Final Paper

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The final project for this class is an APA proposal paper. 

It is an ‘APA paper’ because you will use APA style to write your paper – more on that below…

It is a ‘proposal paper’ because you will not actually do the research, you will only describe a proposal for a research project that you think would be a good one if you had the time, money, and other resources needed to actually do it.

Chapter 16 in your textbook is about writing an APA style research report and should be used as a model for writing the paper.

A proposal is a paper a researcher would write to propose a research study.  Your proposal paper will be identical to an APA paper except that it will not include a “Results” section (since you won’t do the research) and the “Discussion” section will be very limited (also because you are not actually doing the research).  Also, you are instructed in chapter 16 to use the past tense (this was done…; the participants were…etc.), However, the method section of a proposal should be written in the future tense since you haven’t yet done the research (the participants will be recruited from…; each participant will complete the Beck Depression Inventory, etc.)

Come up with a research question – hopefully you have already done this since you should have been thinking about it since the module 1 lab.

GET INSTRUCTOR APPROVAL FOR YOUR RESEARCH QUESTION! Send a message to me and tell me about your topic so you can be sure it is a viable research topic. If you fail to complete this step your grade will definitely be lowered a little and may be lowered a lot if your topic is not appropriate!

You are writing a proposal paper rather than doing actual research yourself because high quality research takes time, money, and materials that you don’t have. For this project you should write as if you were conducting the study at UCF and had access to grant money and other materials such as a lab and equipment and research assistants.

Deciding on a research question: your question should be:

Feasible: one could really study it with the methods of science. For example you could not research the question ‘does God help people when they pray?” and you could research the questions, “does regular prayer or belief in God improve well-being, or happiness, or reduce depression?”

About a topic in psychology: you may not write about biology or medicine or economics. For example, a study about treatment of lung cancer or trends in the economy would not be appropriate. And it could be appropriate to study how people cope with a diagnosisof lung cancer or if they get depressed, or to study the relationship between the economy and depression.

Important/Relevant: Are UCF students happier than FSU students might be important to a college recruiter at UCF or FSU, and it is not important to science. However, you might use UCF and FSU students to study a question such as “how is student debt related to depression and stress in college students?” or “Are there differences in the academic performance, or satisfaction, or graduation rates, or stress levels, etc.  in students who start a four year college after high school versus those who start after attending a two year college?”

New: you may not write about a research project on a topic that is already well understood. For example, you may not write a study about whether Panic Control Therapy for panic disorder works. There are hundreds of studies that already tell us that it does! And maybe you could write about whether it works in Chinese, or when delivered in a self-help format, or via therapy by videoconference, or when it is shortened from 14 sessions to six sessions, or in people with comorbid substance abuse, or if it works as well as some other treatment, or whether it works as well if you skip one component of it. In other words, there are many, many topics we don’t know much about, so there is no need to study something we already know a lot about.

Your method should be:

Realistic: for a researcher at UCF who has some grant money, and access to facilities and resources. What does ‘realistic’ mean? It might be realistic to collaborate with a colleague in Mexico to compare a treatment in Mexican-Americans Vs. native Mexicans. It would not be realistic to compare a treatment in people in 30 countries. It would not be realistic to recruit 100,000 participants. It would be realistic to recruit a few hundred participants or to use an existing database with test results and other data on a hundred thousand participants. It would be unrealistic to pay participants $10,000 each, and it might be realistic to pay them $100. If you are unsure, ask your instructor or TA!

Ethical: Your method must be ethical. Review chapter 4 if necessary.

Your paper will include the following sections:

Abstract:

Introduction

Method

Discussion:

References: must be APA style

The Details

So, what you have to do for this final paper write a research proposal in APA style.  To do so you need to complete the following steps:

1.  First, you need to come up with a psychology research question that you would like to answer.  An example of that would be “Is stress associated with GPA in college students?” “Do family members of veterans with PTSD still report greater depression than family members of veterans without PTSD after the veteran begins treatment for PTSD?” “Does an intervention to reduce binge drinking in college students actually reduce binge drinking and is it equally effective for men and women?
2. Once you have your question, send it to your instructor and get her approval for the topic.

