Identify your specific research question(s) and hypotheses, including the specific variables in your study. You should use your understanding of the relevant research, your natural curiosity, and the advice of your classmates and instructors to generate specific questions for your study and the associated specific hypotheses and variables.

PAPER 2 – PSYCH 12 Fall 2018

Research Proposal

Throughout the course, you have learned a great deal about research methodology in psychology. This final paper is your opportunity to apply your new knowledge as you create your own research proposal examining a psychological phenomenon of interest to you. You will not actually run the study, but you will need to apply all aspects of your developing knowledge of research methods to the creation of this research project. I hope that you find this process both challenging and rewarding.

Steps for Designing Your Research Proposal:

1. Select a topic that interests you within psychology. Think back to your introductory psychology courses – what topics caught your attention? What general issues within that topic do you find intriguing? You might consult the lecture notes on how people generate research ideas for suggestions on getting research ideas. Be sure to evaluate your general idea: Does your idea have the potential to advance our understanding of human thought, emotion, or behavior? Would your idea provide knowledge that is potentially important to the field of psychology? Do you find your idea sufficiently interesting to spend several weeks thinking about it? Is your idea researchable using scientific methods? Would it be ethical and reasonable to pursue your idea?

2. Search the literature for relevant research on this topic. Be careful to conduct a focused search on your topic; if you are specifically interested in modern-day same-sex friendships among college students, you don’t need to review all the literature on every kind of friendship. You also don’t need to conduct an exhaustive literature review on your topic (i.e., you don’t need to read every piece of research on modern-day same-sex friendships among college students), but you should look at enough previous research to inform your proposed study and to ensure your proposed study will inform the existing literature. Your final proposal should contain at least 5 references that are very closely related to your topic.

3. Identify your specific research question(s) and hypotheses, including the specific variables in your study. You should use your understanding of the relevant research, your natural curiosity, and the advice of your classmates and instructors to generate specific questions for your study and the associated specific hypotheses and variables.

4. Specify a research design for your research questions. Think about how best to conduct a study to answer your questions and test your hypotheses (but remember to stay within the bounds of both ethics and reality). What type of design (e.g., experimental, correlational, quasi-experimental) would you use? How would you gather the data? How would you measure and/or manipulate (i.e., operationalize) these variables? What would the participants experience? How would you analyze the data?

   You may choose any type of research study (e.g., true experiment, quasi-experiment, correlational study) and use any type of data (e.g., archival data, self-report, behavioral). Your research design should be neither overly simple (e.g., two-group design with one dependent variable) nor overly complex (e.g., five independent variables with three dependent variables). Your lab instructor will be able to offer helpful feedback on the complexity of your design.

   You will need to either develop new measures and manipulations or find (and cite) pre-existing measures and manipulations for your study. As described below, you should include in your final proposal the actual measures and manipulations used in your study. The only exception to this involves measures and manipulations that require extensive time or knowledge to create (e.g., photographs of faces that are actually ten different faces blended together).

5. Write the research proposal in APA format. Be sure to include the sections listed below.

Sections of Your Research Proposal:

• Title page
• Abstract
• Introduction (approx. 3-5 pages)
  • Start with a general overview to the psychological phenomenon; try to engage the reader right from the first sentence.
  • Present and review previous important and relevant research on this phenomenon.
  • Present the logical reasoning behind your study; justify your hypotheses.
  • Show how your study would contribute to our knowledge about this topic.
  • Conclude the Introduction with a clear statement of your hypotheses.
  • The Introduction is often a difficult section to write. At minimum, your Introduction must include well-organized paragraphs with a logical progression of ideas. In addition, a good Introduction section often conveys an interesting story to the reader. Try to take the perspective of someone reading your paper. How could you best tell a logical and interesting story about your phenomenon of interest, the previous research on that topic, and your proposed study? This is a tough skill to master. It may be helpful to explore published Introduction sections in journals; your lab instructor can provide papers that have good introductions.
• Method (approx. 1-3 pages)
  • Using the future tense, describe precisely how you will test your hypothesis.
  • Provide clear and specific descriptions of your participants, materials, and procedure.
  • Correctly execute your selected methodology (e.g., if true experiment, implement random assignment correctly and avoid confounds).
  • Provide sufficient detail so another researcher could run your study just from your Method section.
  • Include Participants section: Who will serve as your participants? Where and how will you recruit them? How many will there be?
  • Include Materials and Procedure section: You can combine this information to describe your study materials and study procedure in one continuous section. What materials (e.g., questionnaires, equipment, stimulus materials) will you use in your study? What is the flow of events in your study? If you design an experiment, be sure to describe exactly how you will manipulate your independent variable(s), how you will check your manipulations, what your dependent variable(s) will be, and how you will measure your dependent variable(s). If you design a correlational study, be sure to describe exactly what each of your variables is and how you will measure each one. In appendices, include the questionnaires, surveys, scales, stimulus materials, etc. (whether you developed them for this proposal or they were used in previous research).
• References
• Appendices: Include all relevant scales, questionnaires, experimental manipulations, etc. If a measure cannot readily be obtained (ask your TA for help before giving up), you do not need to include it here.