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4PAHPRM2 [2023-24] Assignment Brief for Coursework Assignment 2 (Second Research Report)

RESEARCH METHODS 2 – ASSIGNMENT BRIEF FOR COURSEWORK ASSIGNMENT 2

Overview of module assessment: The assessment on the Research Methods 2 (RM2) module is made up of both coursework and a practical examination. There are two pieces of coursework to be submitted, which together make up 50% of your final mark for the module. The examination makes up the remaining 50% of the marks. To pass the RM2 module, you need to achieve a final aggregate module mark of 40 or above.

RM2 Coursework Assignment 2 is a research report that contributes towards 60% of your Coursework Marks for RM2. It therefore contributes towards 30% of your Overall RM2 Module Mark.

Guidelines for Coursework Assignment 2

Your research report will report a research investigation, for which we have already collected the data as a class activity in Weeks 7 and 8. There is a choice of two investigations for you to write up, which, for the purpose of brief description, I have labelled as the “CFC-14 Investigation” and the “ELOT-R Investigation”. Write up one of these two investigations in the form of a research report for RM2 Coursework Assignment 2.

Your research report should follow the standard format for a psychology research report (Title, Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, References and Appendices) and should follow APA conventions for in-text citation and referencing. In addition to the main section headings (Introduction, Method, etc.) it is recommended that you use sub-headings (of your choice) in the Method section, and elsewhere if you feel that this helps the reader to follow your report.

There are separate word limits for the various elements of the research report, as follows:

NOTE THAT THESE DIFFER FROM THOSE FOR ASSIGNMENT 1

· Title = 15 words

· Abstract = 200 words

· Main Text comprising Introduction, Method, Results & Discussion (altogether) = 3500 words

The word-count for the Main Text excludes the Title, Abstract, References and Appendices; but includes all elements within the body of the Main Text, including titles and sub-titles, footnotes, tables (including table contents, titles and any rubrics/notes) and figure legends.

· Appendices (if included) = 1000 words

The word count for the Appendices includes all elements of the Appendices (as per the guidance for the Main Text).

All word-counts above are strict maxima; there are progressive penalties for assignments that exceed these word-counts. There is no minimum number of words for the assignment.

The References section should contain the correctly formatted reference for each source that is cited in the report (there is no maximum word count for the References section).

Produce your Research Report as a Word document:

· Use the Coversheet for a Research Report Assignment (available on KEATS). Complete the cover sheet with your K-number and Student ID, and provide the word count for the number of words that you have used for each of the elements of the report for which there is a separate word limit (see previous page).

· Do NOT include your name anywhere in the document that you are submitting.

· Use 1.5 or 2.0 line spacing throughout your report; though single-spacing may be used for tables, and for the titles of tables or figures, if preferred. Use single-column layout (not two--column layout).

We request that tables and figures, are placed at an appropriate place within the body of the report; and not at the end of the report as is sometimes seen in ‘draft’ work. (If it is impractical to do so, you may place tables or figures at the end of the report, but must clearly indicate where they would appear with a label of the form: “Table-1-Here” or “Figure-1-Here”. Such labels are included in the word count.)

· If including figures, you may use any software application that you wish to in order to prepare your figures (e.g., SPSS, Excel, Word or Powerpoint) before inserting them at the appropriate point in your Word document.

· If including tables of information, it is not acceptable to ‘paste’ an image (e.g., pdf, jpeg) of your table from another application. Rather, use ‘Tables’ within Word if you are including a table (or tables) in your report.

· Avoid using screen shots or image files to provide details of text from the study task(s) (e.g., questionnaire items that the participants were shown). Image files (e.g., jpeg) are appropriate if presenting images (e.g., study stimuli) that are shapes or pictures with no, or minimal, text. Screen shots or image files of an entire computer screen should only be used when it is essential for your reader to know the precise layout of the information that was presented and when this cannot easily be done by explaining this in the report. Therefore, most reports should contain no screenshots of this kind, and it will rarely be necessary to include more than one or two such images.

· Appendices, if included, must have a title and should appear at the end of the report (i.e., after the References section).

Deadline

Upload your completed assignment via Turnitin (on KEATS) before 10.30am on Thursday 25th April 2024 (in Term 3). That is, the latest time for an on-time submission is 10.29am.

Please remember to check that you have uploaded the correct file.