1. Once your instructor approves your topic, conduct a literature search.  This means you research the topic using the data bases from module 1 – psycINFO and/or google scholar - and find out all you need to know about the topic.  In the introduction, you summarize the findings of your literature search.  Think of the introduction as something an educated person would be reading, however, that person does not know anything about the topic and your job is to educate him or her about it.  In an introduction you (1) provide some general information about the topic, e.g., how common binge drinking is, how many veterans develop PTSD, (2) report about why it is a problem, e.g., binge drinking or PTSD lead to lost productivity, health problems, divorce, school failure. (3) Describe other research that has been done on the topic, e.g., one treatment program used in many college counseling centers is known to reduce binge drinking (Smith & Jones, 2003; Weinberg, 2005), however it requires 10 weeks and is very expensive (Garcia, 2008)
2. At the end of your introduction, state your hypothesis (based on your literature review), and then you point out what your study is going to be about specifically and very briefly – in just a sentence or two - say how you are going to conduct your study. For example, “the aim of the present study is to use a pretest-posttest control group design to evaluate the effectiveness of a three hour internet-based intervention for binge drinking. Since binge drinking appears to be increasing in women (Williams & Chen, 2009), a secondary purpose of the study is to determine if the intervention is equally effective for reducing binge drinking in men and women.” Or, ““the aim of the present study is to use a quasi-experimental design to test the hypothesis that military personnel exposed to insurgent attacks are more likely to develop PTSD than are civilians who witness terror attacks.” Or, “the aim of the present correlational study is to determine if the type of trauma one is exposed to is related to the number and severity of PTSD symptoms. We hypothesize that traumas that involve injury will result in more and more severe symptoms than traumas that involve witnessing injury to others.”
3. In the introduction you must cite your sources using APA style for in line citation. You must have a minimum of eight references in your introduction and the majority of them should be primary rather than secondary sources (note – the eight references are for your intro only – you will probably have additional references for your method section). You may not use Wikipedia as a reference! It can be helpful to look at a Wikipedia page for ideas, and it is not a scientific source that you should cite in a paper. More on APA format below.
4. Next is the method section.  In a methods section you describe exactly how you are going to conduct the research.  The methods section has several sub-sections including: (1) participants (or subjects if non-human): what is your sample, what are their demographic characteristics such as age, sex, ethnicity (or genus/species if animal) and other characteristics as they may be related to your study such as IQ, education, socioeconomic status, depressed, non-drinker, religious affiliation – anything relevant to your specific study. (2)  procedure: how will you recruit participants, what is your sampling procedure, will participants be compensated for their participation, are there any ethical or safety concerns, how were participants assigned to groups (if applicable), where will the research take place, who will administer treatments and how were they trained (if applicable) what is the research design, what will participants be doing, what are the independent and dependent variables how are they being operationalized? This section should be very detailed. (3) apparatus or materials or measures. The name of this section depends on the details of your study. You might have a diagram or detailed description of an apparatus or complex equipment, for instance, what a computer screen a participant sees might look like, a diagram of a course they will drive on after drinking, the arrangement of cameras and computers in a room, the type of eeg machine or blood pressure monitor, and etc.. If your study uses questionnaires or other assessment instruments – as most psychology studies do – then these should be described in a materials or measures section.  For example, a measure of depression, the formula you used to calculate Body Mass Index (BMI), an IQ test, a measure of alcohol expectancy, questionnaire you made up for your study on how likely participants think it is that they will get a flue shot and how likely it is that they will get the flu in the next six months.   For any measure you should provide a full citation in APA format, provide a brief description of it, and say something about its reliability and validity. Say a sentence about why you selected each measure such as, it is widely used to measure PTSD, it has better reliability than other measures, it only takes participants five minutes to complete, research suggests that you can ask participants their weight without having to weight them, etc. You will need to provide citations to do this. If you make up your own questionnaires you should explain why it was necessary (for example, it would be very poor practice to make up your own measure of depression when there are several quick, reliable, and valid measures out there; it would be more reasonable to create a measure of how acceptable participants find a new treatment if no measure of it already exists).
5. See chapter 16 for more details about writing a research paper. There is a sample research paper in appendix D. And I also urge you to look at how it is done by reading articles in APA journals – you should be reading them for your preparing your any way, so it won’t mean extra literature searching!
6. Since this paper is a proposal, there is NO “results” section.
7. For your discussion section, do not use the suggestions in chapter 16 since you are not actually doing the research. Instead write a couple of pages about (1) why you selected the particular research design and procedure you wrote about (2) what results you would hope to find if you actually did the study, and (3) what you see as the biggest strengths and limitations/weaknesses of the study.
8. Though the abstract comes first you should write it last after you have written the above sections. Follow the guidelines in chapter 16, except you will not mention results in your abstract. Put your title and abstract and your name on the first page
9. Finally, references. List every source you cite using APA format.

APA Style

You can find detailed information on APA style in the APA style manual which you can purchase as a hard copy or e-book or find in the reference section of the library.

The UCF library also has some helpful online materials including a tutorial on APA style.

Check out the website below for UCF library resources on APA style

http://guides.ucf.edu/content.php?pid=63545&sid=468776

Many other universities also have online guides to APA style that you can access online. My personal favorite is at Purdue University (No, I am a Michigan alumna not a Purdue alumn, and Purdue has the better website…). Their guide can be found at:

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01

You can find others if you do a google search on APA style citation

How long should my paper be?

Quality will matter more than quantity. A rough guide is 11 – 14 pages including title page and references.

Title and abstract: one page with about half a page of text.

Introduction: five pages

Methods section will be the most variable from student to student, and it could be about three to five or more pages depending on your research design, variables, and sample.

Discussion should be about one or one-and-a-half to two pages.

References should be one or two pages.

How will my paper be graded?

Title and Abstract: 5% of grade. Does that abstract include all the information it should? Does the title make sense given the nature of the project?

Introduction: 20% of grade. Is it thorough? Is all information accurate and up to date? Is the information from relevant sources? Does the intro explain the issue you are researching and why it is important? Does the intro say what type of research has already been done on the topic?

Research Question and Design: 40% of grade.  Is the research question feasible, timely, important? Most important, is the design appropriate for answering your question? Do the variables make sense? Is the design ethical? Is the sampling procedure appropriate? Does the sample make sense given the research question? Are the dependent and independent variables correctly identified? Are all materials and meaures described? Also, writing about a very simple design is easier than writing about a more complex design and will be graded accordingly. (But don’t make it too complex or you are likely to make mistakes or do unnecessary work).

Discussion: 10% of grade. Are the expected results reasonable given what is proposed and known about the topic? Are strengths and limitations described?

References: 10% of grade. Are references correctly cited in APA format? Is all non-original material cited?

Writing quality: 10% of grade. Is the paper well-written and free of grammatical errors, spelling errors, and typos?

Creativity: 5% of grade. Is the proposed research original? Is the question and/or the approach to answering it thoughtful and reflect original thinking?