Research Project

Every student in 312R will conduct an original empirical research project. That means that she will develop a hypothesis, design a study, find appropriate measures, submit her project for ethics review, schedule research sessions (outside of class time), recruit research participants, gather data from those participants, enter that data into a SPSS data file, do appropriate statistical analyses on that data, and write a research paper based on the study, following American Psychological Association (APA) format.

Even though each student will have her own project, students will often work in groups so that we make efficient use of our research participants’ time. One of our tasks will be to coordinate projects within the groups so that each student is able to get the data she needs. Research sessions using the department’s Research Participation Pool are generally scheduled for an hour, and we can often collect data for 2-5 distinct projects in that one hour time block. Thus, I will generally form groups within the class, and each group will use the same set of research participants during the same set of one-hour sessions. A typical student will thus work with 2-4 other students to schedule participants for their sessions. How many sessions you will need to run will depend on how many participants can be run at the same time given your study design.

For some studies, several people can participate in a given hour-long session (though we typically use no more than 10 at a time, for reasons we will discuss in class). For other studies, the methods used require that only one person to participate at a time. For most of the studies we do, you will need at least 60 individual participants worth of data, which means a minimum of 6 1-hour sessions for data collection. (Note that often more sessions are needed, either because 10 people can’t be run at a time, 10 people do not sign up for each session, or your particular study design requires more than 60 people. Six hours for data collection is the minimum you should be prepared to do).