Lab report marking guide

Personality & Social Psychology (PSYC20009)

Overview

Your assignment is to write a lab report (1500 words) on associations between the Big Five personality domains and the three fundamental needs associated with self-determination theory. Specifically, you are to choose 3 associations between Big Five factors and fundamental needs from a larger set (see table below). You will test these associations using correlation analyses, and then write these results up in an APA style lab report.

In the Week 1 tutorial and the Week 2 lecture, you will be given some background theory and research on the Big Five and self-determination theory. Further, in the Week 1 tutorial, you will respond to a few questionnaires that will provide the data on which the lab report will be based. You will analyse this data yourselves in the tutorial in Week 3. To help get you started, you’ll find an introduction to some background literature on the Big Five and on self-determination theory below. Keep in mind that this is only an introduction to these research areas. We expect you to seek out additional research for your lab report; assignments that rely solely on the literature suggested in this documentare very unlikely to receive a high grade.

Background

What kinds of goals do people pursue throughout their lives? Although there are many answers to this question, self-determination theory (SDT) proposes that the goals people pursue mainly focus on the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs – autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Autonomy refers to the feelings of volition and self-ownership; of one’s behaviours originating in the self and being consistent with one’s values. The opposite of autonomy is the feeling that one’s actions are controlled by forces

alien to the self. Competence refers to feeling effective, at taking on and mastering challenges. Relatedness refers to feeling connected to others and feeling a sense of belonging in groups or in one’s community. SDT suggests that to the extent that these needs are satisfied, people will feel a sense of growth and wellbeing.

Most work in SDT has focused on how certain environments or situations help fulfil these needs. For example, studies have shown that high school classrooms can support the three needs and thus promote students’

engagement with learning, and consequently, lead to better learning outcomes.

Despite these needs being termed ‘basic’ or ‘fundamental’, not all people experience autonomy, competence and relatedness to the same extent. Some work has been conducted investigating cross-cultural differences in

satisfaction of these basic needs (e.g., Chen et al., 2015). Apart from the question of whether there is variation

between cultures, another question is whether there might be variation between people – individual differences – in satisfying each of these basic needs.

Your assignment will explore how individual differences in the Big Five personality domains are associated with different levels of satisfying the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness. As you will learn in the Week 2 lecture, the Big Five framework in personality research suggests that there are five major

dimensions of psychological and behavioural variation between people. These are Openness to Experience (O),

Conscientiousness (C), Extraversion (E), Agreeableness (A), and Neuroticism (N)(acronym: OCEAN). In your

assignment you will consider how these personality traits are associated with the basic needs from self- determination theory.

In the first tutorial you completed a brief survey measuring the three basic needs of SDT and the Big Five (along with some additional demographic questions). More specifically, you completed the Balanced Measure of

Psychological Needs (BMPN; Sheldon & Hilpert, 2012) to assess basic psychological needs from SDT and the Big Five Inventory – 2 (BFI-2; Soto & John, 2017) to assess the Big Five.

Your assignment

You are to choose 3 associations from among those possible between the Big Five and the basic needs. The possible associations are represented by the table below; there are a total of 15 associations (represented by each empty

cell) that you can select from.

Table 1. Possible associations between Big Five traits and SDT Needs

You may, for example, choose to focus on one of the Big Five domains (say, Neuroticism) and explore how it relates to each of the three fundamental needs. Or, you may want to focus on one of the needs (Autonomy, for example), and consider how a subset of three of the Big Five traits relate to it.

In choosing your associations, be sure to choose a set of three that you can integrate into a coherent overall

“story.”In writing your introduction, be sure to explicitly derive hypotheses about your 3 chosen associations from the background literature. For example, you may choose to focus on, among others, the association between

neuroticism and competence. From your reading of the background literature, what do you expect the association to be – positive or negative? In other words, do you hypothesize neuroticism to be positively correlated with

competence? Or do you hypothesize it to be negatively correlated with competence? For the purposes of this assignment, do not choose correlations that you expect to be zero. We do not want you proposing a null hypothesis (that there will be no relationship) as one of your three assignment hypotheses. We only want hypotheses where you expect to see some type of relationship between your two variables.

Be sure to choose your associations before your Week 3 lab class, as you will be testing your hypotheses in that class. In doing your data analyses, you will be doing significance tests of correlations. You will also need to report reliability coefficients for the measures you use in your assignment. You will be given plenty of instruction on how to do reliability and correlation analyses in the Week 3 tutorial.

