Welcome to the PSY-520: Research Methods in Psychology II, companion page.
This workshop is a 10-week series covering modules 1-10 of PSY-520. Read the summaries and descriptions for each week below to see if this workshop would be helpful for you.
See the full workshop schedule to view the day and time this workshop runs in your current term. If you cannot attend live, you will still receive the recording under the "My Account" section of your Academic Support Homepage. We hope to see you soon!
In your first week, you will begin thinking beyond the proposal stage of your research from your PSY-510 course and begin thinking about how this will look in an actual research scenario. You have two assignments due this week: A discussion post with two replies and your first Milestone.
Your Week One Assignments:
1-2 Discussion: You will be addressing some of the challenges you will face given your strict data collection parameters. Really dive into how these built-in limitations can affect your research as compared to if you did not have these restrictions in place, and also how you can overcome them.
1-3 Milestone One: You will be resubmitting your final paper from PSY-510. It is important to note that you first address any instructor feedback you may have received rather than simply uploading the exact same paper.
For more information on the concepts from today's workshop, check out these other helpful links:
In week two, you will begin thinking about questionnaire design and survey questions through two assignments: A discussion post with replies and your second Milestone.
Your Week Two Assignments:
2-1 Discussion: This discussion will have you thinking about the importance of the flow of a survey, how questions are worded, how to determine response options, and the format, among others. The research you conduct to complete this assignment will assist you in completing your Milestone Two assignment.
2-2 Milestone Two: You will be submitting your first draft of the survey you intend to use for your data collection. It is highly unlikely that you will get this right on the first try, and this is meant to be a working document to create back and forth dialogue with your instructor to yield the best possible survey when you make it live later in the course. You should submit this assignment by putting the questions in the order you intend to ask them (including demographic information) and are free to use an existing survey that has already been proven to be reliable and valid or you may create your own.
IMPORTANT! Remember that you may not include any questions related to a diagnosable mental health disorder, dealing with suicide, or any type of abuse. These will be rejected by your instructor! You should also keep in mind that if you are asking a question where a word or phrase could be interpreted differently from one person to the next, you should include the working definition you intend to use as the research as part of the question.
Example: How many days per week do you exercise? Exercise for the purposes of this question, is defined as thirty or more consecutive minutes of intense cardio or weight-lifting sessions. Some people may have different interpretations of what it means to exercise, so including this definition will ensure all participants are using the same definition when answering the question.
In week three, you take a break from milestone work and instead have a short paper to do in conjunction with your discussion post and replies. This week is all about statistical significance, null hypothesis, and Type I and II errors.
Your Week Three Assignments:
3-1 Short Paper: You are given an excerpt from a research article that includes the results of this hypothetical study written in APA format. Your paper should be one to two pages and should explain what it means to have statistically significant results, what that means, and ensure you discuss how the p value relates to statistical significance.
3-2 Discussion: For this discussion you will be discussing Type I and II errors. You will be using your research question for the final project for this assignment. To begin, state your research question and what the null hypothesis would be for that research question. You will then discuss potential Type I and II errors that you could make based on your research.
A Null Hypothesis is a simple assumption made in experiments or a research study that says nothing special is going to happen. There is no effect, no difference, or no relationship between things. If you are evaluating a new blood pressure medication, the Null Hypothesis would be "this new medication will have no effect on blood pressure compared to those taking a placebo." When doing research, it is beneficial to START with a null hypothesis, then look at the data you receive to see if there is strong enough evidence to go against it. In our example, let us say the data very strongly disagrees with that statement and we can see a clear difference between those taking the new medication and those taking a placebo. In this case, the researcher would reject the null hypothesis and conclude that it is likely there is an effect that exists.
A Type I Error is when a researcher REJECTS the Null Hypothesis despite the Null Hypothesis being true. In our medication example, this would be if a researcher states the new medicine works and it is the greatest thing since sliced bread and Betty White put together, but in reality, there is little to no difference between those taking the medication and those taking a placebo. This researcher just made a Type 1 Error. To easily remember this, think of the story of the boy who cried wolf. He kept saying the wolf was showing up when it really was not. Same thing here. Saying there are these differences when they do not exist.
A Type II Error is the opposite of a Type I Error. In this case, a researcher ACCEPTS the Null Hypothesis, but there really IS a difference or an effect. The researcher says, "Nah, there's no difference between this new medication and those who took the placebo" when in reality there is a noticeably clear difference that the new medication significantly lowered someone's blood pressure. The researcher failed to recognize something important that happened even though it was right there, glaringly obvious.
