Solution: There are 4 goals of psychological/scientific enquiry namely –
Description – in this the researcher try to describe the behaviour as accurately as possible. This further helps in differentiating the behaviour from other behaviour.
For example- maybe researcher would be interested in knowing about how many students are sincere enough to volunteer for various school activities / know about the studying habits. These behaviour tend to have diverse range of actions including may will love to volunteer and many will not be volunteering, while some try to escape etc…
Thus description means recording of the behaviour and that helps in proper understanding.
Prediction– this is the second goal, if you are able to understand and describe the behaviour then you can also predict the same. You must have observed its relationship with other kind of behaviours and thus it allows the researcher to forecast that under what all circustances and situations one behviour is elicited.
Example- how much hours devoted by the child and success ratio.
Explanation– once you can successfully decribe and predict a behaviour you can actually explain it logically why it occurs. This third goal in same scenario try to enquire about the causing factors of the behaviour like what makes a behaviour occur and does not occur.
Example- why some children are more attentive in the classes
Control – once you are able to explain, predicts and describe why a particular behaviours occurs , then you can control the behaviour. It refers to three things-
Making a particular behaviour happen, reducing it, or enhancing it.
Example – you know how many hours you need to devote to top, you can increase number of hours to fetch more marks while you can reduce to reduce the same.
Application – final goal is to create and bring positive changes in the life of people. Psychological enquiries and researches are conducted in order to enhance life of the people. Example – bringing positive changes in life by yoga or mindfulness techniques