Over length reports

Note that for this assignment there are separate word counts for different elements of the report: Main Text, Title, Abstract and Appendices (if included). The document entitled ‘Preparing Written Assessment’ gives details of the penalties for over length answers for the Main Text (e.g., 5 mark penalty if the Main Text exceeds the limit by up to 10%). A separate penalty is applied to over length Abstracts and to overlength Appendices. There is no minimum number of words for this assignment; though note that if the Main Text or the Abstract is much shorter than the maxima indicated above (e.g., > 75% of the specified length) it is unlikely to contain all the elements that should be included.

Advice for Coursework Assignment 2

Assessment criteria

A document with the Assessment Criteria for a Year 1 Research Report is available on KEATS. This is what the markers use when marking this assignment, and it provides a useful checklist for you when you are drafting and editing your report.

General pointers on analysing an individual difference measure

Both investigations examine individual differences that are assessed by a multiple-item questionnaire measure. Therefore, it will help to have a good understanding of the principles that underpin the measurement of psychological constructs, and of how the reliability and validity of such measures are examined and evaluated. Therefore, the following resources may be particularly useful:

· Gravetter, Forzano and Rakow (2021) Chapter 3.

· The materials from the Joint Practical for RM2 & Psychology and the Individual - Week 1 - Introduction to Psychometrics; in the Data Analysis (Practicals) section of RM2 KEATS.

· The Resource Page on Psychometrics and Questionnaire Measures (Weeks 8 & 9) in the Data Analysis (Practicals) section of RM2 KEATS.

· Sessions 8 and 9 in the RM2 Practical Classes Booklet.

· Maltby, Day and Macaskill (2017) Chapter 23.

General guidance on report writing

There is useful guidance on academic writing, and – in particular – on writing a research report in:

· Gravetter et al. (2021) Chapter 16 and the associated example report (Appendix B).

o Note, however, that you should not include a Title Page as shown in the example research report in the textbook. This is because your cover sheet serves this function and because your submission must be anonymous. Also, you are not required to include a running head for your assignment. In sum, if what you see in that example research report differs from guidance on formatting given in this Assignment Brief, please follow the guidance given in this Assignment Brief.

· The activities/materials for RM2 Seminars 1-5.

· The RM1 & RM2 Lecture and Practical Class materials (for writing up results).

· The KEATS Book on Writing Up and Reporting Research, which is in the Other Key Resources section of RM2 KEATS). Of particular value to this assignment, this KEATS Book includes:

o Annotated examples of individual difference research reports

o An activity on Writing a Method section for survey research and questionnaire methods

· For guidance on referencing and in-text citation, see the document entitled ‘Preparing Written Assessment’

o You can also refer to the sub-section on References in Gravetter et al. (2021, pp. 449-451) as well as online guidance on APA formatting for references and citations.

· You have also seen examples of research reports (complete articles, or sections thereof) in seminars and practicals for most, if not all, of your Year 1 modules.

· The APA webpages on Style and Grammar have a great deal of useful advice for report writing: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines

Coversheet and document formatting

Use the Coversheet for a Research Report Assignment (on RM2 KEATS, see the Overview of Module Assessment in the Assessment section). Please complete all parts.

Write your own concise and informative title for this report, and include it as the “Title for the Report” on your coversheet. Keep your title to no more than 15 words.

Provide separate word counts for the Title, Abstract, Main Text and Appendices on the coversheet.

There is no requirement to include a “running head” (i.e., short report title) for your report in the header of your document.

Do not include your name anywhere in your document or within the filename.

Abstract

This should be a concise but informative summary of the most important aspects of the study. Note that the word limit of 200 words is quite challenging, so leave yourself plenty of time to write and edit your Abstract. The Abstract should go at the beginning of the report (i.e., after the coversheet, but before the Introduction) on its own page.

Introduction section

Include your title (as included on your coversheet) above the text for your Introduction. Centre the title.

