Essay Instructions: Research Design Paper: Each student will be asked to design a study. (The study should not be carried out.) The paper describing the study should be written in APA style and should contain: 1) a title page; 2) an abstract; 3) an introduction (with at least five references); 4) a method section (in which the design is explained); 5) a results section, in which mention is made of which statistic would be used to analyze the data if data were collected (but do not make up data); 6) a brief discussion section; and 7) a references section. The report should be at least seven pages long. Do not use websites as citations.(you can use our online school library source by going into nova. / alvin sherman library / Psychinfo (login: password: 051387)
***Please do NOT ?make up? fake results. This is a proposal of what study you would do if you were allowed, not what you have done. Thus, the abstract, methods, and results sections should be written in future tense.
a. This paper needs to be written about an EXPERIMENT or CORRELATIONAL STUDY with a testable hypothesis. The paper should not be written about an observational study.
b. The paper needs to be in APA style. You should have the American Psychological Association Publication Manual as your guide. You can also use some of the information on the APA website at www.apa.org.
c. Of course, students must not plagiarize in this paper. It is your responsibility to know what plagiarism is and to avoid doing it; however, one quick tip is that whenever you read information from somewhere else, you need to give that author(s) credit, right at that point in the paper, so that the reader knows exactly where you got your information.
I have added below a sample research paper:
The Effect of Watching Aggressive Interactions on Stress
Joe Student
Nova Southeastern University
PSYC 3160: Social Psychology
Dr. Sternglanz
April 4th, 2006
Abstract
The effect of watching an aggressive interaction for five minutes on subsequent stress levels was investigated. Participants were asked to? (The abstract is only about 70 to 120 words long. As briefly as possible, explain the study?s procre, results, and take-home message. The Abstract goes on its own page, and is a single, non-indented paragraph.)
The Effect of Watching Aggressive Interactions on Stress
Health psychologists have demonstrated that repeated exposure to aggressive behavior can be stressful (Smith, Bird, & Jones, 1974; Doe, 1989)?..
Note that the heading of the Introduction is the title of the paper, rather than the word ?Introduction.? In the Introduction, you review numerous studies in the area you are researching. You don?t have to mention everything about the journal articles you cite; just talk about the parts that are relevant to your topic. Ideally, your paper should flow as a cohesive ?story? about a certain area of research. That is, you are summarizing the state of research on a given topic; naturally, in order to do that, you need to explain what studies have been done on this topic. If you can integrate your article explanations together to provide a cohesive picture of the research in this area, that's great. Even if your articles contradict each other, you can discuss the dilemma of which viewpoint is the correct one.
Remember, every assertion in the text of your paper must be cited. Remember that most, if not all, of your references should be from empirical journal articles. Empirical journal articles are articles in which the researchers conducted a study or studies. You can find these empirical journal articles through the PsycInfo database, and you can read them in the journal stacks on the second floor of the NSU Alvin Sherman Library. In your paper, citations should include the authors and the year. If the two or more author names are inside parentheses (), you use an ?&?. If you use the author names outside of parentheses, you use the word ?and.? Here are some examples below:
Researchers have found that parents can read the facial expressions of their own children more accurately than those of other children (Zuckerman & Prewuzman, 1979).
Zuckerman and Prewuzman (1979) found that parents can read the facial expressions of their own children more accurately than those of other children.
Page numbers are not given unless there is a direct quote. Below are some examples if you are quoting the author directly. You should try to keep direct quotes to a minimum; it is much better to paraphrase and put the quote into your own words.
According to a recent study, ?one out of six women are sexually assaulted? (Jones & Smith, 1998, p. 32).
According to Jones and Smith (1998, p. 32), ?one out of six women are sexually assaulted.? In 1998, Jones and Smith (p. 32) said, ?One out of six women are sexually assaulted.?
Your Introduction should start off with an opening paragraph (in which you introduce the topic and provide some context for it), then go into your review of the relevant literature (citing articles where appropriate), and end with the hypothesis for your study. An example of an ending for an Introduction section (i.e., the hypothesis) appears below.
Although many studies have investigated the relationship between aggression and stress, no one has looked specifically at the effects of watching an aggressive interaction on stress. In the present research, the effects of watching an aggressive interaction will be examined. It is predicted that participants who watch an aggressive interaction will experience higher levels of stress than participants who do not watch an aggressive interaction.
Method
Participants
Four-hundred undergraduates at a large university in Southern Florida will participate in the study. All participants will be between the ages of 18 and 24.
Materials
A polygraph will be used to determine participants? skin conductance levels?..
A questionnaire will also be used to measure stress (see Appendix A).
Procre
Participants will be recruited through advertisements posted on a college campus.....
The study will take place in a large college campus auditorium. Participants will be run in groups of ten. When participants arrive at the auditorium, they will be greeted and asked to read and sign an informed consent agreement. Then the experimenter will ask participants to?..
The procre should include every step that participants will go through. If someone else wanted to run your study, he or she should be able to do so after reading your procre. In addition, the variables should be clearly defined. For an experiment, the procre should explain precisely how the dependent or outcome measure(s) will be measured, and should explain precisely how the two or more conditions of the independent variable(s) will be set up. For a correlational study, the procre should explain exactly how the two (or more) variables will be measured.
Upon completion of the study, participants will be thanked for their time and thoroughly debriefed.
Results
Data will be analyzed using a t-test. The independent variable has two conditions: participants either watched an aggressive or non-aggressive interaction for five minutes. The dependent measure is self-reported degree of stress immediately after watching the interaction.
If you actually ran the study, you would describe the outcome of your data analyses here in the Results section.
Discussion
In the discussion, you would first mention the outcome of the study, then explain what it means. Discuss implications of the findings, flaws or limitations in the research design, and directions for future research.
References
Doe, J. (1989). The relationship between aggression and stress. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 83, 589-605.
Jones, A. B., & Smith, C. D. (1998). Sexual assault and dating. In B. R. Egan (Ed.),
Gender across the lifespan (pp. 31-59). New York: Springer.
Smith, C. D., Bird, L. J., and Jones, A. B. (1974). Aggressive behavior in professional
athletes predicts stress-related heart problems. Journal of Sports Psychology, 13,
432-439.
Zuckerman, M., and Prewuzman, H. C. (1979). Parents? skill at decoding nonverbal
cues of their children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 304-
311.
Appendix A
Stress Questionnaire
Please answer the following questions. Simply circle the letter that best indicates how you feel at this moment.
1. How anxious do you feel right now?
A ? Not at all anxious
B ? A little anxious
C ? Moderately anxious
D ? Very anxious
E ? Extremely anxious
[etc. ...]
Above are all the specifications for this research paper. Now the topic I would like to write about an come up with a research is on Cyber bullying. Whether it be on kids or adolescents.
