Practice Assignment 1

Practice Assignment 1: Initial Research Proposal

Introduction

This assignment starts you down the road to completing the research project by asking you to perform the following four tasks:

1. Select a research topic and type of research design.
2. Conduct a literature search with the goal of finding two references for research papers that are related to your proposed research project. Do not give more than two.

references to avoid making errors of commission in any additional references.

1. Complete the TCPS 2: CORE (course on research ethics) online tutorial offered by Canada’s Panel on Research Ethics in an independent manner.
2. If you are working and sharing with others, provide helpful comments or questions to two other peers concerning their proposed research topic and design.

Note: If you continue with the other courses in this stream other assignments will serve as a continuation of this research outline, and you will be asked to provide more details concerning the basic procedure of your proposed study. The culmination will be for you to write a report describing the completed research project.

Marking Guide

Here are some guidelines to show how this practice assignment might be marked by an instructor, if it were being graded. In this course, all assignments are for practice purposes only and will not be graded.

Part A (10 marks)

The selection of an appropriate research topic and type of research design is worth 10 marks. Choose a topic that is both appropriate and interesting to you. If you seem to be struggling to find a topic, you may want to consider searching for examples of interesting naturalistic observation or archival research studies using a database like PsycINFO or Google Scholar, or even by browsing through your textbook. You might then consider how to extend one of those studies by investigating a slightly different aspect of the phenomenon in question, or by using a slightly different approach.

Part B (20 marks)

Each reference will be given 10 marks, distributed as follows:

• Names of all authors listed correctly (i.e., surnames first followed by initials, separated by commas and ampersand) (2 marks)
• Year of publication listed correctly (i.e., year in parentheses immediately following authors’ names) (2 marks)
• Title of article correctly given (i.e., complete title, not capitalized) (2 marks)
• Name of journal listed correctly (i.e., journal title is capitalized and underlined or italicized) (2 marks)
• Volume, issue, and pages given in correct order and accurately (2 marks)

Variations from APA style may be given partial credit. Databases can be searched to ensure that references are correctly provided.

Part C (30 marks)

The submission of a certificate of completion from the TCPS 2 online tutorial counts for 30 marks. The certificate must list your name and the date on which it was issued.

Part D (20 marks)

This part of Practice Assignment 1 includes two components that are collectively worth 20 marks:

• Creating a new thread in the discussion forum or microblog for Practice Assignment 1 is worth 5 marks. Your proposed research topic should be entered as the topic of the thread and a copy of the answers to Part A of this practice assignment with respect to research design should be pasted.
• The student’s feedback to the proposed research topic of two other students is worth 15 marks (7.5 marks each). The feedback provided should be evaluated on the basis of its thoughtfulness and utility to the student in question. Superficial comments or suggestions (e.g., increasing the same size) may be awarded partial credit.

Instructions

Part A: Selecting a Research Topic, Research Question and Type of Research Design

The first task of this practice assignment is to select a research topic that interests you and will help you learn about research methods. It is important to have an interest in the topic since you will be doing a fair bit of reading and writing on it during this course. For that reason, take some time to consider a topic carefully.

You must then conceive of a research question that you would be interested in studying. To help you get started, consider your interests (e.g., sports, consumer behavior, driving, relationships, etc.). You might choose a question related to your interests by asking yourself: “What would I like to learn about that?”

A few examples help illustrate this:

• Do professional sports teams win a greater proportion of their home or away games?
• Do people tend to sample more flavours of ice-cream before buying when they have more or fewer choices?
• Are drivers more likely to come to a full stop at a stop sign when they have a passenger in their car?
• Do men and women tend to describe themselves differently in personal ads?

If you cannot think of an appropriate topic and research question that you want to investigate, ask someone to brainstorm with you and/or suggest a few topics for you to choose from. You may use the micro-blog discussion forum (found at the bottom of the Home Page) for this purpose.

Your choice of topic and research question will be constrained by your choice of data collection method. Develop a research question that is ethically and practically feasible, given the time and resource constraints in this course. In this course, your research project must adopt a method of data collection that is exempt from requiring approval from an institutional research ethics board (REB). As a result, you have two types of non-experimental data collection methods to choose from: naturalistic observation and archival research. You will learn much more about both of these research designs in Unit 3. However, what follows are brief descriptions of each of these data collection methods:

Naturalistic Observation

Naturalistic observation is an approach to data collection that involves observing people’s behaviour in the environment in which it typically occurs. Researchers engaged in naturalistic observation usually make their observations as unobtrusively as possible so that participants are often not aware that they are being studied. Ethically, this is considered to be acceptable if the participants remain anonymous and the behaviour occurs in a public setting where people would not normally have an expectation of privacy. Grocery shoppers putting items into their shopping carts, for example, are engaged in public behaviour that is easily observable by other shoppers. For this reason, most researchers would consider it ethically acceptable to observe them for a study.

