Each week, I will upload a text and questions aimed at helping you gain proficiency in research methods. It is ok if you aren’t sure or confident – I would highly encourage you to have a shot and learn something. I really hope that this thread is used by people with a broad range of abilities. Ideally, the difficulty/complexity of the questions will increase as the year goes on. Towards exam prep time I may post 10 markers here as well.
1st (day of questions being posted) to 3rd day: reply with your answers (it’s ok if you have no idea where to start for some of them – do what you can)
1st to 4th day: Find answers that others wrote and you think are high quality (eg. 1. Quote UserB 2. Quote UserA 3. Quote UserC ). Please also say why you think it’s a great answer. This time can also be used to refine your answers, by quoting your previous post and/or relevant feedback and indicating what you are now changing your answers to. It can also be used to provide and query feedback.
5th and 6th day: Group discussion on the optimal answers and agreement on answers that should make it into the solutions guide
7th day: I will compile the exemplar answers into a solutions guide and post it here
This thread is designed for aspiring and current psych students (1/2 or 3/4) to improve their knowledge but feedback is welcome from previous students .
Currently taking: Week 6 answers, feedback and review
1. 'To investigate the impact of colour in tablets on their perceived medical effect on participants.'
2. 'It is hypothesised that participants aged 18-30 years old (without a pre-existing mental condition) who are given white coloured PainGo tablets will experience a greater reduction in pain after taking the tablets than participants who are given blue coloured PainGo tablets of the same composition.'
3. IV: colour of PainGo tablet (white or blue)
DV: level of pain experienced after taking the tablet (measured through self-rating scale of 1-10 with 10 being the highest level of pain in response to a headache, both before and 1 hour after taking tablet).
4. Independent groups design.
4. a - The independent groups design is very time-effective, as the control and experimental group can be tested simultaneously.
5. The experimental results and implications cannot be generalised to all age groups, as only individuals aged 18-30 were used as participants.
The method of sampling is not representative of any particular population, as participants were chosen based on convenience, rather than randomly.
6. The same procedures and methodology could be applied to participants of different ages, to establish whether the experimental results of the first experiment were age-specific.
The data regarding levels of pain experienced by participants after taking a tablet could be measured objectively through medical testing, to ensure that results are accurate, as the use of a self-rating scale is very subjective and thus vulnerable to error.
7. Subjective, self-report data.
8. Confidentiality - Dr. Citizen made the results of the experiment public to all participants; it is not identified that permission to do so was received first by participants.
Informed consent - participants were not necessarily informed of the fact that the blue and white tablets both had the same composition, thus they may not have been informed of the true nature of the experiment.
9. Dr. Citizen's findings cannot be generalised because his experiment only used participants of a specific age group (aged 18-30) and thus cannot be applied to members of different age groups. Additionally, the sampling method used was not random, rather it was convenience sampling, which is not representative of a total population.
Group 2 (11.6 standard deviation)? Don’t think I've studied this yet.