PSYC11012 - Foundations of Psychological Research

Assignment Task

Overview

The aim of this assessment is to enable you to develop your writing skills and to practice preparing a research report. A research report is structured in the order that you actually conduct research; typically, a researcher becomes interested in a puzzling psychological phenomenon, designs a study to investigate it, collects and analyses data, then interprets the results. In PSYC11012, I aim to give you a taste of this exploratory research process! The only difference is that, because this is an introductory unit, you will not have to conduct any complicated statistical analyses, but rather, you will be given the results for the experiment (note, you will have to do follow some basic steps in order to write up the results correctly). You should be able to demonstrate that you can critically evaluate the literature on a given topic, communicate a research aim, construct a hypothesis, and discuss research findings.

You will be required to write a brief research report. You need to write the report as if you are the researcher (rather than a participant in a class study or study conducted by the unit coordinator). You will be assessed on your ability to put together a scientific report, based on collected data (note you will also be a participant), in American Psychological Association (APA) format, with sections including an Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, and References. Five references will be provided to you, but at least five more must be found, and referred to, in your report (so, your reference list should have a minimum of 10 journal articles in it. Non journal articles such as books, government websites etc do not count towards the 10 but can be cited if necessary). You will need to do some independent searching and reading of the literature. Reading and conducting scientific reports, and the use of the APA style are skills that you will utilise all throughout your psychology degree and beyond. Please refer to the APA publication manual (2020) and utilise the APA template provided for further information on how to appropriately format your report.

The information in this handout includes the methods and times for data collection, the required readings, that need to be included in your submission, and some guidance on how to format your report. For other information on the subject content, including the marking criteria against which your report will be marked, please refer to information contained in the Assessment tile on Moodle.

Introduction 

The introduction describes what you are studying, why you are studying it, and what you expect to find.  The introduction should make up approximately one quarter of the total length of your report (although it can be longer, if the discussion is shorter – together these two sections should make up about 60% of the report). For this section of your report, you will need to:

• Begin by introducing the area of interest your experiment is designed to

• Provide a brief review of the constructs that are relevant to the study, and related literature (i.e., key theories, and previous research that has attempted to test these theories). This coverage should lead up to an explanation of why you decided to do your experiment (i.e., what are the gaps in the literature?).

• Discuss how the current study fits in. Previous research provides a background, from which the puzzling phenomenon that you are studying has arisen, but you will need to state how your study will attempt to further the understanding of this phenomenon.

• The final part of the introduction should describe what you predict will happen in your research, in the form of specific aims and hypotheses. Here, you are making an educated guess, based on previous research, as to the likely outcome of your experiment. Make sure that the statement of the hypothesis (or hypotheses) is the last part of your introduction.

• Unlike an essay, do not mention the aims or hypothesis at the beginning of the introduction- only place it at the end after you have justified the importance of the topic, reviewed the literature, and have an argument that informs the nature and direction of your hypotheses.

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