Supplemental notes from the readings are included in navy blue.
Tuesday, September 04, 2012: Introduction and Class Experiment
- Illusory Correlation (IC): perception of a relation between two events that are not related, or a perception of a larger relation than actually exists
- Hamilton & Gifford (1976)
- IC – a cognitive basis for stereotyping
- Group A (majority) vs. B (minority)
- Number of statements: 26 vs. 13
- Number of desirable statements: 18 (69.23%) vs. 9 (69.23%)
- Number of undesirable statements: 8 (30.76%) vs. 4 (30.76%)
- Ratio of positive to negative: 9 to 4 vs. 9 to 4
- Participants over-attributed undesirable behaviors to group B
- Participants perceived group B more negatively
- Group B with undesirable behaviors rarely occurred
- Distinctiveness and salience led to mroe attention and encoding, which increased the perception of relation
- Independent variable 1 was valence (emotion) of thoughts of Obama; independent variable 2 was type of minority (black vs. elderly)
Wednesday, September 05, 2012 Writing an Introduction in APA Style
- Structure
- Broad to narrow
- General problem
- Past research (literature review)
- Present research (purpose, hypothesis, brief description)
- Review of Literature
- Review literature strategically
- If relevant, what did researchers do, find, and how did they explain those results?
- Do not present hypothesis of prior researchers
- Integrate previous studies to show how they work together to inform your study
- Integration can be accomplished with thorough, thoughtful transitions
- Transitions: how are past studies similar/different conceptually/methodologically?
- Purpose
- How does present study add to accumulation of knowledge?
- Example: address discrepancies, problems, untested assumptions, gaps in research
- State hypotheses clearly
- Readers should be able to see the expected results; avoid using statistical language
- Bad example: there will be a main effect of similarity
- Justify hypothesis
- Why do you expect those results to occur?
- Theoretical conceptual rationale
- Economy of expression
- In intro and entire manuscript, remember
- E.O.E. is a hallmark of good scientific writing and clear scientific thinking
- Participants
- Number, demographics, compensation
- Design
- IVs and levels – 3(hair color: blonde, brunette, redhead) x 2(personality: warm, cold)
- Within, between, or mixed subjects design
- DVs: names of constructs
- Very succinct: do not describe operations in design
- Materials
- Stimuli, measures, equipment, apparatus
- What participants saw, held, heard, but not what they did
- Operations of measures provide purpose (in order to), scales and pole definitions; if combined items, Chronbac’s alpha (how well they go together)
- Procedure
- Actions in chronological order
- Active voice
- Who were the experimenters, what did they do
- If relevant, who were confederates, what did they do
- What did participants do
- Duration of sessions
- Comprehensive: recruitment through debriefment and data management, if necessary
- Making it easily replicable
- Eliminate actions that readers can easily infer
- Operations of IVs and DVs
- Materials or procedure sub-section?
- Case-by-case determination
- Use paragraphs: divide your method sub-section into paragraphs
- Maintain continuity
Thursday, September 06, 2012 Class Experiment
- Method
- Overview: “… research project concerned with impact of thought exercises on how people process and remember visual info …”
- Consent forms
- Thought exercise (5 minutes) (random assignment of positive/negative thoughts about Obama)
- 39 sentences w/ pictures slides
- 7 seconds each
- Why include pics of targets and objects? Not glaringly obvious it’s about the person’s group membership (subtlty)
- Participant completed questionnaire
- Debriefing
- Questionnaire
- Demographics; cover story, fillers; mood
- Attributions of group membership
- 39 statements from slides in different random order
- Names and groups removed
- Participants indicated group A or B
- Frequency estimates, number of undesirable behaviors about each group
- Trait ratings: rate members of group B on 7 bipolar adjectives, semantic differentials
- Suspicion check
- Hypotheses
- Control procedures?
- Administration process, location, format
- Methods of acquiring knowledge: tenacity, authority, rationalism, common sense, science
- Five steps to scientific problem-solving and linkage to writing
- Identify the problem
- Lit review (theories, findings)
- Unanswered questions, conflicts
- Form one or more hypothesis
- Hypothesis: expected effect, a testable statement about the relation between variables
- Title and introduction of APA paper
- Design the study/experiment
- Which conditions are necessary to test hypothesis?
- Between, within, or mixed subjects design?
- Stimuli? Timing?
- Abstract constructs of title and introduction → concrete operations of method
- Operational definition: concrete, unambiguous definition, one that specifies how the abstract concept will be measured or manipulated
- Conduct the study/experiment
- Groups vs. individuals, settings
- Empirical process: learning through direct observation
- If expeirmental research: standardization, control procedures
- Method section
- Test the hypothesis
- Statistical analysis, interpretation
- Results, discussion
- Communicate findings
- Papers, presentations, posters
- Other researchers review and critique, attempt to replicate (reliability, use present research in future research
- Naturalistic observation
- Lack of intervention by scientist
- Primary goal: description
- Correlational research
- Lack of intervention by scientist
- Primary goal: prediction
- Usually ethical challenges reventing us from manipulating behavior (ex. alcohol consumption)
- Experiments
- Intervention by scientist
- Primary goal: explanation
- Potential for high internal validity