Introduction and guidance
This free course, Investigating psychology, illustrates the range of questions investigated by psychologists. It has been designed to support your learning in one of the key areas of the discipline, ‘Conceptual and historical issues in psychology’, known to most psychologists as ‘CHIP’. It will help you to understand how psychological enquiry exists within a broader social and historical context; to see what different methods are used by psychologists to investigate human behaviour; and to learn about the different perspectives that exist within psychology. It will give you a sense of the historical locations of the people, the cultural influences on their thinking and how they are grouped together in terms of direct contact with and influence on each other.
The course is split into three separate sessions: each session should take you around one hour to work through.
One of the keys to understanding psychology is to familiarise yourself with its history and core questions. For this reason, The Open University has specifically developed an interactive resource designed to allow you to explore psychology in the way that best suits you. You can follow links to people, contexts, perspectives and methods to discover information, images and links from across psychology.
The resource also links each of these people, contexts, perspectives and methods, so that you can see how each element is connected in the history of psychology.
If you enjoy this course you might be interested in the Open University BSc (hons) Psychology [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .