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PSYC2001 ASSIGNMENT
This assignment is worth 20% of your final mark and is to be submitted electronically via the Turnitin link on Moodle by Midnight on Friday April 22 (Week 10). Please see the School of Psychology Student Guide for information on School policies regarding assessment, late penalties, and submission of work. This assignment is designed to give you the experience of carrying out both planned and exploratory analyses and then reporting them. It is deliberately open-ended and involves judgment on your part, just as real research does. It draws on material from both the first and the second half of the course, and in particular on the Week 7 lecture on replication and the online module on Writing a Results Section. The assignment is based on a fictitious study on wellbeing in two different cultures, one that emphasizes competition and individual achievement (“individualistic”) and one that emphasizes cooperation and a sense of community (“communal”). The researcher is interested in variables that predict wellbeing across the sample as a whole, as well as variables that distinguish between the two cultures. She administers a survey to 50 adult participants from each culture, and collects the following data: Variable jamovi name Categorical variables Culture culture 1 = individualistic, 2 = communal Gender gender 1 = female, 2 = male Relationship relationship 1 = single, 2 = in relationship Employment employment 1 = unemployed, 2 = in job Continuous variables Age age years Exercise exercise 1 = little to 7 = regular strenuous exercise Number of close friends friends count Illness illness 1 = healthy to 10 = serious illness Social media use socialmedia 0 = none to 7 = more than 4 hours/day Trust in government trustgov 1 = very little to 5 = high Total assets assets thousands of dollars Total debt debt thousands of dollars Daily commute time commute minutes Subjective wellbeing wellbeing 1 (low) to 9 (high)
You can download the data file from the Assignment section on Moodle. The data are available in two formats: 1) a ‘csv’ file, which is easily editable in Excel, 2) an ‘omv’ file, the format that jamovi expects. Note that this file is NOT edited with the appropriate variable types. You will need to edit the variables.
Your assignment has three parts. Part 1: Hypotheses [half a page double spaced] 5 marks Imagine yourself in the position of the researcher after designing the study but before collecting the data. Based only on the design outlined on the previous page, plan one analysis to address the researcher’s interest in predicting wellbeing, and one analysis to compare the two cultures. Prediction: choose up to four variables that you hypothesise will be good predictors of wellbeing, and indicate how you would combine them together to form a single predictor variable using the jamovi computed variable function. Explain why you have selected this combination of variables. Group comparison: choose one variable that you hypothesise will best differentiate between the two cultures. Explain why you have chosen this variable. In writing this section you need to state the prediction analysis you plan to do and explain why, as well as state the culture comparison analysis you wish to do and why. You should also include the hypothesized outcome of these analyses. You do not need to cite any papers or do additional research to provide support for your reasoning. For this assignment, it is fine for your reasoning to be based on your intuitions. Please do not look at the data or perform any calculations before writing this part of the assignment. This will defeat the purpose of the exercise. We want you to have the experience of forming hypotheses on theoretical grounds, and then in the next step find out whether your hypotheses are supported by the data or not. This is how real research is carried out. Your answers in this section will not be marked on how well your hypotheses match the actual data, but on your rationale for forming them in the first place. Part 2: Analyses [half a page double spaced, plus output] 7 marks First, carry out the analyses you planned in Part 1 and show the jamovi output. In one sentence, describe how you felt when you saw these results. Second, explore the data set, using whatever descriptive statistics you consider appropriate (there is no need to show these analyses). On the basis of this exploration, come up with one analysis to capture what the data tell us about prediction of wellbeing, and one comparison that best illustrates the difference between the two cultures. These analyses will be of the same type as the ones you planned, but this time they will be based on what you see in the data, not on what you expected to see. Show the jamovi output for these two analyses. For each analysis, explain why you chose this analysis specifically. Comment on the differences between your planned and exploratory analyses, and on how likely each analysis would be to replicate if the study was repeated. Part 3: Report your results [1 page, double spaced] 8 marks Write a brief report of the results of your analyses in the form of a typical Results section in a journal. For a guide on how to write up a Results section, please see the “How to Write a Results Section” module on Moodle (under Week 7). For example, you may want to report descriptive statistics, the results of null hypothesis significance tests or confidence intervals, and a visual depiction of your results. You should finish with a brief conclusion, based on your analyses.