ASSIGNMENT 2 – RESEARCH REPORT

Your task for this assignment is to write a brief¹ research report based on the data provided to you on Canvas. You will each work on your own datasets given to you in an Excel spreadsheet. You will each have a unique data set – that is, the data each student works with will be different from that of the other students.

Information about the study (the rationale, research questions, how the data were collected, etc) will be covered in the Week 5 lecture. All the materials you need to complete this report will be available on Canvas. I have even provided you with all the references you might need.

I encourage you to work together in the labs. Working together and helping each other is a good way to learn. However, the assignments you hand in MUST be your own work.

When working on your reports in the lab, try to figure things out by yourselves first, before asking for help. That said, there will be two tutors in the room to help you, so there is lots of support available.

Basic structure for the report

Your research report should follow APA7 guidelines² for research reports. It should contain the following sections. Each section has a well-defined purpose, so do not get them mixed up:

Title page

This page lists the title of your report, (your) author(s) name(s) and institutional affiliation (School of Social Sciences and Humanities, AUT)

Abstract (5 marks for title and abstract)

Use 250 words or fewer to describe the study and your findings. It needs to summarise thewhole report. The abstract appears separately on a new page following the title page, under the centred heading ‘Abstract’

Introduction (10 marks)

This is how the body of the article starts (after the abstract page) but it is never labelled as ‘Introduction’. Instead, the title of the article will appear at top the of the page.

The purpose of the introduction in research reports is to provide some context in which to position you research, to justify your research question and the approach taken to answer it:
Specify briefly what the theoretical/practical problem being addressed is, discuss findings relevant to it available in the research literature and explain why they are insufficient, and propose a better way of addressing the research question (yours!). An introduction ends with a paragraph briefly describing the basic design of the study (to be described in detail in the Methods section) and hypotheses to be tested, if any. You do not have to find articles for this section – they will be provided. However, you are free to find additional articles, if you like, or feel you need them. But this is not required.

Introductions MUST stay under 500 words!!

Methods (25 marks)

Participants

Specify on what basis participants joined the study and how they were sampled. Describe them by demographics (eg, ethnic group, gender, age, total number in each group, etc).

Materials/Instruments

Describe the IV (ie, the variables we manipulated), what each scale measured, number of items in each scale, number of steps and anchoring points for items; how items were chosen for the composite variables (criteria applied for making this decision). Give reliability coefficients for each scale, where appropriate (we have one measure where a reliability  coefficient doesn’t make sense). Specify for each scale which items (if any) had to be dropped because of unsatisfactory item-scale correlations. Report, if any, (whole) scales had to be excluded from further analysis because of unsatisfactory alpha coefficients.

Equipment and software (if any) used for data collection.

Procedure

Describe where and when the data was collected, the instructions given to participants, and if any debriefing of participants took place. This is the section where you describe what was done in enough detail to allow replication (ie, what would you need to tell somebody who wanted to do this research again in just the way you did it?). The information you need for this section should be available to you (a) on the materials used in class, (b) in your lecture notes,
and (c) mateils uploaded to Canvas. Details about this will also be covered in the Week 5 lecture.

Results (30 marks)

This section describes your  findings only – any explanations or comments should be left for the Discussion section.

The findings are described in words – tables and graphs are added for support.

If your Results section for this report includes only tables and graphs, without a written description of what these tell us, you will be asked to resubmit the assignment. In fairness to other students, the maximum mark for a resubmitted assignment is 50% (C-).

Relevant graphs, analyses and significance testing of results should be included and organised according to which research question they contribute to answer.

Any claims about statistically-significant group differences or relationships need to be supported with the appropriate statistical tests. If you did not find any significant differences or relationships, you still need to report the obtained statistics. A null result is still a result!

Graphs and tables need to be formatted according to APA7 guidelines.

The APA site has good information on formatting graphs and tables:
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/tables-figures

You were taught proper APA formatting in other papers and are expected to follow those instructions. Use separate sequential numbering for figures and tables. Captions and figure/table notes need to be fully self-explanatory.

Do not make any statistical claims from graphs only. Any claims regarding, say, differences between means (one group being higher or lower than any other), or correlations HAVE TO BE TESTED.

This section should include at least 1 table and 1 graph, correctly formatted according to APA7 guidelines. You will need to decide the best way to present the results. Some are best presented in a table, others as graphs, and yet others just in the body text. Avoid duplication of statistics (ie, numbers from statistical tests) in tables and text. That is, if you present statistics in a table (eg, correlation coefficients in a correlation matrix), then don’t repeat them again in the written text. Otherwise, what’s the purpose of the table? Please be selective about the graphs and tables you include. You probably won’t need more than 2 or 3 tables, and 1 or 2 graphs.

Discussion (20 marks)

Summarise your results in words, and IF they allow you to do so, answer the research questions. Assess your results: are they definitive or should they be read with caution? (Are they statistically significant? Are there other factors that could explain your results?)

You will then go on to relate your findings to your hypotheses and discuss whether the results you obtained were  predictable or if the theory should be reformulated somehow – and where more research needs to be done.

A scientific journal article would go on to discuss the strengths of the study, as well as the ways in which the study could have been done better (no research is perfect!). In your discussion for this report, you will need to assess this study from a methodological point of view including (but not restricted to!) the quality of the measures, and design of the study.

Reflection (10 marks)

When you have finished your assignment I would like you to write a short reflection (150-200 words) on how you thought you did in the assignment. These are easy 10 marks! Include information on what you think you did well in this assignment (if anything), what you think you didn’t do so well (if anything), why you found this assignment difficult or easy, how you could improve your assignment, and the mark (out of 100) you think you deserve (ie an honest
estimate of what you think the assignment is worth, not what you would like to get) for this assignment. Please be honest – the mark you think you deserve will not influence the mark I give you.

1. You might not think 2000-2500 words is ‘brief’ but a journal would consider this brief. And you’ll probably discover that it will be quite hard to keep the whole thing under this.
2. A lot of useful information on APA7 can be found here: https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/