Due in lab Tuesday 2/3
In class we have been talking about the idea of alternative explanations, and how sometimes the validity of conclusions drawn from data is suspect. For this assignment, find an article in a newspaper or magazine that illustrates this phenomenon. Alternatively, find and critique a web site (following the guidelines in the Student Manual for this assignment, pp 9-10). Here is an example of a news article:
Murders Increase After Heavyweight Championship Fights
Heavyweight boxing championship fights cause the U.S. murder rate to jump dramatically, a startling new study reveals.
"They provoke aggressive behavior which results in an increase in homicides," said Dr. David Phillips, Ph.D., who conducted the study published in the American Sociological Review. Dr. Phillips examined the homicide rates after 18 heavyweight championship fights over a recent five-year period, and noted that the rates shot up in the days following the fights.
The greatest jump--12.46 percent--came on the third day after a fight. It's as if the violence needed a couple of days to brew to full pitch. Dr. Phillips noticed that the largest increases came after the most heavily publicized fights. The greatest single surge in the homicide rate--a whopping 32.2 percent increase--occurred after the bloody "Thrilla in Manila" battle between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier in 1975. The fight took place on October 1. On October 4--just three days later--108 Americans were murdered, or about one-third more than the expected homicide figure of 81.69.
What's more, said Dr. Phillips, the study showed that when black fighters were beaten, the number of black male homicide deaths rose--and when white fights lost, there were more white male murder victims. This startling fact indicates that murders occur because people imitate the boxing ring violence they see on TV or hear about on the news. "The violence that's most likely to be imitated is the kind that's real, exciting, justified, socially approved and heavily rewarded," said Dr. Phillips, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego. "The kind of mass media violence that meets those criteria are heavyweight championship fights."
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A similar theme was seen in a newspaper report several years ago, shortly after the Superbowl. The story reported that incidents of domestic violence were elevated on Superbowl Sunday, and concluded that watching the game caused men to become violent toward their partners.
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For this assignment, submit the article (or a photocopy of the article), along with your brief critique. Or, if you critique a web site, submit responses to each question, pp 9-10.
Assignment due: Tuesday, February 10
Select two cases other than ones we discussed in lab and analyze each in terms of the ethical issues involved in the study. Identify possible concerns that might cause an institutional review board to be reluctant to approve the study if permission was being sought for it to be conducted today. Finally, indicate whether you would approve the study if you were an IRB member. (You may find it useful to consider cost/benefit analysis in reaching your decisions.)
Literature Search: Identify a topic of interest, and use Library resources to locate relevant literature.
Identify an area of psychological investigation that interests you. Ideas can come from your own prior interests, or you may wish to look through issues of Current Directions and Psychological Science for topic ideas. Your topic should, ideally, lead to the development of a testable question that can serve as the basis for your research proposal.
The study described by your research proposal should involve a manipulated independent variable. In other words, you are expected to design an actual experiment, as opposed to doing survey research or a correlational study.
Using on-line resources such as PsychInfo and PsychArticles, identify at least 5 articles relevant to your topic. Identify which ones our library has immediately available (either in bound journals, or on-line) and which ones would need to be obtained via interlibrary loan.
For February 24, submit a brief written description of your topic (a few sentences at most), and a list of references in APA style*.
*APA style: Information regarding reference style for six common types of citation is given in your textbook, p. 440. Also, on p. 453 you will find the Reference section of a sample research report. Note that references are listed in alphabetical order and are not numbered. For journal articles, the journal title and volume number are in italics. For texts, the text title is in italics.
Search hints: once you have found one relevant article, you can use it to help locate additional related sources.
1. Do a search of the author(s)’ name(s) to find other related work he/she/they
may have done.
2. Look at the key terms associated with the useful article you found; use
those terms to do searches.
3. Look at the references listed at the end of the article for potentially useful
articles.
Assignment due in class on Friday 3/12
Working alone or with a partner, select an environment and behavior of interest. Some ideas might involve observation at a sporting event, the cafeteria, the library, a shopping mall, a grocery store, or just about any public place you could think of. Your objective is to observe subjects in their natural environment and to inconspicuously record some specific aspect of their behavior.
A. Decide on, and clearly operationally define the behavior(s) you will record. Specify any
subject variables of interest (e.g., age, sex). Get approval for your topic before proceeding.
B. Make a detailed plan for your procedure. (Recommended: Do a "trial run" before actually
gathering data. Using feedback from your trial run, revise your procedures as needed.)
C. Create an appropriate coding (data collection) sheet.
D. Record data.
E. Summarize your data. Report any appropriate descriptive (and possibly inferential) statistics.
F. Prepare your poster:
Make a poster that summarizes your hypothesis, method, results, and conclusions interpretation).
G. Prepare a written summary (typed), which should:
1. Briefly summarize the information on your poster; and also
2. Discuss the limitations you encountered in your study. Identify any possible confounding variables, such as problems with subject selection or problems inherent in your observational procedure.
Note: If you are working with a partner, each of you must write your own summary.
From Fall 1999
Mirror tracing:
(1) Prepare Figures for each of the 4 data sets distributed in lab on 11/10. Due Tues 11/16.
(2) Submit a write-up in APA style. Due: Tuesday 11/30. Include the following:
Cover page
Abstract
Introduction (brief, no refs needed)
Method
Results
Discussion (brief)
Figures, if desired
Research proposal: Please continue to look for and read articles related to your topic. By Weds. 11/17 prepare a summary of the readings you've been doing. Be able to identify one question your proposal could explore. On 11/17 we will use Lab time for individual conferences (20 min). You'll sign up for a specific appointment ahead of time, and we'll meet in my office instead of in the lab.
Cheating Paper: Due Tuesday November 2. Regarding the use of additional references (beyond the original article from the journal Teaching of Psychology)--several weeks ago, when we first started talking about this assignment, I indicated that you should be looking for other relevant articles to incorporate into your write-up. Last week some of you asked how many sources I expected. I said I thought that 2 articles plus the original article would be a reasonable minimum.
