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HPS301 Psychology Research Methods (Intermediate)

Overview of this Assessment

AT1 – Laboratory Report. (DUE: 8pm, Thursday April 2nd, submitted via CloudDeakin)

Lab Report Guidance session: Monday March 23rd at 11:30am

The major assignment for HPS301/781 casts you into the role of a Research Psychologist. You will be required to analyse some data obtained from a research study and to write a report based on your findings. The assignment must be presented as a formal laboratory report (see example lab report on CloudDeakin and/or Deakin's scientific report support for more information) and should contain an abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion, and reference sections. Given that this is a Research Methods unit, the assessment of your report will focus primarily on the results and discussion sections and this is reflected in the weighting of marks (see below).

Thus, the primary aims of this assignment are to:

1. Develop your skills in using appropriate statistical techniques to test a specific research question,
2. Broaden your understanding of research designs,
3. Develop your report writing skills; particularly the ability to report statistical results, the ability to interpret statistical results in the context of past research, and to integrate previous work into a structured argument.

A secondary aim is to apply the work you have been undertaking in HPS301/781 to a ‘real world’ problem in psychological research. Hopefully, you will come to appreciate the way we use statistical methods to help answer questions about important issues.

We will provide you with the data set early in the trimester (here it is: Lab Report data), as well as information about the study methods, and specific research questions. 

Your task will be to analyse the data and then write a lab report on the results. Thus, you will need to draw on the skills you have been developing over the course of the trimester. You can consult the Seminar Activity Instructions documents on CloudDeakin for help with analysing the data and interpreting your output. Furthermore, a Lab Report Guidance session (date to be advised in a News post) will be scheduled on Zoom closer to the due date for any student queries regarding the assignment.

The main focus of the assessment is on your ability to understand, analyse and interpret the appropriate statistical analyses to test the hypotheses and to report the results correctly. Overall, your ability to write a psychology laboratory report (following APA conventions) as a whole will be assessed. The necessary readings for AT1 can be found in the Lab Report section of the HPS301/781 CloudDeakin site. There is no need to go beyond these readings, but you are welcome to source additional readings if you want.

Submission

8pm, Thursday April 2nd 2026, submitted via CloudDeakin. 

The assignment is to be submitted as a word document (.docx) or pdf (.pdf), as well as your output (copy your output into your lab report at the end - call it an Appendix - no need to format the Appendix, just have a heading) to the CloudDeakin dropbox for the HPS301/781 site. The purpose of this is so we can see which analyses you have run in Jamovi, and if the analyses match the results. 

The dropbox will activate closer to the due date. 

Word limit

For this task you must submit a lab report that includes the sections outlined below. The word limit is 1,700 words (excluding your Title page, Abstract, Reference list, and any Appendices) with a 10% leeway (this means that no marks can be awarded for work beyond 1,870 words so do NOT go over 1,870 words).
HPS781 students: please note that you have an additional 500 words for your reflection piece - no 10% leeway on this (see the last section of these instructions).

Formatting

Please ensure that you submit your work as a typed/word processed document, using a standard font (Times-New Roman) and suitable font size (12 pt) with double-line spacing. Your document should be formatted with 2.5 cm margins on each side. Please make sure that you spell-check AND carefully proofread your work prior to submission. For guidance with APA formatting, see the following resources:

• APA style guide (thank you Dr. Michael Do)
• APA referencing guide
• APA style guide (if you click on the 'style and grammar guidelines' section you will be able to see guidelines for APA in-text citations, references, tables and figures, and paper format - all of which maybe helpful!)
• The example lab report.

Weighting

This assignment is worth 40% of the total grade for this unit.

Unit Learning Outcomes

Background to the study

Relational aggression is often a covert type of aggression that is associated with many harmful outcomes, such as poor mental health and feelings of hopelessness. While there is extensive research on relational aggression in children and adolescents, research in adults is scarce - however, this limited research does suggest that relational aggression (victimisation and perpetration) continues throughout the lifespan. Of the limited research in adult populations, studies have mainly focused on relational aggression in peer (i.e., friends) and romantic relationships, however other settings in which adults commonly engage, such as the workplace, are yet to be explored. 

Your lab report will need to use the provided literature to argue for the merits of this study, and lead to the following research questions:

1. Do age, gender, and workplace relational aggression perpetration predict psychological distress in Australian adults?
2. Do age, gender, and workplace relational aggression victimisation predict psychological distress in Australian adults?

References (click to access them)

Please note that while you are free to examine other sources if you wish, you are not required to.
We have also prepared a Reading Guide to help glean the important parts of these resources.

1. Crick and Grotpeter, 1995
2. Goldstein et al., 2008
3. Ellis et al., 2009
4. Hyder et al., 2025
   

Lab Report Sections

You are required to submit a formal laboratory report for this assessment. The sections of the report are detailed below. As this is a research methods unit, the majority of the marks (80) are allocated to the results and discussion sections. Thus, your ability to report the results correctly and then interpret them appropriately is the main focus of the assessment.

Abstract (5 marks)

The abstract should be a summary of the rationale, methods, results, and conclusions of the report. This should be no longer than 150 words (no leeway here).

Things to include in this section…

• A brief statement of the study background/aim(s) [the word limit is too brief to include hypotheses]
• Important to mention the study design, which constructs (not scale names) were measured (i.e., workplace relational aggression victimisation and perpetration, psychological distress), and also mention sample key demographics (e.g., how many people participated in the study, gender breakdown).
• You likely won't have words to state the hypotheses, but you can infer them when summarising key findings (e.g., 'as hypothesised, we found that...' or ‘contrary to the hypothesis, we found…’)
• Make reference to the method of statistical analysis (e.g., ‘Standard/hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that…’)
• State any implications and a broad conclusion drawn from the findings which is related to either prior theory or your study aim(s).

