Attitudes Toward Research in Undergraduate Psychology Students at a Public University in Mexico: A Cross-Sectional Study

Research methodology (RM) is included in the curricula of all scientific disciplines and is important for several reasons. First, RM teaches students to analyze and evaluate data and build logical evidence-based arguments, thereby promoting their ability to think critically (McKelvie & Standing, 2018). These skills are essential in any field of study and are highly valuable in the workplace. Second, it lays the groundwork for graduate studies, in which RM is an integral part of coursework. In this sense, introducing RM at the undergraduate level better equips students to meet the demands of graduate research (Madan & Teitge, 2013). Third, RM provides students with data collection and analysis skills that are essential for making evidence-based decisions in a variety of settings, including academia, business, and government (Webber, 2013). Fourth, students become better equipped to conduct research, which can lead to increased research productivity and quality (Madan & Teitge, 2013). Fifth, RM teaches students to think creatively and innovatively, which is essential for solving complex problems and developing new ideas (Peachey & Baller, 2015). Overall, teaching RM in undergraduate education encourages a culture of evidence-based decision making and innovation and supports the acquisition of essential skills for students’ future careers.

Despite these advantages, teaching RM can be challenging. Undergraduate students often approach the course with a negative attitude because they are unaware of its benefits or because their past experience of learning RM has been poor, or both (Matos et al., 2023; Sizemore & Lewandowski, 2009).

The study of attitudes as a powerful predictor of behavior mediated by intentions is a well-established field of study (Conner & Sparks, 2015). Ajzen and Fishbein (2000) “use the term ‘attitude’ to refer to the evaluation of an object, concept, or behavior along a dimension of favor or disfavor, good or bad, like or dislike” (p.3).

There is variability in the results of studies that have described undergraduate psychology students’ attitudes toward science, psychology as a science, or the teaching of research methodology. While some report that students prefer activities requiring less commitment, effort, and initiative than commonly available psychological research activities (e.g., listening to or reading about research vs. helping to conduct it; Vittengl et al., 2004), others have found that undergraduates’ intentions to engage in research-related activities were most influenced by their attitudes toward research in their future career field. These attitudes were found to be more influential than their research activities and perceptions of the research environment (Griffioen, 2019). In addition, the fact that students do not recognize psychology as a science may be suggestive of their low regard for scientific inquiry (Holmes & Beins, 2009).

One underexplored line of inquiry is the relationship between attitudes toward research and perceived experience in research methodology training. Recent qualitative research with Colombian university students found that RM courses were seen as annoying, unimportant, and easy to pass. The study also identified the teacher’s pedagogical practice and the curricular content of the course as reasons for the negative perceptions (Álvarez Merlano et al., 2022).

Based on the hypothesis that a satisfactory experience with an RM course will be associated with more positive attitudes toward research, and that knowledge gained through training will also be positively related to RM, this study examined these relationships in psychology students at a public university in Mexico City.

Design. A cross-sectional study was conducted between August and October 2022.

Participants. Using non-probability sampling, students from different groups and semesters at a public school of psychology were invited to participate voluntarily in the study. The inclusion criteria were that participants had to be formally enrolled in any semester of the degree program or have completed their degree in the previous six months at the time of measurement.

Variables. Research attitudes: The questionnaire “Attitude Toward Research in University Students” (Barrios & Delgado, 2020), consisting of 28 statements, was used. Four constructs with seven items each were identified in the original version: research skills, positive appraisal, obstacles to research, and negative appraisal. The responses follow a Likert scale format (0 = strongly disagree; 1 = disagree; 2 = agree; 3 = strongly agree). The authors reported a coefficient of internal consistency of 0.73 for the full questionnaire.

Also, based on earlier work with psychology students at the university where the study was conducted (Montero, 2019), another scale of attitudes toward research with a semantic differential structure was also developed, which included a set of ten bipolar adjectives (Research is... interesting - boring, easy - difficult, etc.).

Experience in research methodology courses (ERMC): A 10-point analog scale (from 1 to 10) was used, where 1 was the “worst experience in research methodology courses” and 10 was the “best experience in research methodology courses.”

The following were included as sociodemographic and academic performance covariates: age, gender, subjects failed, grade point average (from 5 to 10), and semester of enrollment.

Procedure. First, judges reviewed the instruments to ensure their face validity. Once corrected, all instruments were uploaded to a form hosted on Google Forms. A pilot test was carried out with 10 students from the target population to discover potential mistakes in the instructions and form navigation.