In week four, we go back to our friend from PSY-510, the IBM SPSS program. But before we do that, let us take a look at your Milestone Three assignment.
Your Week Four Assignments:
4-1 Milestone Three: You are preparing to use the Qualtrics program for your survey. You should be sure to incorporate all feedback from your instructor from your second Milestone assignment. Unlike other Milestones, this one is due like a Discussion Post, so it must be turned in by Thursday at 11:59pm of your local time zone. After you input your survey, you will create an intro message and then be sure to delete any existing responses before you fully publish your survey. Every time you or your instructor access it, Qualtrics counts it as a response, so clearing those out before publishing will ensure you are left with only responses from those actually taking the survey. Your module has many helpful links on using Qualtrics, and you can find those links at the bottom of this page as well.
The second part of this (which is a separate, ungraded assignment) is to make any final adjustments based on your instructor’s feedback/once you have been given your instructor’s approval and publish/deploy your Qualtrics survey in the PSY 510/520 Research Methods Student Lounge in SNHU Connect. This should be done by Sunday at 11:59pm in your local time zone. The quicker you get your Milestone Three assignment completed, the quicker you can get the approval to publish your survey.
4-2 SPSS Assignment #1 on Multiple Regression: Be sure you address every question (some have multiple parts to them) on the template provided. Be sure you are opening the 4-2psy520 SPSS#1 data set for this assignment. You are also encouraged to watch the tutorial video located in your Reading & Resources section of the module (also linked below for you).
For more information on the concepts from today's workshop, check out these other helpful links:
SPSS Tutorial Video 1: Multiple Regression
How to Get Started With Qualtrics
In Week Five, you will have three assignments due: a discussion, a journal, and a short paper. You should also be taking as many surveys as you can for your peers, as you are relying on them to take your survey as well. Though this is ungraded, it will really help your peers just as it will help you with your research.
Your Week Five Assignments:
5-1 Short Paper: You are given four research scenarios. You should be describing a potential mediator and moderator for each of those scenarios (so you will identify a total of eight variables; four mediators and four moderators). Be sure you begin your paper by explaining these two concepts first (defining them and the concept of them.
5-2 Discussion Post: You are choosing a peer-reviewed article that discusses EITHER a mediator or a moderator. Ideally this will be related to your project topic, though this is not required. Follow the discussion post prompts for your post and your replies to at least two of your peers.
5-3 Journal One: You will be preparing to analyze your data in Week Six. Begin by describing the level of data you collected, and then what you plan to do with the data you are collecting. You should be stating the statistical test(s) you will be using and why you chose those, which variables you will be examining by using a specific test, and then also stating tests you will not be using, and why they are not appropriate ones to use.
It could be helpful to familiarize yourself with Mediator and Moderator variables, so let us take a look at that now.
Mediators are an intermediate variable that lie directly in the causal path of the Independent (IV) and Dependent (DV) variables. In other words, they are a "mystery" variable that researchers must try to identify when determining causal links between variables. Mediators explain the “how” or “why” an IV affects a DV. If a study shows that exercise (IV) improves work performance (DV), a mediator could be a reduction in stress levels. This would answer the "why" question of "why did this change occur?"
Moderators are what determines the “when” or the “for whom” an effect occurs by amending the strength (or weakness) or the direction of the relationship between the IV and DV. It gives us the context of the relationship between the two variables. For example, how effective the amount of time spent studying is (IV) on a student's grades (DV) is moderated by the student's intelligence level. It will be a stronger relationship for some, but weaker for others. It answers the question of under what conditions does this relationship occur.
Another couple examples would be smoking causes cancer. But in between there, smoking causes lung damage which can lead to cancer. The lung damage is the mediating variable. Exercise leads to weight loss. How effective exercise is on an individual's amount of lost weight can be moderated by their age.
For more information on the concepts from today's workshop, check out this other helpful link:
In Week Six, you have your Milestone Four and SPSS Assignment #2 due. The PSY-520 Workshop Week Six session goes into deep detail about both of these assignments, and you are strongly encouraged to sign up for and attend. If you cannot attend live, you can still sign up for the session which will give you access to watch the recording at your convenience.