Introduction (5 marks)

You only need to produce an abridged version of a typical Introduction (approximately 200 words). This abridged version only needs two paragraphs. The first paragraph should define relational aggression (no need to define other constructs) and make a very simple argument as to why we want to explore relational aggression in adult populations, particularly within the workplace. You should cite literature for your definitions and include some citations for your argument in your opening paragraph (use some of the articles provided - but no need to use them all). The second paragraph needs to clearly state a research aim and your hypotheses. Your research questions, which should guide your aim and hypotheses, are as follows:

1. Do age, gender, and workplace relational aggression perpetration predict psychological distress in Australian adults?
2. Do age, gender, and workplace relational aggression victimisation predict psychological distress in Australian adults?

Method (5 marks)

In the method section you need to describe the participants (note that in your datafile we only had male and female respondents and they have been coded as male = 1 and female = 2), measures, and procedures which were utilised in the study. The important point to remember when writing a method section is that you need to provide enough information so that the experiment can be replicated by another researcher. We have provided the information pertaining to the measures and procedure for you to insert into your method section (view and download here: Method T1 2026). However, you will need to report on the sample size, age (include age range, mean age and SD), gender distribution (raw numbers and percentage) of the participants by analysing our data-file.

Your data will include some variables that are ready to be analysed in their current form, however, you will need to create an overall measure of psychological distress. Pay close attention to any instructions the method section might give for calculating total scores from individual items and use the “Compute” function in jamovi to help you out. Hint: You can easily make summed scale values by using the SUM command, or averaged scale values by using the MEAN command. We practiced this skill (creating a new variable in jamovi) in your week 2 seminar as well.

Results (40 marks)

Along with the discussion, this is the major component of the report and you will be assessed on your ability to conduct and report the statistical procedures. Thus, here you need to present the results of the study – only present and describe them; there should be no interpretation of the data at this point.

There are really two parts to the results section.

1. In the first part, you should present the descriptive statistics for all continuous variables in your multiple regression analyses. Include key descriptives such as means, standard deviations, and min/max (lowest/highest) values. Briefly (1-2 sentences) explain what you see in terms of means, range and/or SD (without repeating the statistics from the table) for the interpretability of your inferential stats. See the example Lab Report for a good example of how to do this.
2. In the second part, you will present some multiple regression analyses (which should be preceded by a correlation table including all variables from your research questions). See your Seminars (week 3) for how to write these analyses up. While you can do the relevant assumption tests for your own interest, such tests are not to be undertaken for this assessment task (we have already examined them and determined there are no substantive problems for the required analysis).

As the trimester progresses, you will become familiar with the specific analyses that you will be conducting to answer your research questions:

1. 1. Do age, gender, and workplace relational aggression perpetration predict psychological distress in Australian adults?
   2. Do age, gender, and workplace relational aggression victimisation predict psychological distress in Australian adults?

Conduct multiple regression analyses to answer these questions. You may consider the directions of some predictors (but not necessarily all). Based on the research questions, you will also need to decide between standard multiple regression and hierarchical multiple regression (the general argument put forward in your Introduction should justify this choice).

For each analysis you are required to report the results in the conventional manner (see your Seminar materials on CloudDeakin for illustrative examples of how to report the various statistical tests in APA format). 

Discussion (40 marks)

The findings of the study should be discussed in relation to the aims and hypotheses presented in the introduction. You also need to discuss the findings with reference to prior research, in particular the literature that was cited in your introduction. There should be clear statements as to whether the hypotheses were supported.

It is generally a good idea to discuss one or two limitations. However, these limitations should be relevant to your specific research design rather than generic limitations (such as ‘correlation/regression does not imply causality’ or ‘the sample size was not large enough’). Even better is to be able to tie these limitations to future research directions.

Questions to help you write up your discussion section:

1. How do the present findings inform your research question(s)? (i.e., were the hypotheses supported? What do the results mean?)
2. How do findings advance current knowledge in this area?
3. What might explain any unexpected findings, or how might you further explore them?
4. Were there any factors that may limit the conclusions you draw from this data?
5. What findings were most important, and what is the big picture conclusion drawn from this study?

Scientific writing style etc. (5 marks)

This will also be assessed independently as well as within the demonstration of other criteria.

The word limit is 1,700 words (excluding your Abstract, Reference list, and any Appendices) with a 10% leeway. It is nonetheless important to be concise in your writing. 

Required Files

Data set and Method document. 

Critical Reflection Piece (HPS781 students ONLY - 20 marks)

You are required to write a 500 word piece critically reflecting on the following questions. If you include the questions themselves in your response (i.e. in question and answer format), the questions do not count towards your limit. You may re-use aspects of your discussion to address these questions, but be sure that you answer the questions carefully.

1. Why are your chosen analyses appropriate for your research questions?
2. Identify and elaborate on one key aspect of the study design (e.g., the research design, the variables, or the research questions) that, if changed, would require a different analysis. Explain your thinking.
3. What is the biggest limitation of your study design, and what could you do (in terms of study design) to overcome this weakness? Would such a change drastically change how future research is conducted in this field (why/why not)?
4. If you were to rerun this project, what additional information would you want to collect from participants, and what impact would having such information have on your research question/s and analyses? 
5. Given the results of your analysis in the lab report, your next job is to design a research study that involves an intervention focused on one of the key variables. Describe how you would attempt to address causality for this intervention, what barriers might be present and what would be a manageable solution.