Participating students were recruited on a voluntary basis through classroom invitations and with the consent of the class professor. Participants used their cell phones to access the form using a QR code. They were first required to explicitly state that they agreed to participate and give their informed consent, with the assurance that confidentiality and anonymity would be maintained. Those who agreed proceeded to complete the instruments. All of them were thanked for their participation upon conclusion.

Statistical Analysis. A descriptive analysis of the sociodemographic and academic variables was performed. Quantitative variables were described with measures of central tendency and dispersion, and qualitative variables with frequencies and proportions. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of the research attitude scale and an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of the attitude scale in semantic differential format were performed, respectively. The internal consistency of both scales was estimated using Cronbach's alpha coefficient. Likewise, the type of data distribution was identified using the Shapiro-Wilk test to decide the appropriate approach for the analyses (parametric or nonparametric). Correlations between the two attitude scales and research methodology experience were estimated. The scale scores were compared according to sex, semester, and whether a course had been failed. Finally, multivariate models were estimated, one for each attitude scale, with research methodology experience as the independent variable and the sociodemographic and academic variables as covariables. A value of p < .05 was established as the significance criterion. All analyses were performed with Stata v. 17 software (StataCorp, 2021).

Table 1 shows the characteristics of the study sample. A total of 261 participants were recruited, mostly women (62%). No significant differences were observed in the distribution of participants by sex and semester, nor were there differences between sexes in age or in percentage of failed students. Females had a slightly but significantly higher grade point average (GPA) than males.

For the research attitude questionnaire, CFA did not replicate the factor structure of the original instrument (Barrios & Delgado, 2020). Only the positive and negative appraisal factors were reproduced with fewer items than in the original scales (Figure 1). The internal consistency coefficients were 0.79 and 0.78 for the positive and negative appraisal factors, respectively. The model showed satisfactory goodness of fit for most indicators (Acock, 2013).

For the semantic differential attitude scale, the matrix determinant of 0.034, Keiser-Meyer Olkin (0.80), and Bartlett's sphericity tests (χ²=864.36, p < 0.05) together showed that exploratory factor analysis was feasible. EFA with oblique rotation identified three factors that explained 56.5% of the variance of the items. Table 2 shows the factor loadings of the three factors and the corresponding items. Given that the complexity dimension had an internal consistency coefficient below what is usually recommended (Taber, 2018), it was excluded from subsequent analyses. For interpretation purposes, higher scores indicate a worse assessment of the importance of and interest in research.

Although some of the correlations had low coefficients, most study variables correlated significantly in the predicted directions. As expected, as students’ experiences in research methodology courses improved, their attitudes toward research also improved. The correlations support the instruments’ validity in general (Table 3).

Except for the meaningless scale, where a marginally significant difference (p = 0.05) was found between men and women (means of 6.5 and 5.3, respectively), no significant differences were found in the positive appraisal, negative appraisal, meaningless, boring, or ERMC variables, by sex, semester, or existence of previous failed courses.

3.1 Multivariate Analyses

Since the dependent variables were not normally distributed, it was decided to perform the regression analyses using a robust method. The four models were adjusted for sex, failing courses, and GPA (Table 4). In all four cases, perceived experience in research methodology courses was significantly associated with research attitudes. Clearly, as appraisal of experience improves, negative evaluations decrease and positive evaluations increase.

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between experience and knowledge acquired in RM courses and attitudes towards research in a sample of undergraduate psychology students from a public university in Mexico City.

The findings revealed a positive correlation between learning experiences in RM courses and positive attitudes toward RM. Similarly, negative associations between RM course experience and negative attitudes toward RM were found. These findings were independent of the participants’ grade point average, having failed courses, academic semester, and gender.

The results are consistent with a study by Landa-Blanco and Cortés Ramos (2021) who found that regardless of academic degree, number of courses and research projects completed, GPA, and gender, attitudes towards research were positively associated with satisfaction with research courses, which appears to suggest that this is the variable best associated with attitudes towards RM. This underscores the importance of the impact of learning experiences on student attitudes.

On the other hand, the results indicated that GPA was slightly and negatively associated with ERMC, but not with attitudes toward RM. In this regard, a previous study with undergraduate psychology students showed that after attending an RM and statistics course, students’ knowledge improved, while their interest and attitudes regarding perceived usefulness decreased (Sizemore & Lewandowski, 2009). Additionally, in research by Freng (2019), the GPA of students in advanced psychology courses was not associated with the number of RM courses completed, the perception of psychology as a scientific discipline, or perceived anxiety about RM, which is consistent with the results reported here.