Your Week Six Assignments:
6-1 Milestone Four: This is the first draft of both your Methods and Results section. It is highly recommended to use the critical elements as subheadings (provided in the rubric (bolded words in your prompts) to ensure you do not accidentally miss anything. Now that you have done your data collection, you should be revising the Methods section that you wrote in your PSY-510 Milestone Four (for that assignment you did a “proposed methodology”). Your PSY-520 Methods section should be a reflection of what actually took place (participants, materials, procedures). Your Results section should first describe how you are reducing your raw data, should include at least one table of relevant descriptive statistics and explanation of them, description of the test you chose to run, and an explanation of your findings.
6-2 SPSS Assignment #2: You will be working on ANOVAs. You are encouraged to follow the instructions step by step. If you feel overwhelmed, just focus on one thing at a time and go in order. Some students prefer to see the whole thing before they start working on the assignment, and this strategy can induce anxiety in others. Use whichever method you prefer, and just take it slow to really make sure you understand what is being asked of you. You are also encouraged to use the Tutorial Video provided in your Reading and Resources for this week (linked below).
For more information on the concepts from today's workshop, check out this other helpful link:
SPSS Tutorial 2: ANOVA 1 [Video]
In Week Seven, you have a discussion, journal, and SPSS assignment due. Before you begin your discussion and SPSS, you are encouraged to check with your instructor (if they have not already made an announcement) to see if the research designs chosen can be the same in your discussion as what you use for the SPSS assignment. Your discussion post AND Question 4 of your SPSS assignment are basically identical, so you should check the expectations of your instructor prior to working on these assignments.
Your Week Seven Assignments:
7-1 SPSS Assignment #3: Familiarize yourself with the data set provided, noting what each set of participants indicates. Be sure to go step by step for this assignment and watch the tutorial provided in your Reading & Resources section of the module (also linked below) as this will greatly assist you in completing this assignment.
7-2 Discussion: You will create a research design that would require the use of a repeated measures ANOVA to be performed. Your responses should, as always, be scholarly in approach and discuss alternative research designs that could have been used to answer your peers’ questions.
7-3 Journal Two: Your Journal assignment is to prepare you for doing Milestone Five in Week Eight. While it does not contain every single element that Milestone Five will require, it does contain a lot of what will be needed, so be as specific and detailed as possible.
For more information on the concepts from today's workshop, check out this other helpful link:
For Week Eight, you have your Milestone Five assignment and your fourth and final SPSS Assignment due.
Your Week Eight Assignments:
8-1 Milestone Five: You are drafting the Discussion section of your final paper. As noted in Week Seven, you did a lot of this work as part of your journal assignment. Your Milestone Five has six bullet points to write about, and, specifically, you addressed some aspects of the first three bullet points and the fifth one, in your Week Seven journal assignment. You also have had some practice with identifying tests that you could have used and ones that are less appropriate (the fourth bullet point of your Milestone Five) back when you did your journal assignment in Week Five, so be sure to check out the feedback you received from that assignment!
8-2 SPSS Assignment #4 on Chi-Square: Follow the answer template provided and do the questions in order. Be sure to check out the tutorial video in your Reading & Resources section of the module before attempting this assignment (also linked below).
For more information on the concepts from today's workshop, check out this helpful link:
SPSS Tutorial Video 4: Chi-Square Tests
In Week Nine, you find you have a fairly light week from a coursework perspective, in that you only have two discussion posts, each with two replies.
Your Week Nine Assignments:
9-1 Discussion - Qualitative Coding Exercise: The spreadsheet linked in the prompt opens up a 2-tabbed Excel workbook. The first tab has instructions for what you will be doing and includes an example of what your final table looks like. The second tab contains various responses to the question at the very top of "What is the most pressing concern for you and your family in the coming year?". Look through the responses (there are forty-one of them) and find ways to categorize and combine/label (or "code") responses together that are similar in nature. For example, you will notice there are a few that essentially state there is nothing that currently concerns them in the coming year. Even though these qualitative responses vary in wording, they are basically saying the same thing, so you could have a category that says, "No concerns" and then apply that to each instance of a response that would fit that category.
One way to approach this assignment is to go line by line and in column "B", begin listing your categories next to each response, and in column C (or even on a piece of paper next to your computer) keep a running list of your existing categories so you know what you've already used to see if you need a new category or if the next response in the list fits into one that you've already created. Once you have done this, you will create a little table like the example shows (NOTE: You will more than likely have more than the three example categories listed). Your table should include all three of these elements (coding category names, total number of responses that fit into that category, and what percent of the total responses that category has. Remember, you have forty-one total responses, so take the number of similar responses, divide by forty-one, and multiply by one hundred to get your percentage). In the example table, you can see there are fifty total responses (20+12+18). The weather was rainy category had 20 respondents, 20/50 = 0.4 x 100 = 40%.
