Research Report #2 Methods and Analyses | PSYC 200 | Fall 2021

Assignment Overview

The purpose of this and other research report assignments is to give you the opportunity to demonstrate (1) your proficiency with interpreting the output from statistical software (SPSS); (2) your scientific literacy (e.g., your understanding of the nature of scientific work); and (3) your ability to communicate effectively via scientific writing and the use of tables and figures.

 

In this particular assignment, you will demonstrate your understanding of the statistical output generated in SPSS and its contextual meaning by writing excerpts from an APA-style research report and creating APA-style tables and a figure.

 

Submission Instructions

This assignment is due by 11:59pm on Sunday, December 6, 2020. You are asked to submit only one file:

 

  • A file containing your APA-style research report excerpts and table (e.g., .docx, .pdf).

 

This document should look like an early draft of a complete APA-style research report that contains some complete and some incomplete sections. It might help to imagine that you are a member of a collaborative research team who is responsible for analyzing the data and writing up those results, while other team members work on the introduction, discussion, etc. Specific instructions regarding the sections that are required of you are detailed below.

 

This document should be prepared in a word processing program (e.g., Microsoft Word), using Times New Roman 12-point font, and 1” margins. (You may submit the final version of this document as a Microsoft Word-compatible file or a PDF file.) A separate title page should be included in APA style. Headings (e.g., “Method”) and subheadings (e.g., “Participants”) should be included in APA style. No abstract is necessary. For resources related to creating such a document, please see Blackboard > Assignments > Research Reports > Resources for APA-Style Research Reports.

 

  • A file containing your SPSS output (e.g., .spv, .pdf). Please include only the relevant output, i.e., a “clean” version of your output, without any repeated error messages, exploratory analyses of the data that aren’t discussed in your report, etc.[1]

 

This file should be uploaded to Blackboard. Please go to Blackboard > Assignments > Research Reports, and then follow the appropriate link to do so. If you have any trouble, e-mail me the file.

 

Grading Criteria

Research Report 2 is worth 10% of your final grade. It will graded on three main criteria:

 

  • Correctness (60%), e.g., producing the correct statistics and tables; using correct terms and reasoning in your verbal responses; conforming to APA style as required; etc.;
  • Completeness (20%), e.g., providing all requested files and information; answering all questions; etc.
  • Conscientious Effort (20%), e.g., providing thoughtful, comprehensive verbal responses; ensuring that your table is interpretable by attending to titles, notations; etc.

 

 

 

 

 

Study Description

Studies have suggested that human mating and sexual responses may be impacted by scents expressed through sweat glands. In the current study, you are hoping to understand how such scents may impact individuals’ responses to potential romantic partners. While literature has shown that some chemical signals expressed through sweat, such as androstadienone, may affect sexual arousal, studies have yet to determine how this may interact with other dating behavior, such as the use of pick-up lines.

Therefore, you decide to conduct a study to examine how exposure to such chemical signals interacts with experiencing different types of pick-up lines to determine how individuals respond to potential partners and rate the attractiveness of potential partners.

To test this hypothesis, you recruited 194 heterosexual female participants from a college participant pool, and had them come to the lab for the study. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, based on two independent variables. For the scent variable, participants were randomly assigned to either receive an androstadienone intranasal spray (experimental condition), or to have no spray (control condition). Then, participants interacted with an opposite-gender confederate in the lab, who engaged in flirting behavior with the participant. The confederate followed a basic script, and was randomly assigned to either request the participant’s phone number with a “direct-direct” pickup line (“Can I have your number?”) or a “cute-direct” pick-up line (“I lost my number, can I borrow yours?”)

After the interaction, three dependent variables were assessed. First, participants were asked to rate the physical attractiveness of the confederate on several items, which were averaged together to create a composite score (“attractiveness” variable). In addition, interactions were videotaped.  Three coders rated participants on behaviors that might indicate receptivity to a relationship with this person after the pickup line (e.g., being polite, smiling, continuing the conversation, eye contact, laughing, not being rude). Each coder gave a 1–5 rating to each participant, where 1 = behavior indicates no interest in beginning a relationship and 5 = behavior indicates strong interest in beginning relationship. Lastly, participants were asked to provide a global rating of their general enjoyment of the interaction with the confederate on a scale from 1 = did not enjoy at all to 10 = enjoyed myself the entire time.

(As a note, this data, while based on other findings, appears to have been designed for stats class purposes and is not real data)

Instructions for Analyses (See bolded parts that you will still have to do from the output.- also, this is how you would walk through if you wanted to practice on your own)

  1. First, open and explore the data file (Research Report 2_PickupLines). Prior to completing the analyses, read the description above. What do you hypothesize will happen for the three interaction analyses (IV1: scent spray, IV2: pickup line type; DVs: physical attractiveness ratings, receptive behavior, enjoyment of interaction) Record this as you will include it in your report.

