PSY4130 – Promoting Change through Social Psychology

Course content

Applying psychology and doing psychological research in any field requires skills that go beyond merely knowing about theories and evidence. In particular, researching and applying social psychology in a scientific way requires three building blocks:

  1. connecting theory and evidence to observations in the field
  2. designing interventions based on these insights
  3. evaluating interventions.

In this course, students learn about and practice these three basic building blocks of social-psychological science in an integrated way. Whether you desire a career as a research scientist or a consultant, this course will provide you with valuable knowledge and the necessary skillset to fulfill these roles.

Learning outcome

Knowledge

In this course, students acquire fundamental knowledge about the scientific process in social psychology. After this course, students have detailed knowledge about the steps in scientific observation, theorizing, hypothesis testing, intervention, and evaluation, and their connectedness.

In addition, the course will provide knowledge in selected fields of classic and contemporary social psychology that are used as examples in the three parts of the course. This knowledge about basic and applied social psychology can be related to various subfields, such as social cognition, social relations, or emotional and motivational processes.

Skills

This course focuses on the acquisition of skills that characterize a social-psychological scientist. After completing this course, students are able to:

  • Gather, evaluate, summarize, and integrate theories and research findings, and apply them to specific questions that have applied significance
  • Conduct research to describe and compare populations, evaluate interventions, test correlational and causal hypothesis
  • Plan and conduct interventions
  • Collaborate with others in pursuing these research activities

General competence

In terms of general competence, students learn:

  • how to deal with larger bodies of scientific texts
  • how to evaluate theorizing and research
  • how to translate applied problems into scientific questions, how to back-translate theoretical models and empirical findings into interventions and answers for applied problems
  • how to communicate with practitioners
  • how to work collaboratively on problems

Admission to the course

Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for in Studentweb.

If you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures.

Formal prerequisite knowledge

You must have completed PSY1010 – Innf?ring i metode or equivalent and PSY1101or equivalent. Completion of PSY4111 – Applied Social Psychology is also mandatory as part of the specialization in social psychology.?

Overlapping courses