to put your new research methods knowledge into practice while addressing an issue at the cutting edge of psychological research.

Psychological Research Methods at Sheffield

In addition to Psychological Research Methods, at Sheffield we offer two other specialist masters courses in this area that allow you to specialise further and develop the skills you need for a successful career:

• MSc Psychological Research Methods with Advanced Statistics
• MSc Psychological Research Methods with Data Science