1OO2PSY INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY II
RESEARCH REPORT
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CORRELATES OF SEDENTARY BEHAVIOUR
OVERVIEW: 1500 word (max) research report in APA 6th Edition
format based on the online survey constructed and disseminated by the class
WORTH: 30% in total
DUE: 6:00PM
Monday September 16th 2019
Week 10
SUBMIT: Electronic submission via Turnitin
Research Report folder under Assessment tab on
Learning@Griffith
LATE: 5% of maximum mark (30 marks), for each working day
PENALTY: or part working day the item is late
Assessment items submitted more than five working days after due date → 0%
Submission Date/Time Late Penalty
→ Monday Sep 16th 6:00PM
0%
N / A
Monday Sep 16th 6:01PM → Tuesday Sep 17th 6:00PM
5%
-1.5 marks
Tuesday Sep 17th 6:01PM → Wednesday Sep 18th 6:00PM
10%
-3 marks
Wednesday Sep 18th 6:01PM → Thursday Sep 19th 6:00PM
15%
-4.5 marks
Thursday Sep 19th 6:01PM → Friday Sep 20th 6:00PM
20%
-6 marks
Friday Sep 20th 6:01PM → Saturday Sep 21st 6:00PM
25%
-7.5 marks
Saturday Sep 21st 6:01PM →
100%
Fail
BACKGROUND
With the increasing prevalence of technology in our everyday lives, many individuals are engaging in higher amounts of sedentary behaviour (e.g., time spent sitting, watching television, playing video games). The aim of the present research was to investigate whether a range of psychological variables correlate with sedentary behaviour.
The variables we measured were:
• Openness to experience
• Conscientiousness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism
• Loneliness
• Anxiety
• Social anxiety
• Body satisfaction
• Self-esteem
• Age
• TV habit strength (automaticity)
• Self-control
• Procrastination
• Physical activity levels
Your job is to choose TWO (2) of the above variables that you find most interesting, and write up a research report exploring the relationship between these variables and sedentary behaviour.
RESEARCH
To write your research report (especially Introduction & Discussion sections), you will need to do your own research to find articles relevant to each of the two hypotheses you make about the relationship between your two chosen variables and sedentary behaviour. As everyone will pick different variables, there is no one set reading.
Use Google Scholar in conjunction with Griffith Library to find articles.
• Search for key paired terms (e.g., “sedentary behaviour” & “personality”)
• Using multiple variations of words might yield more results
(e. g., “Anxiety” vs. “social anxiety”)
• Searching for both general (e.g. “sedentary behaviour”) and specific terms
(e. g., “scree-time use”) might yield more studies
• Search for broader theories to explain your relationships
(e. g., “motivation”, “health”, “social norms”)
Some of the research articles you find may be statistically complex.
Don’t panic – you don’t need to know the statistics that they use, try reading through the abstract, introduction, and discussion of these articles to get an idea of what relationships they examined and what they found. Link these articles back to the research questions you are investigating in your research report. When reading through these research articles, ignore information that is irrelevant to your own research questions/hypotheses.
REPORT SECTIONS
COVERSHEET
Content
• All assignments must include the required Griffith assignment coversheet, which can be downloaded from Learning@Griffith in the Research Report folder under the Assessment tab Formatting
• The coversheet is pre-formatted and includes a first page with correct pagination, so you can begin writing your assignment directly into it
TITLE PAGE Content
• Give the report a suitable title
• Include your name, institution, & word count on the title page
• Include a left-aligned header that contains the following:
Running head: [ABBREVIATED VERSION OF THE REPORT TITLE] Formatting
• First page of the assignment
• Centre-align all text
ABSTRACT
Content
• 120 word (max) summary of entire report
• Briefly introduce the topic, define the research question, outline the methodology, describe key findings, and state that the implications of the findings will be discussed at the end Formatting
• This section gets a page to itself after the title page
• Put ‘Abstract’ as the heading; centre-aligned; NO bolding
• Left-align text; no indentation
INTRODUCTION
Content
• Start with the title of the report
• Introduce the topic and set the context for the study; describe sedentary behaviour and let the reader know what you are investigating in relation to it
(i.e. your aim) and why (i.e. your rationale)
• Define & describe each of your chosen variables, using the literature
• Review the background literature and refer to relevant research articles that have found evidence of a relationship between each chosen variable and sedentary behaviour
• Explain how each variable relates to sedentary behaviour, drawing on past literature o What do you believe (what does the research tell you) is the direction of each relationship – positive or negative?
o Theoretically, how does the literature propose these variables are related to each other? Using the literature, try to explain the mechanism underlying the relationship!