 

  1. In order to conduct the analyses properly, you will first need to compute a new variable:
    1. Create a score that captures coders’ behavioral ratings of participants’ receptivity to beginning a relationship. To do this, compute a mean of three variables (Coder1, Coder2, Coder3), naming the new variable Receptivity.

 

  1. Anticipate that you will need to write a paragraph that describes important characteristics of your sample. This dataset only contains participants who identified as female, so you do not need to analyze gender (though you should note that!) Specifically, run analyses that will enable you to report the following descriptive information for your participants: age, ethnicity, year in school, dating status, and contraceptive use.
  2. Calculate descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, minimum, maximum) for the three key measured outcome variables in the study: Receptivity, Attractiveness, Enjoyment.

 

  1. Turning to hypothesis testing, run analyses that will allow you to show whether pairs of the three key outcome variables (receptivity, attractiveness, enjoyment) have independent associations with each other.

 

  1. Next, as you know that contraceptive use can potentially impact pheromone responsiveness, you want to understand if there are differences in your sample between those who are on contraceptives and those who are not on contraceptives in their reciprocity scores, their ratings of attractiveness, and their enjoyment scores. Run the appropriate test to determine whether participants on and off contraceptives are significantly different in these areas (1 = not on contraceptives, 2= on contraceptives). By hand or using an online calculator, calculate the Cohen’s d for significant effects.

 

  1. Next, you wonder whether ratings vary by whether or not the participants reported being in a romantic relationship. Run the appropriate test to see whether there are differences by romantic relationship (1 = single, 2 = nonexclusive dating relationship, 3 = exclusive relationship) in receptivity scores, attractiveness ratings, and enjoyment scores. If appropriate, be sure to run a multiple comparisons test to see what groups are significantly different. Calculate the η2  for each significant analysis.

 

  1. Lastly, you move to testing your primary research questions. Run the appropriate test to test for main effects and an interaction between scent condition and pickup line condition, on the three outcome variables: attractiveness ratings, receptivity scores., and enjoyment scores For each, calculate the η2  for each significant analysis for each main effect and the interaction.

Instructions for APA-Style Research Report

Remember that your research report is expected to look like the early draft of a complete APA-style research report that contains some complete and some incomplete sections. In total, your APA-style research report should include the following bolded (sub-)sections:

 

  • Title Page
  • Introduction
  • Method
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • References
  • Tables (as a note, do not label the Tables section – just start a new page with each table)
  • Figures(as a note, do not label the Figures section – just start a new page with each figure)

 

Those (sub-)sections that are bolded will include at least some information that has been produced by you, although they will not necessarily be complete (e.g., you will draft an incomplete discussion section, with only

 

Specific instructions related to the (sub-)section excerpts are as follows:

 

  1. For the title page, choose a title (and accompanying running head) that sounds appropriate given the study description above (no need to overthink it) and list yourself as the sole author of the paper for now.

 

  1. Include (an) introduction paragraph(s) where you provide your hypotheses for the main research questions related to the two-way ANOVA models (consider both main effects and the interaction – predict what you think will happen!).

 

  1. Include a Method section where you write a short paragraph in APA style that describes the participant characteristics for this study, including information about the number of participants, how they were recruited, age, ethnicity, year in school, dating status, and contraceptive use. In doing so, you will need to decide which descriptive statistics to report.

 

  1. For this report, you will not be asked to write up design or measures, as it is all contained within the study description. Just participants.
  1. Write a results section that directs readers to the tables you will create in step 6, and describes the following results in text. In the text of the results section, you will use sentences/text to describe the results of steps 6, 7, and 8 (be sure to include calculated measures of effect size (Cohen’s d, η2) in your write-up):

 

  1. A brief discussion section, in which you should consider the following:
    1. What are be the takeaways of the primary results? What might be the implications of the findings?
    2. Future directions – what might be a potential future study that the researchers might do from here?

 

  1. Practice communicating your results in table form. Construct the appropriate tables to depict the findings for steps 4 and 5 in the analysis.

 

  1. Construct 2 line graphs using excel, in APA style, labeled as figure 1 and figure 2, to depict the results of your two-way ANOVAs.

 

A Note about APA Style

These instructions do not cover specific information about APA style such as how to include in-text citations, how to bold, italicize, indent (sub)section headings, etc. For more information about those exact guidelines, please consult your textbook, as well as any number of free online APA-style resources.

[1] Remember that you can edit out analyses using the lefthand toolbar – you can delete things that are unnecessary if you make a mistake.

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