Analysis

From Psychology Wiki

Analysis generally means the action of taking something apart in order to study it. It means literally to break a complex problem down into smaller, more manageable "independent" parts for the purposes of examination; with the hope that solving these smaller parts will lead to a solution of the more complex problem as well. Although taken for granted as a method of advancing understanding today, this is a relatively recent and important invention of humankind, however it should be noted that roughly parallel concepts within mathematics and logic go back beyond Aristotle. It has been variously ascribed to Descartes (from his "Discourse on Method"), Galileo and Newton as a practical method of physical discovery, and was quite surprising to their contemporaries. See for example "Newton and the Method of Analysis" [1].

It may refer to:

In psychology:

• Item analysis
• Job analysis
• Risk analysis
• Systems analysis
• Task analysis
• Functional analysis
• Multidimensional scaling

In psychotherapy:

• Psychoanalysis, seeks to elucidate connections among unconscious components of patients' mental processes
  • Transactional analysis
• Behavior analysis

In linguistics:

• Discourse analysis, a general term for the analysis of language use above the sentence or clause level
• Semantic analysis (linguistics), the process of unpacking clause, sentence and paragraph structure
• Voice analysis, the study of speech sounds for purposes other than linguistic content
• Content analysis
  • Content analysis (test)

In philosophy:

• Philosophical analysis, a general term for the techniques used by philosophers
• ANALYSIS is the name of a prominent journal in philosophy.

In statistics:

• Analysis of variance, a collection of statistical models and their associated procedures which compare means by splitting the overall observed variance into different parts
• Analysis of covariance
• Meta-analysis, combines the results of several studies that address a set of related research hypotheses
• Time-series analysis, methods that attempt to understand a sequence of data points spaced apart at uniform time intervals
• Cohort analysis
• Statistical analysis

It may also refer to:

• Category analysis
• Protocol analysis, a means for extracting persons' thoughts while they are performing a task
• Systems analysis, the science dealing with analysis of complex, large scale systems and the interactions within those systems
• Causal analysis
• Costs and cost analysis
• Numerical analysis,

[edit] See also

• Analytic
• Synthesis
• Scientific method

This page uses content from the English-language version of Wikipedia. The original article was at Analysis. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Psychology Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.