Lab reports require a particular style of writing, so read short report articles in the leading journals (e.g., Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) to get a feel for the writing style. All laboratory reports must be typed rather than hand-written. The report should also conform to the format specified by the American Psychological Association, in the APA Publication Manual (7th edition).

The following broad guidelines may help you write your report (see also the marking/feedback scheme as well as other resources on Canvas):

Your report should contain 6 sections (with an optional 7th): Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion,

References, (and Appendices, if required). In addition, you should give your report an appropriate title that

describes what the report covers (for some guidance, look at some psychology journal articles). This title should be no longer than about 15 words.

•            The Abstract should be no more than 150 words and should provide a complete, self-contained summary of the report. This should include the research question you are investigating, the method, the nature of the

participants tested, the results, and conclusions.

•            The Introduction begins with the general area under consideration, then moves on to provide a review of the major research findings and theories that are relevant to the study. The introduction should end with the

hypotheses that you have tested. In the introduction you are to derive the hypotheses from background research and theory. That is, the hypotheses should follow clearly and logically from the literature you review in the

introduction. There is no minimum or maximum number of references required; you should include as many as you need to make your arguments.

•            The Method section should give no more and no less information than is needed to replicate the

experiment. As you are describing what you did, the past tense should be used. The method should be divided into subsections that describe the Participants, Materials, and Procedure. In the Participants subsection describe who the participants were, including the number of participants, the numbers of different genders, the mean age, the age standard deviation, and the range. The Materials subsection includes a description of those measures used in collecting the data (including reliability coefficients). This should include the nature of any questions that were asked and how these were responded to. The Procedure subsection should contain a chronological account of

what happened during the study.

•            The Results section should provide a description of what data you analysed, how you did it, and what the results were. This should be related to the hypotheses that you presented in the Introduction. Do not include any discussion of the results in this section (i.e., do not explain the results). You may find the inclusion of Tables that

present descriptive statistics, for example, means or standard deviations, useful. If you include a Table, it should be appropriately labelled (including a number) and its contents must be described in the text (see APA style guide for formatting requirements for Tables).

For your assignment, hypotheses are stated in terms of predicted correlations. Thus, you need to conduct significance tests of correlations to test your hypotheses.

•            The crucial function of the Discussion section of the report is to review your findings and to show how they relate to the relevant literature, including the theories or models you are testing. Typically, the discussion begins with a reminder of the aim of the study, a summary of the hypotheses and a statement of whether the hypotheses were supported or not. In the rest of the discussion, you should consider what implications your findings have for extant theories, any limitations of your results (due, for example, to methodological limitations), and future

directions for research.

•            The References section should include a full reference to each citation in your report. These should be listed alphabetically in APA format.

• Appendices are included only if necessary. For laboratory reports these may be used to present copies of any questionnaires that were used. For this lab-report, they are not necessary. If these are included, they must be referred to in the text of the report.

If you need more guidance, be sure to see the resources posted under the Assessment Information module, and also the "How to Write a Lab Report" module on Canvas. Here you will find detailed instructions and recommendations on how to write a lab report.

Measurement and variables

Demographics

Age: Participant age in years

Gender: Coded: 0 = female; 1 = male; 2 = self identify

These variables will be given to you in summary form. This is because we have an ethical duty to ensure that the

data is completely anonymised, and that everyone with access to the file will not be able to identify individual

respondents on the basis of their gender or age data. In the lab report, you simply need to report this summary data in describing your participants.

Balanced Measure of Psychological Needs (BMPN; Sheldon & Hilpert, 2012).

This measure contains 3 subscales: relatedness, competence and autonomy. Items relate to these subscales as noted below:

As you will note, even items are worded negatively (i.e., agreement indicates low levels of the assessed constructs). These have been reversed-scored in the assignment dataset. These items are labelled BMPN_REL_1 …

BMPN_AUT_18rc. The use of REL/COMP/AUT is so that you can identify the subscale that each item belongs to. Items that have been reverse coded are followed by ‘rc’ e.g., BMPN_REL_2rc.

