Res Report Assignments

Research Report Assignments Psychology 311 Fall, 2007

Objectives  To give you experience in searching and reading the scholarly literature in Psychological research  To give you practice in conducting and interpreting basic statistical analyses to answer specific psychological/behavioral questions  To begin learning how to write scientifically, specifically according to APA format.  To obtain feedback on all of the above, providing an opportunity for learning and improvement

Requirements There will be two research reports due during the semester. They will deal with a set of psychological questions that emerged from our discussion earlier in the semester. They will require you to  Find and read relevant research articles that have been published in a scholarly, peer-reviewed psychology journal within the past 15 years.  Conduct analyses of real data,  Interpret the results of those analyses and describe their psychological implications  Prepare a report in APA format.

Format and organization of the papers Length Consistent with APA format, each paper will As you’ll see in the APA style material, include the following sections. An overview of the title page, abstract, and reference these sections will be provided in class and is section are one page each. In addition, available in your research methods textbook. the main body of the paper (Intro, See also page three of this assignment Method, Results, and Discussion) will 1. Title Page require several pages of text, just to get 2. Abstract the minimal information across. So 3. Introduction your total paper is likely to be between 4. Method 6 and 9 pages (double-spaced, 11 or 12 5. Results font size) 6. Discussion 7. References 8. Tables and/or figures (possibly) Information available for your analysis The choice of variables to measure was based on conversations in lab at the beginning of the semester. See the third page of this document for information about scoring the questionnaires. Here are the variables in the data set:  Academic performance (GPA)  General happiness level  Conformity to WFU norms  Level of intrinsic academic motivation  Level of extrinsic academic motivation  Amount of exercise (2 indicators of this)  Amount of alcohol consumption (4 indicators of this)  Biological Sex  Sociosexuality Report 1 – Basic correlational analysis

The first research report will focus on basic Descriptive and Correlational analyses of the class data set. Your paper will essentially be a report of the results of your analyses – what was/were the psychological research question(s), how were the data collected, what were the results of your analyses, and what are the implications of those results for the psychological question that motivated the research?

Identofy three questions that each reflect the association between two variables in the data set. For example, you might ask “to what degree….. 1. Is amount of exercise related to happiness? 2. Is greek affiliation associated with conformity to WFU norms? 3. Is amount of alcohol consumption related to happiness? 4. Is biological sex related to Intrinsic academic motivation or to Extrinsic academic motivation? 5. Is GPA related to academic motivation? 6. Is happiness related to sociosexuality? 7. Is sociosexuality related to amount of alcohol consumption ? 8. Is biological sex related to happiness? 9. Is amount of exercise related to alcohol consumption?

Pick a theme to organize your paper Note that you should be able to take some of these questions and frame them around a theme. For example, you might focus on three “academic motivation” questions and frame your report as a study of some factors that are associated with academic motivation. Or take several of the “alcohol” questions and frame your report as a study of the factors associated with drinking.

Obtain, read, and summarize one additional research article. Based on whatever theme you aim toward, you should use the PSYCINFO database to find a relevant article from a scholarly journal, published within the past 15 years. You should obtain this article (note that you may even need to go to the library!), read it, and incorporate a summary of it into the brief introduction to your research report.

What you need to know about the measures (for the method section) The class web site contains information about the measures used in this study – pdf files of articles, and the original survey itself. You can use these sources to get the information you need to write your method section.

Feedback and progress toward the second research report You will receive a grade on this report, and you’ll receive feedback on it from your lab instructor. The second research report, due later in the semester, will build off of the first. Although you will conduct additional, more complex analyses for the second report, you will be able to use much of the same Introduction and Method sections from the first report. This process will give you an opportunity to think seriously about the feedback from the first report to improve the writing, formatting, etc for your second report. Hopefully, this will payoff for you in upper-level psychology courses, in which many instructors will assume that you are fairly familiar with APA style. Scoring the questionnaires

General happiness level See the class web page for this article and the appropriate reference information. Item number four needs to be reverse-coded. A participant’s total score is the mean response across his or her four items

Level of Academic Motivation (From WPI items, 30 items) See Table 1 in Amabile et al. (1994), which is available on the class web site. The “Primary” columns in Table 1 tell you which of the WPI items are on which scale - the Intrinsic Motivation (IM) scale or the Extrinsic Motivation (EM) scale. In addition, it tells you which items need to be reverse-scored before computing the two scale scores.

