TuTh – 4:00-5:15 Psych 241 – Methods Lab section 03

Jury Paper Proposals? Questions?

Survey Paper Start with something interesting, and professionally written! We tested 126 university students to determine whether having a smoker in one’s household made people support the smoking ban less. We found that… Smoking tobacco has been linked to many negative health outcomes. In response, many local governments have instituted anti-smoking laws. However, it is unclear what individual variables affect attitudes toward smoking bans… Why do some people support smoking and some people not? Maybe it’s because they smoke themselves! We tested 126 students to see if that’s what happens…

Survey Paper What are we testing? 1) How people feel in general toward the smoking ban? 2) How specific groups of people compare in attitudes toward the ban.

Survey Paper Writing tips: “I tested” NOT “We tested” “Females liked the ban more THAN MALES” NOT “Females liked the ban more” (Males and Females, not Men and Women, nor Boys and Girls) If you are not 100% sure what a word means, you probably shouldn’t use it. That includes statistical words, like “significance” and “correlation”. If you are not sure what to say or how to say it, you should see a writing tutor or me.

Survey Paper Writing tips: “statements” not “questions”

Survey Paper Procedure: What the researchers did, or what participants did? (Hint: What the participants did.) What we did to make the survey comes in the Materials section. What we did to prepare the data to analyze comes in the scoring and reliability section.

Scoring and Reliability How are items scored? Why would we need to include this? What is the answer? What items were reversed? Where can we find this? Why were they reversed? What are the benefits of reverse coding? What is reliability testing (why do we do it)? How did we test reliability? What did we use to test the reliability?

Scoring and Reliability What did we find? “_ >.9 – Excellent, _ >.8 – Good, _ >.7 – Acceptable, _ >.6 – Questionable, _ >.5 – Poor, and _ <.5 – Unacceptable” ( George and Mallery, 2003; p. 231). Good reliability. What did we conclude about our items? What did we do next? Created a mean of all of the items. What did that mean represent?

Descriptive Statistics Descriptive Statistics: What does that sound like it means? Statistics (numbers) that describes your variables. What should you be describing? Dependent and independent variables. What information would go here about your dependent variable? Histogram/skew. What is the possible range of scores? What is the actual range of scores? Overall Mean and Standard Deviation. Example: “On average, participants were neither in favor of nor against the smoking ban (M = ____, SD = ____)…”

Descriptive Statistics Descriptive Statistics: What information should we include from our independent variables? How well were our participants divided along our independent variables? Example: “Participants were (relatively evenly, unevenly) divided into males (n = ___) and females (n = ____).

Inferential Statistics Inferential Statistics: What test did you use? One-way ANOVA. Why one-way? What is your p-value criterion? If you don’t feel comfortable talking about what this means, don’t talk about it. It’s more important that you know what you are talking about. Remind us of your hypotheses, report results. Example: “I predicted that ___ and I found that in fact ____...” Conclude results.

Inferential Statistics Inferential Statistics: “When we look at the results we find that they show that men supported the ban less than women.” “I found that men support the ban significantly less than women.”

Tables What I want: MEANS TABLES What do they include? Mean Standard Deviation Participant number “n”

Tables Table 1 The effect of using APA or non-APA means tables on student’s happiness with final grade received. GenderMeanSDn Male Female Total Note.

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Homework. Make edits based on what we discussed today! Everything I prepare and present in class, is something I expect to see addressed in your final papers.

Jury project: Groups Yumi, Kaylyn, Gabby, Ryan Stephanie, Sarah B., Alyssa, Morgan Freddie, Ally, Emma, Anastasia Emily, Garrett, Ashley Jordan, Bree, Kara Dan, Derek, Sarah W.

Contact Information Tobin 626 Office hour: Tuesdays from 1-2pm