Remember that a research investigation always builds on the ideas examined in previous research, and the findings of that research. You should not assume that your reader is familiar with the details of the methods of previous studies that your research is based on, the specialist terms used in that research topic, the findings of those research studies, or the theories that have been put forward to explain those findings. Therefore, you should provide relevant background for your reader that sets out why your research study has been done and prepares them for what they will read in the remainder of the report. You will not have space to set out a full ‘history’ of the research that led up to your study, so choose the most appropriate examples and most relevant theoretical ideas to include. Use your Introduction to set out the aims of the investigation: this may be done by making specific predictions or by setting out a series of research questions for which no specific prediction is made (or, indeed, a mixture of those two things). Predictions and research questions should be motivated by theory and/or previous research. In other words, use theory and/or research findings to explain why a particular prediction is being made, or to justify why a research question is worth investigating. If different theories make different predictions, it is a good idea to describe these competing predictions. As a general guide, a good length for the Introduction section for this report is around one-quarter of the length of the main text of the report. If it is considerably longer than that, you may end up omitting important information from other sections of the report. If it is much shorter than that, you will have difficulty providing sufficient background and motivation for your study.

Method section

The data were collected as part of a class activity or module activity (these are suitable phrases that you can use when describing the data collection in the Method). However, you should follow the usual convention of writing up the method from the perspective of the researcher, not from the perspective of a participant (e.g., write “Participants completed …” rather than “We completed … “). Because the data were to be shared, I did not ask for your gender or age (because this information could be used to identify a participant within the data set). Therefore, your participants should be described, but without providing this information.

Make sure that the materials/stimuli (e.g., questions, survey items, test items, etc.), task(s) and procedure are clearly described. Keep in mind the goals of a Method section that we have discussed in seminars and that are emphasised in the Assessment Criteria. One key goal is that your Method should provide information that is sufficiently complete that it allows for an exact replication of the study. Therefore, do not miss out elements. This guidance still applies if – in other parts of your report – you have chosen to say very little about an element (or have chosen not to mention that aspect at all).

We did not give you much information about the studies in advance of the data collection so as not to prompt you as to what the study hypotheses or research questions might be. Both investigations were conducted using the Qualtrics on-line platform. You can access a ‘demonstration version’ of the survey via KEATS in order to check details of the Method/Procedure. An annotated copy of each investigation’s survey questions is available as a Word document on KEATS. This indicates the source for measures, where appropriate.

The usual convention for reporting multiple-item (e.g., questionnaire) measures is that if a measure has been used in previous research one indicates (with an appropriate citation) where the reader can access all of the items (e.g., a research article that provides such information). If doing so, it is useful to report some example items: this will help the reader to understand the nature of the measure. If, however, one is reporting data for a ‘new’ or revised measure, then the report should contain details of those (because the precise details of the measure that are needed for a replication cannot be found anywhere else). If this requires a lot of space or words, the items are often provided in an Appendix (rather than in the Method itself). Given that the Consideration of Future Consequences (CFC-14) scale and Extended Life Orientation Test (Revised, ELOT-R) scale are fundamental to the two investigations, I recommend that the relevant items from those measures (depending upon which investigation you are writing up) are included in full, if at all possible.

In the data collection activity, we collected data for two investigations. You are not expected to report the methods of both studies. Rather, your Method section is a report of the investigation that you have chosen to write up for the assignment. However, when data for two or more studies are collected at the same time, it is usual to mention this in the report. This is because that is one of the details that defines the context in which the data were collected. However, the mention of the ‘other study’ would usually be very brief, requiring no more than a couple of sentences.

Results section

Each ‘Guide to Writing Up’ has a list of suggested analyses for each report write-up. You should seek to make good use of the data from the investigation; and if you only examine a small portion of the data, you will limit the mark that you can achieve on some criteria. I recommend that each task/measure that was used for your investigation is included in your analysis. However, you do not have to do all of the suggested possible analysis for all of the measures in order to produce a high quality report. You should, of course, report data analysis for all of the research questions/hypotheses that you have set out in your Introduction. Note that you are not restricted to these suggested analyses: if you think of a good additional piece of analysis, feel free to include that. Separate data files are provided for each of the studies.

For conducting your analyses and for guidance on writing up your data analyses, make use of the RM1 and RM2 Practical Class Booklets and other materials from RM1 and RM2.

Discussion section

Keep your discussion focussed on what your investigation found, what these findings means (i.e., interpretation, application), what your findings contribute to a wider body of knowledge (e.g., how it fits with previous research), and what more could be done in a future study to clarify any issues that could not be resolved by your study or its data analyses. This may include suggested improvements to the individual difference measure that you are examining. If doing so, explain the reasoning (justification) behind these suggestions. In particular, remember that these investigations were non-experimental. Therefore, for most parts of these investigations, you will not be able to draw clear conclusions about cause-and-effect explanations of behaviour, and you should adjust your language accordingly. The length of your Discussion will likely depend somewhat upon how much detail your Introduction contains. If your Introduction includes many details, and is quite long, then your Discussion can likely be a little shorter than it otherwise would be, because the reader knows all the relevant points of theory and you can therefore simply connect your findings to that previously-described theory. Conversely, if you are expanding upon points of theory in the Discussion alongside the explanation of your findings, your Discussion will be a bit longer (and your Introduction shorter because some details of theory have been left until later in the report).

