Week 10.
Finish suveys, begin basic statistics.
Lecture notes
This week we will finish
surveys, and begin introductory statistics.
Lecture notes: Statistics notes # 1.
Readings
Study for your exam on Wednesday. I have been giving exam notes as part of lectures: look at the lecture summaries & your notes.Discussion group Assignment
Word version of Week 10 assignment.Write the methods and results sections of your paper.
This is an important chance to get feedback on your
paper, so use it!!
You
should already have written your introduction and design for
Week 8. Now write up your methods,
and integrate them with your introduction. This is a lot for
a weekly homework assignment – you
may not get through all of it – but if you are wise you
will use this as an impetus to get the guts of your paper done now,
and to get feedback on it in group. For hints on how a final
paper looks, go to the Guide for reading articles.
- Who are your research participants? What type of sample is this (e.g., random, convenience, targeted, etc.). What is the n?
- Here / how did you recruit them?
- What are the sampling biases or limitations?
- What was the overall design?
- Was this a measurement or an experimental study?
- “True” experiment or quasi-experiment?
- What were the overall study procedures – generally, how did you put the study together?
- What, step-by-step, did you do with each participant?
- If you did an experiment your Independent Variable will be operationally defined in this section: what was your experimental manipulation, what were the experimental v. control groups?
- How did you obtain informed consent? Describe the IRB approval. What other ethical issues may there be (e.g., stressful conditions, deception or placebo groups…), and how did you deal with that?
- How did you operationally define your Dependent Variable(s)? Describe this in terms of your hypothesis, being concrete enough that someone else could get the same numbers you did.
- If you are doing a measurement study your Independent (or predictor) Variable will also be defined in this section.
- Were the measures known to be reliable and valid? How?