Clearly, the results show the importance of teaching in the development of students' research competencies, both in terms of knowledge and attitude, and confirm what has been described in other studies (e.g., Becerra et al., 2020; Hernandez et al., 2022; Kumar et al., 2020) regarding the conflict between the importance of research training and how difficult and discouraging it can be to teach RM.

Typically, at the undergraduate level, RM is taught in order to introduce students to research methods and data processing so that they can develop their own research studies to produce knowledge; this may impact the perceived disconnect between RM and practice and, consequently, may result in negative attitudes regarding the usefulness and significance of RM (Griffioen, 2019; Gurung & Stoa, 2020; Strohmetz et al., 2023). In contrast, when a teaching strategy is adopted that explicitly considers students’ baseline knowledge, interests, attitudes, and anxiety toward RM, attitudes improve, and even more so when students are able to investigate topics of personal interest and apply course concepts in non-academic and professional contexts (Wishkoski et al., 2022).

Although the instruments employed proved to be an adequate measure of attitudes, the omission of the complexity dimension in the semantic differential scale due to the low reliability coefficient suggests a need to include more precise descriptors that facilitate understanding of perceived complexity of RM among students, as some studies report that difficulty is perceived as a barrier that is negatively associated with attitudes towards RM (Balloo, 2019; Kumar et al., 2020). As an additional limitation, it is conceivable that the sample size used affected the statistical power of the study, despite the consistency of the identified associations, shown here by applying robust statistical analysis methods and controlling for multiple variables.

Effective training in RM is significant in the formation of empirical epistemic thinking, as opposed to intuitive thinking, which is more likely to promote practices without any scientific basis (Gaudiano et al., 2011; Landa-Blanco & Cortés-Ramos, 2021; Nussbaumer-Streit et al., 2022).

Students’ experiences in research methodology courses appear to affect their attitudes toward research and, consequently, the likelihood of incorporating research into later professional practice. Research in this area with appropriate

An approach to teaching RM at the undergraduate level that is based more on the promotion of evidence-based practice than on the production and execution of research projects, which are almost always limited in scope and manufacture, appears to be a potential area of research, with implications for the transformation of teaching strategies and content.

Writing - review and editing: Joshua Parker

Contribution of each author

Mario Rojas-Russell: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, writing-original draft.

María Fernanda Martínez: data curation, methodology, formal analysis.

Ángel Francisco García: funding acquisition, methodology, writing-original draft.

Karina Serrano-Alvarado: methodology, formal analysis, writing-original draft.

Declaration of no conflict of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Source of funding

Project funded by the PAPIME, DGAPA, 307021.

References

Acock, A. C. (2013). Discovering structural equation modeling using Stata (1st ed). Stata Press.

Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (2000). Attitudes and the attitude-behavior relation: Reasoned and automatic processes. European Review Social Psychology, 11(1), 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/14792779943000116

Álvarez Merlano, N., Rodelo Mercado, A. J., & Duncan Pajaro, Y. (2022). Percepción de los estudiantes universitarios colombianos sobre la asignatura de Metodología de la Investigación [Perception of Colombian university students on the Research Methodology course]. Fronteras en Ciencias de la Educación, 1(2), 1–14.

Balloo, K. (2019). Students’ difficulties during research methods training acting as potential barriers to their development of scientific thinking. In M. Murtonen & K. Balloo (Eds.), Redefining scientific thinking for higher education (pp. 107–137). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24215-2_5

Barrios, E., & Delgado, U. (2020). Diseño y validación del cuestionario “Actitud hacia la investigación en estudiantes universitarios” [Design and validation of the questionnaire "Attitude Toward Research in University Students"]. Revista Innova Educación, 2(2).

Becerra, J., Contreras, M. del S., Mercado, A. A., Servin, A., & Valencia, G. C. (2020). Módulo de Fundamentos Metodológico-Instrumentales: Opinión de los estudiantes [Methodological and instrumental foundations module: Students' opinion]. In M. del S. Contreras (Ed.), Formación del Psicólogo, de las Funciones a las Competencias Profesionales (pp. 29–55). UNAM, FES Zaragoza.

Conner, M., & Sparks, P. (2015). The theory of planned behaviour and the reasoned action approach. In Predicting and changing health behaviour. Research and Practice with Social Cognition Models (3rd ed., pp. 143–188). Open University Press.

