All psychological research should be useful. This means that the research should have some real life applications and these applications should work. For example Stress research is very useful because stress costs UK companies huge amounts of money a year so by understanding stress we can try to reduce its impact.

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How Research’s usefulness can be limited 

Lab studies- As the situation is artificial the behaviour maybe unnatural. Therefore, researchers can not be sure that in real life the participants would behave in the same way.

Samples- If the sample is unrepresentative then researchers do not know whether the behaviour they have seen would be the same in other groups of people.

Cause and effect- If cause and effect can not be established. Then the research can not research a definite conclusion about what has caused the behaviour.