• Re-state the aim of the research, and briefly indicate the methodology you will be using
• Conclude by stating your hypotheses, based on your literature review o For each variable: What sort of relationship are you expecting to find – positive vs. negative?
Although you may theorise about “causal” mechanisms above, do NOT make hypotheses about which variable
“causes” the other – we can’t make causal hypotheses when we’re running a correlational study! o E.g. “I hypothesise that Variable 1 will be positively/negatively correlated with sedentary behaviour.”
Formatting
• Start section on a new page
• Centre-align title; NO bolding
• Left-align text; indent start of each paragraph
METHOD
Content
• Organise this section into the three required sub-sections
Participants o Describe the people who participated: number of participants, age (mean & standard deviation), gender frequencies, say they were a community sample recruited by students in the course
Procedure o Describe the recruitment procedures and research methodology (online survey taking ~10min)
Measures
o Describe in detail how each of your two variables and sedentary behaviour were measured:
Number of items used to measure each variable
If the measure was adapted from another source, say so and reference the source
Provide an example of an item, including scale anchors, and an indicator of whether it was reverse-scored (r)
For multiple-item scales, describe how total scores were calculated (e.g., averaged over items, summed items) & interpreted (e.g. higher score indicates higher X)
Formatting
• Start this section right after the introduction; do NOT add a page break
• Put Method as the heading (Level 1); centre-aligned & bolded
• Sub-headings (Level 2) should be used for each of the sections – Participants, Procedure, Measures; left-aligned & bolded
• Sub-headings (Level 3) should be used when describing all measures, such as Sedentary Behaviour, under the Measures section; left-aligned, indented, & bolded
• Left-align text; indent start of each paragraph
• Make sure M and SD are italicised when reporting the age statistics RESULTS
Content
• Summarise the statistical analyses that you ran on the data collected
• Include a table of descriptive statistics (means & standard deviations for all variables) and correlations between each of your chosen variables and sedentary behaviour – refer to it in text
• Explain in words what each of your correlation coefficients mean; report the exact p value in parentheses after each correlation you describe (since the r correlation coefficient is in the table, it does not need to be reported again in text – you can if you wish)
Formatting
• Start this section right after the Method; do NOT add a page break
• Put Results as the heading (Level 1); centre-aligned & bolded
• Left-align text; indent start of each paragraph
• Statistics reporting:
o Report means and standard deviations to 2 decimal places
Report r values to 2 decimal places: r = .XX
Report p values to 3 decimal places: p = .XXX o 0’s before the decimal are left on for M and SD values
0’s before the decimal are removed for r and p values o Make sure r and p are italicised o Put asterisks next to each r value in the table to indicate its level of significance (nothing for p > .05, *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001)
• Make sure the table is formatted correctly; use the format below:
Table 1
Descriptive statistics and correlation with sedentary behaviour for variable 1 and 2
Variables
M (SD)
Sedentary Behaviour
Variable 1
X.XX (X.XX)
.XX
Variable 2
X.XX (X.XX)
.XX*
Sedentary Behaviour (minutes)
X.XX (X.XX)
*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001
DISCUSSION
Content
• Re-state your topic, aim, and the variables you investigated
• Describe each of your findings and state whether they supported each hypothesis you proposed in the introduction or not o E.g. “In line with the hypothesis…”, “Contrary to the hypothesis…”
• Relate each of your findings back to the evidence you referenced from the literature; do your results match up with the existing literature?
o If so, re-explain how this variable relates to sedentary behaviour, and say that your finding in this study provides further support for this
o If not, discuss reasons why you may not have found the relationship you hypothesised
• Discuss the real-world implications that your findings may have. Some questions to consider may be:
o Do your results paint sedentary behaviour in a positive light or a negative light?
o What do your results suggest about the nature of people who engage in high amounts of sedentary behaviour?
