MSc Psychological Studies Positive Psychology Lab

MSc Psychological Studies                                      

Positive Psychology Lab

 

Lab 2 Summative Report Instructions

Individually produce a report that describes the research that we conducted in the Lab 2 Positive Psychology.

Please note that your Lab report should be no more than 2500 words(excluding the reference section).  Use the coursework submission forms that will be sent out and format your work to be 1.5 line spacing, 12pt font with minimum 2.5cm margins.  If you have time, format your work using APA guidelines.

Things to think about…

• Use the feedback from Lab 1 to feedforward into your writing of this report
• Below are three options for generating the hypotheses, pick only one.
• Write from the perspective of the primary investigator rather than a lab perspective

Which data to use:

You will need to recalculate all statistics using the full data set.  This will be clearly labelled as the data set to use.

 Three Report Options

We made a number of measures, but you will not be able to write about all possible combinations of relationships or predictions.  We ask you to choose one of the following:

1. Write up a correlational study looking at Wellbeing, Stress and one other factor that is your free choice. Base predictions of relationships on literature reviews.
2. Write up a regression study looking at subjective wellbeing and 2-3 suitable predictors. Use a literature review to justify which predictors are suitable.
3. Write up a regression study looking at any one of the measuresand 2-3 suitable predictors. Use a literature review to justify which predictors are suitable.

 IMPORTANT: pre-register your option in your next lab so that we know what resources to develop to support your preparation of reports.  These resources would be supplementary activities and extensions.  We will also use the information to nominate you into a forum that you can use to discuss features of your specific write-up.  Finally we will use this information to allocate marking of the reports.

About Pre-registration: this is good practice in research and allows the reporting of both confirmatory and non-confirmatory data.  In other words it means that researchers publish both the experiments that worked and those that did not work, so giving a more balanced perspective on research in general.  By the time that you attend the second class for this lab, you should have done enough reading and thinking to be able to pre-register which report you will write.

This also protects your time – it is better to focus your attention and resources on only the measures you intend to write about form the beginning of this process.

Write as though you presented to participants only the measures you have pre-registA reminder of the structure of a lab report:

Section 1 Title

Write an informative title for the research report.

Section 2 Abstract

Write a summary of the entire report, including a little background, the hypothesis and methods as well as the results, interpretation and discussion and conclusion/take-home message.

 

Section 3 Introduction

Write an introduction to the experiment which focuses on thebackground and rationale for study.  Focus on the measures you have pre-registered.  Finish this section with what you expect to happen.

 

Section 4 Methods

Summarise the methods of the research.  Use your Charting Mindfulnesslab worksheet to recall what sections need to be here and what you need to write in each.Report only on the measures that you pre-registered.

 

Section 5 Results

Briefly summarise the results of your experiment.

Use both descriptive and inferential statistics.  Interpret your result in relation to your hypothesis.

 

Section 6 Discussion and Conclusion

Write a discussion about your research study.  Important features of the discussion are that you put your results in context by referring back to your introduction and make a conclusion about your research study.  Discuss your findings further in the context of more literature – this may be a good place to introduce some of the other measures if they are relevant.  Other sections might include extensions to the study into other populations, applications in other settings and suggestions for future research – these should also be justified by literature review.

 

Section 7 References

Add the references for your report. Look at the online resources on the Moodle page to find out more.

 

IMPORTANT: you can structure your work using APA conventions, however if you choose such conventions, you need to apply them consistently.

 

What Everyone did wrong Last Year

 

In the reports there were two constants that need to be addressed for improvement.

 

Evaluation: almost every report focused excessively on evaluating methods and in most cases focused on criticism. You do not find this in professional reports. It is the job of a reviewer or editor to criticise research, but authors always find the positives. Even when criticism is warranted, you will find that it is discussed as a suggestion for future extension to the study. Fundamentally, this was good research, based on a real problem that has not previously been studied – the combination of lines and sentences in bisection to differentiate attention vs hemisphere difference based theories of pseudoneglect. In almost all cases you did not look beyond the current study to examine how this relates to theory. Theoretical discussion should dominate the discussion section while evaluation of methods need to be a side-show and can be used to show how your work could be extended to enhance the literature even further.

 

Literature: About half of the literature that you discuss needs to be from the last 5 years. Most older literature is summarised in review papers and so I would assume that you have not read it and instead have just summarised the work of another reviewer. More importantly, you need to build an understanding of how psychology is currently grounded and you will miss advances in theory and the field if you focus on only older literature. Now, in some cases there is very little modern literature and in that case your study is even more important because it brings into modern times some older ideas. However you need to make that an important point in your introduction and be confident that a reviewer will not know a body of modern literature that is appropriate. You would also then be expected to tie the older ideas into current application.