Remember that your Discussion should reflect your investigation and its findings. Keep your discussion focussed on that. Avoid turning your discussion into a broad discussion of the general topic or the general strategy for the research, in ways that fail to connect directly with your study, its findings or its implications. Also, try to ensure that your discussion relates well to the information in the other sections of your report.

Reference section

Include a References section with the references listed and set out according to APA conventions.

Appendices

Appendices may be used if you wish to provide some additional details, where it is not practical to provide these details within the Main Text of the report. Examples of this could be: providing details of the full set of stimuli (having only given one or two examples of these in the Method); presenting lengthy (verbatim) instructions that participants received (having given the ‘gist’ or the most important features of these instructions in the Method); or reporting an ‘alternative’ analysis for a research question (e.g., some analysis was reported in the Results, but you have checked whether the findings are the same when outlier scores are excluded or when the analysis is restricted to a specific category of participants). The Appendices have a separate word count to the Main Text. Note that you should not regard Appendices as alternative means of providing essential information that you could not fit into the Main Text of the report. Make sure that information that is essential to understanding the methods and analysis of your study is clear and is within the Main Text of the report. For guidance on what is “essential”, please refer to the Assessment Criteria for a Year 1 Research Report (on KEATS), and in particular to what can contribute to a high grade on each section of the report.

Remember that the organisation of your appendices should follow principles similar to those that you use for organising the other sections of your report: tables and figures should be titled appropriately; sub-section headings can be used; and any abbreviations, specialist terms, or codes should be defined.

Style, structure and presentation

Use the guidance in your textbook, the RM2 Seminars, and APA-format journal articles that you have read to guide the way that you structure and write your report. When making decisions about writing style or structure, the key principle is that you should be doing everything possible to make your report easy to read and straightforward to understand (e.g., if additional subheadings help understanding, then it is a good idea to use additional subheadings).

Any ‘standard’ version of English may be used for determining spelling and grammar: for example, you can use the spelling “behaviour” (British English) or “behavior” (American English); or use “judgment” or “judgement”. However, please be consistent (e.g., stick to one spelling throughout your report) – though use whichever spelling the original author(s) used when quoting directly from a paper, or when listing the article in your References section (if the word appears in the title of an article or the journal name).

You are strongly encouraged to make use of the ‘Guide to Writing Up’ for your chosen study, and the original papers that your study is based on, when deciding what to include in your report. However, please take great care to ensure that you always express ideas in your own words (i.e., please be very careful to ensure that you do not plagiarise text from these, or any other sources).

Formative feedback for this assignment

Throughout Terms 1 and 2, there have been many opportunities for formative feedback on your work which can help you with writing this assignment. Here is a reminder of some of the key sources of feedback that you can draw on, together with details of further opportunities for guidance and advice on your report.

Peer and Seminar Leader feedback. Use the feedback that you have received for RM1 and RM2 Seminar activities to inform what you include in your report, and how to express your ideas. Use the feedback that you have received during RM1 and RM2 Data Analysis Practicals on how to interpret and present results.

Written marker feedback. Use the marker feedback that you have received on previous work to help you to do a good job with writing this report. In particular, take note of any comments on:

· Writing Results sections (e.g., RM1 Assignment 3)

· Expressing ideas about research design and the interpretation of research (e.g., all RM1 Assignments)

· Your Research Report for RM2 Assignment 1

Feedback and feedforward from staff. In Weeks 9 and 10, you can use the Practical Classes (Thursdays) and RM2 Weekly Drop-In (Fridays) to discuss some of the analyses that you have done, to check that you are working along the right lines, to ask questions about the study methods or about general approaches to report writing. There will also be an in-person drop-in at 1000-1130 on Thursday 18^th April.