Here are the subscale items:

Relatedness

1. I felt a sense of contact with people who care for me, and whom I care for.

2. I was lonely.

3. I felt close and connected with other people who are important to me.

4. I felt unappreciated by one or more important people.

5. I felt a strong sense of intimacy with the people I spent time with.

6. I had disagreements or conflicts with people I usually get along with.

Competence

7. I was successfully completing difficult tasks and projects.

8. I experienced some kind of failure, or was unable to do well at something.

9. I took on and mastered hard challenges.

10. I did something stupid, that made me feel incompetent.

11. I did well even at the hard things.

12. I struggled doing something I should be good at.

Autonomy

13. I was free to do things my own way.

14. I had a lot of pressures I could do without.

15. My choices expressed my ‘‘true self.’’

16. There were people telling me what I had to do.

17. I was really doing what interests me.

18. I had to do things against my will.

Composites, formed by averaging the sub-scale relevant items, have been computed and are labelled:

Psych_Needs_Relatedness (Relatedness; average of items 1 – 6)

Psych_Needs_Comptenece (Competence; average of items 7 – 12)

Psych_Needs_Autonomy (Autonomy; average of items 13 – 18)

These can be found at the far-right of the data file.

More information about this scale can be found in

Sheldon, K. M., & Hippert, J. C. (2012). The balanced measure of psychological needs (BMPN) scale: An alternative

domain general measure of need satisfaction. Motivation and Emotion, 36, 439-451.

Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI 2; Soto & John, 2017)

This measure contains 5 domain-level sub-scales (corresponding to the Big Five) and 15 facet-level subscales (3 nested within each domain) corresponding to finer-grained dimensions in the trait hierarchy. For the purposes of this assignment we will be working with the 5 domain-level scales. As with the BMPN, some items are worded

negatively (such that agreement indicates lower levels of the trait). These have been reversed-scored in the

assignment dataset. These items are labelled Big5 E 1  …. Big5 O 60 in the Assignment dataset, with the letter representing the Big 5 subscale the item belongs to. Reverse-scored items are followed by ‘rc’ (e.g., Big5 E 11rc).

Composites, formed by averaging the sub-scale relevant items (see just above), have been computed and are labelled:

Big5_Extraversion (Extraversion)

Big5_Agreeableness (Agreeableness)

Big5_Conscientiousness (Conscientiousness)

Big5_Neuroticism (Neuroticism/Negative Emotionality)

Big5_Openness (Open-Mindedness)

These can be found at the far-right of the data file.

More information about this scale can be found in

Soto, C. J., & John, O. P. (2017). The next Big Five Inventory (BFI-2): Developing and assessing a hierarchical model with 15 facets to enhance bandwidth, fidelity, and predictive power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113, 117-143.

Items and their relation to the domain subscales can be seen below.

Literature

Here are some (other) references to get you started on thinking about how the Big Five might relate to the basic needs outlined in SDT; you will be expected to go beyond these in writing your lab report.

Big Five

These articles will give you a good general introduction to the Big Five framework (you will also get a further intro to this framework in the Week 2 lecture):

Anglim, J., & O’Connor, P. (2019). Measurement and research using the Big Five, HEXACO, and narrow traits: A primer for researchers and practitioners. Australian Journal of Psychology, 71(1), 16-25.

John, O.P. and Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big Five Trait Taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical

perspectives. In  Pervin, L.A. and John, O.P. Eds., Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research, Vol. 2, Guilford Press, New York, 102–138.

This article will give you a sense of the kinds of things that the Big Five domains are associated with. This will help you think through which associations you might choose to examine in your assignment:

Roberts, B. W., Kuncel, N. R., Shiner, R., Caspi, A. & Goldberg, L. R. (2007). The Power of Personality: The

Comparative Validity of Personality Traits, Socioeconomic Status, and Cognitive Ability for Predicting Important Life Outcomes. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 313–345.

This article will give you some more information about the particular measure of the Big Five we’ll be using in the assignment: the BFI-2:

Soto, C. J., & John, O. P. (2017). The next Big Five Inventory (BFI-2): Developing and assessing a hierarchical model with 15 facets to enhance bandwidth, fidelity, and predictive power. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113, 117–143.

Self-determination theory (SDT) is a complex theory consisting of multiple lower-level, more specific sub- theories. We’ll be focusing on the Basic Psychological Needs Theory (BPNT), which is a sub-theory of SDT.

A very good general introduction to SDT and its component sub-theories can be found on the SDT website here:

http://selfdeterminationtheory.org/theory/

For an introduction to the key ideas behind the basic psychological needs sub-theory, this article, although long and rather complex in parts, will provide you with a good starting point:

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 227–268.

This paper provides an elaboration of the BPNT and a description of the measure we’ll be using in the assignment:

Sheldon, K. M., & Hippert, J. C. (2012). The balanced measure of psychological needs (BMPN) scale: An alternative domain general measure of need satisfaction. Motivation and Emotion, 36, 439–451.

Best of luck!

Assessment criteria