This is important. While you are free to complete your assignment at any point before the Thursday deadline, you are asked to not post your response until Wednesday. This will give your classmates who may not be able to do work as early in the week as you a chance to produce their own coding schemes without being influenced by your work.
9-2 Discussion – Qualitative Research: You will discuss how your research could have looked differently if you were able to take a qualitative approach instead of a quantitative approach. To clarify, this is referring to your final project’s question, not a new one. Write about the type of qualitative research that could be used and how you would go about conducting it and then discuss the pros and cons of using this design over the quantitative method you used for the course.
Due to the light load this week, be sure to use that extra time to get started on assembling your final project that is due in Week Ten!
This is it, the culmination of all your hard work over the past 20 weeks. A discussion post with two replies and your final project submission are all that remain.
Week Ten Assignment:
10-2 Discussion: For this discussion, you are simply discussing anything you found interesting or surprising related to the weekly readings. Did any threats to scientific integrity in the field of psychology jump out at you? If so, how could those be remedied?
10-1 Final Project: The following are some tips for your final project. Feel free to use any and all (or none!) of these to ensure your final paper is as polished as possible:
- Go through EVERY SINGLE PAPER you have done in both 510 and 520 and make sure you addressed/incorporated ALL instructor feedback for each assignment. A recommendation is to save these as "Assignment Name – UPDATED" or something like that so you can easily identify which ones you have done, and which ones still need to be done. Even if you got a perfect score on the paper, your instructor may have left notes on how you could make an area even stronger.
- Create yourself a brief outline of which Milestones fit where in the final project and note that, as it will be easier to identify when you begin merging documents into one polished piece (you can also refer to the recommended headers section that follows these tips as it has these identified for you).
- The paper should flow as: New Title Page for the 520 Final, the Body of your most updated final 510 paper, the body of your 520 final paper, references for both final papers merged into one Reference list. Be sure to maintain alphabetical order!
- Be sure to check your content against the Rubric and Feedback (yes, do this again!)
- Read the paper aloud, review the formatting, run a grammar and spelling check, and then read the paper aloud again.
Finally, here is an example of how these two papers can flow together (after your title page) AND includes an example of how your headers can look (Level 1 – centered and bolded, Level 2 – Left-hand adjusted and bolded, and Level 3 – Left-hand adjusted, bolded, and italicized). Having your paper laid out like this shows your instructor that you have checked every box on the grading rubric. It also will make it easier for them to grade because they already know what you have submitted that did not require any alterations, so they can focus on the areas where feedback was given to see that you addressed those items. Note, these examples include which Milestone assignment you did this work in. Do not include that information as part of your header (Example, Problem Statement should be the header used, not Problem Statement (from 510 – Milestone One).
PSY 510 – Final Paper:
Problem Statement (from 510 - Milestone One)
Literature Review (from 510 - Milestone Three)
Existing Research
Research Designs
Advantages and Disadvantages
Appropriateness
Unknown
Principles and Standards
Research Question and Hypothesis (from 510 - Milestone Two)
Research Question
Hypothesis
Variables
Proposed Methodology (from 510 - Milestone Four)
Participants
Materials
Procedures
Ethical Concerns
Data Analysis Plan (from 510 - Milestone Four)
Preparation of Raw Data
Analytical Procedures
Descriptive Statistics
Principles and Standards
Anticipated Results (from 510 - Milestone Four)
PSY 520 – Final Paper:
Methods (from 520 Milestone 4)
Participants
Materials
Methodological Procedures
Results (from 520 Milestone 4)
Raw Data
Descriptive Statistics
Statistical Test
Research Findings
Discussion (from 520 Milestone 5)
Data Analysis
Previous Literature
Strengths and Limitations
Other Tests – Less Appropriate
Future Research
APA Standards
References (Begin on new page)
If you need additional support with APA citations, try these additional resources:
Using Figures and Tables in Microsoft Word in APA Format
Fundamentals of APA (with Video)
APA Formatting Basics in Word
APA Citation: Journal Articles from Databases (with Video)
Need More Help?
Check out our other relevant group sessions, including the Psychology Office Hours, the APA Workshop, and the workshop this companion page aligns with, PSY 520 Grad Psychology. Take a look at the full workshop schedule to see all our offerings.