There will be additional Online Drop-in Sessions (using the Teams link for the RM2 Weekly Drop-Ins):

· 1000-1100 on Friday 19^th April

· 1000-1100 on Monday 22^nd April

Remember that, in many cases, it will be better to ask your questions via the Module Forum so that all students can contribute to and benefit from a discussion of your question. Also, this will usually facilitate a quicker response to your question (e.g., not having to wait until a Thursday Class or Drop-In).

Questions via the Module Forum. Feel free to post questions about the assignment on the RM2 Module Forum. However, please check that your question has not already been addressed in a lecture, in this Assignment Brief, in the relevant Guide To Writing Up, or in an earlier Forum post. Please make sure that any questions that you have are asked by the end of the day on the Tuesday before the submission deadline (in time for answers to be included in the final post on the RM2 Module Forum on the day before the deadline).

Special notes on data analysis for this assignment

For each of the investigations for this assignment, the suggested analysis recommend that you examine several linear relationships (i.e., correlations). The notes that follow give advice on the techniques that you can use to do these analyses, how your analysis can be presented, and how you can decide for yourself how to analyse and report on these relationships. Additionally, you can refer to pages 13-15 of the RM1 Week 9 Workbook (‘Additional notes on reporting correlation’).

Note on using scatter plots – think carefully about when to include them.

Scatterplots are a useful way to illustrate how two variables are related. However, when a large number of correlations are examined in a report, it is not feasible to include a scatter plot for every relationship that is examined. For example, having many figures in a report can make it difficult for the reader to follow what information is being presented. Consequently, the potential ‘added value’ due to adding a figure can be lost. This information from your RM1 Week 9 Workbook is worth bearing in mind:

“However, note that it is actually rather rare to include scatterplots in the Results section of a research report. Typically, reporting the correlation is deemed sufficient for communicating the strength and direction of the relationship. When a plot is included, it is usually because there is something particularly noteworthy about what the scatterplot shows, such as:

· The plot illustrates the ‘most important’ finding of the report

· There is something ‘unusual’ or ‘surprising’ that can be seen in a plot that would not ordinarily be inferred from the correlation coefficient alone.”

Note on whether to use correlation and/or simple linear regression

Correlation coefficients and simple linear regression are two techniques that can be used to examine the linear relationship (i.e., correlation) between two variables. However, it is worth noting that when researchers examine linear relationships between pairs of variables, it is far more common to report correlation coefficients than it is to report a series of simple linear regressions. This is because the simpler approach of reporting correlation coefficients is usually sufficient for the purpose of the research. For example, in the journal articles that you read to help you with Assignment 2, you will likely see correlation matrices that report the correlations between several pairs of variables. In those articles, you are unlikely to see details of a simple linear regression analysis for each pair of variables. This does not mean that simple linear regression would be inappropriate for analysing these relationships. Rather, it likely reflects that correlation coefficients were deemed sufficient for the researcher’s purpose (e.g., to identify the strength and direction of a linear relationship, and whether the relationship is statistically significant).

For a longer discussion of the pros and cons of using simple linear regression in addition to, or instead of, reporting correlation coefficients, see this entry in the KEATS Book on Writing Up and Reporting Research: https://keats.kcl.ac.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=7439266&chapterid=703747

Note on reporting and interpreting confidence intervals for correlation coefficients 

Confidence intervals could be particularly useful when it comes to comparing different correlation coefficients. For instance, it is dangerous (i.e., poor reasoning) to assume that two situations differ just because one correlation is statistically significant but another one is not. For example, one might have one correlation that is statistically significant with p = .04 and another correlation that is non-significant with p = .06. In such cases, the correlation coefficients will likely be very similar to each other in terms of their absolute size. Therefore, the fact that one correlation is significant, while the other is not, is not – in itself – good evidence that the two correlations have different strengths in the population. However, if the confidence intervals for each of these two correlation coefficients do not overlap, this is very clear evidence that these two coefficients are different (in the population).

Also, sometimes there are situations where a theory predicts a zero, or near-zero, correlation between two measures. If so, finding a correlation between two measures that is non-significant provides only weak support for that theory. This is because a non-significant correlation does not ‘prove’ that the correlation is zero in the population; rather, it means we have not met our standard of evidence for concluding that it is not zero. If, however, all of the values for the correlation coefficient (r) that fall within the confidence interval represent weak correlations we can infer that all plausible values for r (in the population) lie close to zero. This provides reasonable corroboration for a theory that proposes that the correlation should be close to zero because any ‘plausible’ value for r (as indicated by the 95%CI) aligns with such a proposition.