Strengths

Objective

• Provides accurate measurement
• Research is replicable - results should be repeatable if same participants and same procedures used
• Results reliable and generalisable

Generates theories

• Theories lead to hypotheses
• Theories stand or fall on supporting or refuting empirical evidence
• Psychology’s progress as a scientific discipline depends on developing better and stronger theories

‘Real life’ applications

• Mental health - eg: assessing different forms of Psychotherapy and stress management
• Criminological Psychology - eg: offender profiling, assessing the soundness of witness evidence

Weaknesses

People as machines

• Deterministic - people are predictable and controllable - cause and effect - and reducible to laws and regularities of behaviour - according to Nick Heather (1976), people are viewed as inert and passive until propelled into action by some internal or external force
• Reductionist - complex behaviour can be reduced to basic, simple, component parts - in contrast to the holistic view propounded by Humanistic psychologists

Research methods artificial

• Empirical methods of enquiry create artificial situations to control extraneous variables
• According to J Deese (1972), the very act of the researchers determining which variables are important reduces objectivity
• Vulnerable to experimenter bias and demand characteristics
• Lack of ecological validity makes generalising findings to large groups of people or whole populations questionable

Ethical issues in research

• Guidelines - eg: British Psychological Society, American Psychological Association - place ethical constraints on psychological research
• Constraints in ‘hard’ sciences usually less restrictive
• Certain investigations cannot be undertaken using human participants