Freng, S. (2019). Predicting performance in upper division psychology classes: Are enrollment timing and performance in statistics and research methods important? Teaching of Psychology, 47(1), 24–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628319888086

Gaudiano, B. A., Brown, L. A., & Miller, I. W. (2011). Let your intuition be your guide? Individual differences in the evidence-based practice attitudes of psychotherapists. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 17(4), 628–634. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2753.2010.01508.x

Griffioen, D. M. E. (2019). The influence of undergraduate students’ research attitudes on their intentions for research usage in their future professional practice. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 56(2), 162–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2018.1425152

Gurung, R. A. R., & Stoa, R. (2020). A national survey of teaching and learning research methods: Important concepts and faculty and student perspectives. Teaching of Psychology, 47(2), 111–120. https://doi.org/10.1177/0098628320901374

Hernandez, R. M., Montes-Valer, E., Mamani-Benito, O., Ortega-Pauta, B. I., Saavedra-Lopez, M. A., & Calle-Ramirez, X. M. (2022). Index of attitude towards scientific research in Peruvian psychology students. International Journal of Education and Practice, 10(2), 204–213. https://doi.org/10.18488/61.v10i2.3046

Holmes, J. D., & Beins, B. C. (2009). Psychology is a science: At least some students think so. Teaching of Psychology, 36(1), 5–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/00986280802529350

Kumar, C., Geethanjali, A., Agil, S., Jyothi, C., Sasikala, P., & Chandrasekhar, V. (2020). Knowledge, attitude, practice and barriers of research among medical students. National Journal of Research in Community Medicine, 9(1).

Landa-Blanco, M., & Cortés-Ramos, A. (2021). Psychology students’ attitudes towards research: The role of critical thinking, epistemic orientation, and satisfaction with research courses. Heliyon, 7(12), e08504–e08504. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e08504

Madan, C., & Teitge, B. (2013). The benefits of undergraduate research: The student’s perspective. The Mentor: Innovative Scholarship on Academic Advising, 15. https://doi.org/10.26209/mj1561274

Matos, J. F., Piedade, J., Freitas, A., Pedro, N., Dorotea, N., Pedro, A., & Galego, C. (2023). Teaching and learning research methodologies in education: A systematic literature review. Education Sciences, 13(2), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13020173

McKelvie, S., & Standing, L. G. (2018). Teaching psychology research methodology across the curriculum to promote undergraduate publication: An eight-course structure and two helpful practices. Frontiers in Psychology, 9. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02295

Montero, G. (2019). Experiencias en el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje de la Metodología de la Investigación en estudiantes de psicología de pregrado: Análisis de grupos focales [Experiences in the teaching-learning process of Research Methodology in undergraduate psychology students: An analysis of focus groups]. [Tesis de licenciatura]. Facultad de Estudios Superiores Zaragoza, UNAM. https://ru.dgb.unam.mx/items/89d1180d-cb4e-4516-a52b-07e4a0d01c8f

Nussbaumer-Streit, B., Jesser, A., Humer, E., Barke, A., Doering, B. K., Haid, B., Schimböck, W., Reisinger, A., Gasser, M., Eichberger-Heckmann, H., Stippl, P., Gartlehner, G., Pieh, C., & Probst, T. (2022). A web-survey assessed attitudes toward evidence-based practice among psychotherapists in Austria. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 9374–9374. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-13266-2

Peachey, A. A., & Baller, S. L. (2015). Ideas and approaches for teaching undergraduate research methods in the health sciences. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 27(3), 434–442.

Sizemore, O. J., & Lewandowski, G. W. (2009). Learning might not equal liking: Research methods course changes knowledge but not attitudes. Teaching of Psychology, 36(2), 90–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/00986280902739727

StataCorp. (2021). Stata Statistical Software (Version 17). StataCorp LLC.

Strohmetz, D. B., Ciarocco, N. J., & Lewandowski, G. W., Jr. (2023). Why am I here? Student perceptions of the research methods course. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 11(2), 273-283. https://doi.org/10.1037/stl0000353

Taber, K. S. (2018). The use of Cronbach’s alpha when developing and reporting research instruments in science education. Research in Science Education, 48, 1273–1296. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-016-9602-2

Vittengl, J. R., Bosley, C. Y., Brescia, S. A., Eckardt, E. A., Neidig, J. M., Shelver, K. S., & Sapenoff, L. A. (2004). Why are some undergraduates more (and others less) interested in psychological research? Teaching of Psychology, 31(2), 91–97. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15328023top3102_3

Webber, M. (2013). Developing advanced practitioners in mental health social work: Pedagogical considerations. Social Work Education, 32(7), 944–955. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2012.723684

Wishkoski, R., Meter, D. J., Tulane, S., King, M. Q., Butler, K., & Woodland, L. A. (2022). Student attitudes toward research in an undergraduate social science research methods course. Higher Education Pedagogies, 7(1), 20–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/23752696.2022.2072362