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Psych 241 – Methods Lab section 03. TuTh – 4:00-5:15. Jury Paper. Proposals? Questions?. Survey Paper. Start with something interesting, and professionally written!
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Psych 241 – MethodsLab section 03 TuTh – 4:00-5:15
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”
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 • ladelman@psych.umass.edu • Tobin 626 • Office hour: Tuesdays from 1-2pm