• Identify and discuss a key limitation of the study, clearly explaining why it is a limitation
o Think about limitations concerning the methods and measures we used and how they may influence the conclusions we can draw
• Make at least one suggestion for future research that can directly resolve the limitation you have identified – explain how this suggestion can overcome the limitation, in detail
• Think up a punchy conclusion to your research report
Formatting
• Start this section right after the Results; do NOT add a page break
• Put Discussion as the heading (Level 1); centre-aligned & bolded
• Left-align text; indent start of each paragraph
• No statistical jargon, explain findings in plain English
REFERENCES
Content
• List all research articles you have referred to throughout the report
Formatting
• References should be alphabetized by surname of first author
• Hanging indent for every reference
• Research article references contain:
o Author(s) of article – surname first, initials of first & middle names
One author: Surname, F. M.
Two+ authors: Surname, F. M., & Hannan, T.
o Year of article – in parentheses; end with a period (2018).
o Title of article – capitalize only the first letter of first word or first word after a colon/dash, and proper nouns; end with a period Title of article with colon: An example.
o Title of journal – capitalize all major words (not conjunctions) in journal titles; italicise the entire title; end with a comma
Title of Journal,
o Volume number of journal that article came from – italicise the volume number; end with a comma
10,
Note, you may find issue numbers in brackets next to journal articles – you do not need to include those
o Page numbers of article within volume – include range with a hyphen; end with a period
101-111.
o Note, you may find DOI numbers at the end of articles. For this assignment, you do not need to include those.
• Example:
Surname, F. M., & Hannan, T. (2018). Title of article with colon: An example. Title of Journal, 10, 101-111.
OTHER IMPORTANT CRITERIA
IN-TEXT CITATIONS
• The sources of all your information, evidence, and ideas should be noted in-text, using correct APA style
• The literature you use to inform your definitions, descriptions, theorising, and hypotheses in your introduction
• The sources of the measures you report in your Method section
• The literature you relate back to in your Discussion section (that you should have already cited in the introduction)
• In-text citations can be incorporated in a number of different ways
o “A study found evidence that X was associated with Y (Hannan, 2018).”
o “Hannan (2018) found evidence that X was associated with Y.”
• In-text citations contain surnames of the article authors and year of the article; note the correct APA formatting below:
o One author:
o 1st in-text citation onwards: (Hannan, 2018)
o Two authors:
o 1st in-text citation onwards: (Hannan & Stainer, 2018)
o Three – five authors:
o 1st in-text citation: (Hannan, Stainer, & Scrafton, 2018)
o 2nd in-text citation onwards: (Hannan et al., 2018)
o Six or more authors:
o 1st in-text citation: (Hannan et al., 2018)
o 2nd in-text citation onwards: (Hannan et al., 2018)
• Do NOT lift text from other sources and use “quotations” in this assignment – learn to paraphrase and (cite)
GENERAL APA FORMATTING RULES
• Times New Roman, size 12 font throughout
• Double-line spacing throughout
• No spaces between paragraphs
• Page margins of at least 2.5cm all around (or just the normal setting on Microsoft Word)
• Page numbers should begin on the title page and continue throughout report
• A left-aligned header that contains a fully capitalised ABBREVIATED VERSION OF THE REPORT TITLE should appear on each page starting from page 2
• The title page should contain the same thing, but preceded by Running head:
• Proper formatting, alignment, and indentation of the different levels of headings:
• All Roman/English letter statistics that are reported throughout the report should be italicised (i.e. M, SD, r, p)
• See REDBOOK for more APA formatting guidelines
WORD LIMIT
• 1500 words – maximum, no leeway
o Includes:
Introduction
Method
Results (except Table)
Discussion
o Does NOT include ( above):
Coversheet
Title Page
Abstract (the abstract has its own word limit of 120)
Table (in Results section)
References
