Meehan-PSY 380

Senior Seminar

 

Instructions for Survey and Observational Research Projects

 

  1. See the course syllabus for general requirements for both the survey and the observational research project options.
  2. See instructions on how to write APA style research reports and how to write APA references.
  3. What do I expect for the paper?  The brief research report must contain the following sections done in APA style: Title, Introduction, Method (with Participants, Materials, and Procedure as subsections), Results, Discussion, References….  An Abstract is optional. Tables and Figures are to be included after the References page, IF you created any tables or figures.  NOTE: Figures done professionally in either Excel or SPSS can get you additional credit towards fulfilling Option 4 on the syllabus.
  4. What do I expect for Results?  You must summarize your data using descriptive statistics. Significance tests (t-tests, ANOVA, chi-square, etc.) are not required.  Descriptive statistics are covered in the first half of any basic Statistics book.  Refer to chapters on central tendency (mean, median, mode), variability (standard deviation, range), frequency distributions & histograms, percents and proportions, and correlation coefficients. Examples, that may or may not apply to YOUR particular study, would be:

*   Example 1: Create a table of means and standard deviations for the answers to survey questions you measured on a Likert scale.

*   Example 2: Make a frequency histogram to visually summarize data comparing how often males vs. females engaged in the behavior you observed in your study. 

  1. What do I expect you to hand in? On the due date, you are to hand me a floppy disk.  On that disk you will have a folder (subdirectory) called Research Project containing:

*   your APA research report

*   each of your Excel or SPSS graphs, if you have any

*   your Excel or SPSS data files if you used either to analyze your data

*   your informed consent and survey questions (for survey projects)

*   a sample of your observation data collection sheet (for observational projects)

 

NOTES: If you do two research projects, label one Research Project 1 and the other Research Project 2.  If you do any graphs or data analyses by hand, then you need to hand in paper copies of those things on the due date.