The two scale scores are computed as the mean across the 15 items on each scale.

Conformity to Wake Forest norms (3 items) These are original items (ie, no know psychometric properties). Compute the average of the two “self-oriented” items, and use the “average student” item separately.

Amount of exercise (2 indicators of this) Because these are such different kinds of items, treat these as two separate variables See the “variable view” screen in SPSS for information about how one of these variables were coded.

Amount of alcohol consumption (5 indicators of this) See the class web page for this article and the appropriate reference information. This might be combined, let the data tell you. 1. Compute the correlations among the items. 2. If the items are pretty well correlated with each other (say r = .20 or higher), then you might want to combine them. If not, then examine them separately (you might want to choose only one or two, to keep things simple). See the Weitsman & Nelson article (online) for details about how to categorize responses on the first four items. 3. Hopefully you can combine them. To do so, standardize (z-score) each item, and then compute the average of the z-scores for each person. This average is the person’s “drinking” score

Biological Sex See the “variable view” screen in SPSS for information about how this variable was coded

Sociosexuality (“individual differences in willingness to engage in uncommitted sexual relations”) See the class web page for this article and the appropriate reference information. 1. Reverse-score item 7 2. For each individual, compute the average of questions 5, 6, and 7 (eg., call this “SOItemp” or something – a new variable) 3. Z-score (standardize) items 1, 2, 3, 4, and the SOItemp variable that you just created  Note – some people might argue that you should omit item #4 – what do you think? 4. For each individual, compute the average of the five z-scores that you just computed. This average is the individual’s SOI score. Sections of the paper

Purpose:

Throughout this semester, you have been learning experimental terminology, and you’ve been learning how to conduct and interpret various kinds of statistical analyses. This project is an opportunity to integrate and apply many of these procedures.

The assignment

For this paper, you will write an APA-style report of the project. The research report should include seven parts, as described below. Make sure that you’re familiar with Chapter 15 in the Leary book, and refer back to it as you write. Your paper should be between 6 and 9 pages (double-spaced, 11 or 12 font size, including the Title and Abstract), and it must be written in APA format.

Although everyone in your lab will be working with the same data and procedures, you are expected to write and think independently.

1. Title Page (1 page)

2. Abstract (1 page, but see APA formatting rules for word limits)

3. Introduction - statement of Research Issues  Briefly summarize the questions to be addressed by your specific study.  You may include predictions if you have any.  This should include a summary of one relevant study from a scholarly journal. This should “set the stage” for your specific analyses.  The purpose of the study should be very clear – someone unfamiliar with the project should be able to read your statement and predict almost exactly your analyses (i.e., what is being correlated with what?).

4. Methods  Participants (who were they, how many, why did they participate?)  Materials (describe the measures in detail – what variables were measured? number of items in each measure, name of a measure (if applicable), format of the items. You only need to include details about the measures used in your analysis.  Procedures (where, how were measures completed?).

5. Results  Provide basic statistical information for descriptive statistics of your relevant variables (means, sd, n, etc)  Provide properly-formatted information regarding effect sizes and inferential statistics.  Be clear about which questions are addressed by which analyses. Eg “to examine the association between X and Y…..”).  Provide accurate statistical interpretations of the results (eg, sig or non-sig?)

6. Discussion - Implications for Research Issues  Briefly summarize the answers to the main research issues.  That is, provide the more psychological interpretations/implications of your statistical results  Speculate on possible implications of your results (eg, why are the variables related or not?, is there a follow-up question that you’d like to address if you could?)

7. References

Note that clarity and grammar will affect your grade.