Having said this, note that not all naturalistic observation studies are considered exempt from requiring REB approval. According to the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS) regarding ethical conduct for research involving humans (2010), in order to remain exempt from REB approval your project design must meet several criteria:

• You may observe only the natural behavior of others in a public setting.
• You should observe the chosen behavior at a distance and in such a way that the individuals do not come to learn that their behavior is being observed.
• You may not observe the behavior of children or other vulnerable populations.
• You may take notes as you conduct your observations; however, you may not make an audio, video, or other digital recording of the observed behavior.
• You may not identify any specific individuals when reporting the results of your study.

Some possible examples of research questions that you could address using a naturalistic observation study include:

• Do people take longer to pull out of a parking spot when there is another car waiting to take their spot?
• Is there a relationship between gender and jaywalking?
• Do people tend to smile more on sunny days?

Archival Research

An archival study involves the analysis of records or data that have already been collected for some other purpose. The data may include, for example, voting records, speeches made by public figures, census data, or even sports statistics. Archival studies sometimes incorporate content analysis, a category of techniques that can involve specifying keywords, phrases, or ideas and then finding all occurrences of them in the data. These occurrences can then be counted, timed (e.g., the amount of time devoted to entertainment topics on the nightly news show), or analyzed in a variety of other ways.

Just as with naturalistic observation, not all archival studies are considered exempt from requiring REB approval. According to the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS) regarding ethical conduct for research involving humans (2010), in order to remain exempt from REB approval the archival data must be publicly accessible with no reasonable expectation of privacy. Thus public archives, court records, newspaper headlines, and even the tweets of public figures may be used in an archival study without applying to an institutional REB for approval.

Some possible examples of research questions that you could address using an archival study include:

• Are newspaper headlines more negative during the winter?
• Is the average household income related to the number of hate crimes committed?
• Is there a positive relationship between the temperature and the number of fouls committed during soccer matches?

You may wish to vet your potential choice of a topic.

Examples of some useful and publicly accessible data archives include:

• Global views on morality
• Canadian election study
• Social science data archive
• Inter-university consortium for political and social research
• Statistics Canada
• The General Social Survey
• Canadian Community Health Survey
• Links to other data sets from the APA

Remember: Do not start working on the remaining parts of Practice Assignment 1 until you have discussed it with someone who could provide you with some useful feedback.

Part B: Providing References

Current research builds on previous studies; it is not isolated from the findings of earlier studies. Using the techniques described in Unit 1 and practised in Activity 1-5, initiate a literature search in order to identify two articles that are related to your research idea. The articles may be related because they focus on one or more of the variables that you are considering investigating for your research project. You must list both references in APA style. Along with each reference you should describe, in a few sentences, the results of that study.

Both articles should be from refereed, peer-reviewed academic journals/periodicals and should have been published during the last ten years. If you are not sure if a particular journal qualifies as peer-reviewed and academic, please ask a librarian or another knowledgeable person for assistance. For information about APA style referencing, please consult Chapter 11 in your textbook, a reputable online source such as Purdue University's Online Writing Lab, or the TRU library guide.

Part C: Completing the Canada’s Panel on Research Ethics Online Ethics Tutorial

A firm grasp of the ethical principles that govern research with human subjects is essential to your research project. After reading Chapter 3 in your textbook, you are required to complete the TCPS 2: CORE (course on research ethics) online tutorial offered by Canada’s Panel on Research Ethics. Before you begin the tutorial you will need to create an account as an undergraduate researcher.

The tutorial includes eight modules and takes an average of three hours to complete. You can go through the modules at your own pace (your progress is automatically saved), logging out and logging in again to resume your session. Upon successful completion of the tutorial you will receive a certificate of completion. If you want credit for this course, you should save this certificate and attach the saved named file to Practice Assignment 1 as evidence of completion.

Part D: Participating in a Peer Review Process (optional but recommended)

Science is a community enterprise that usually involves many different researchers working on the same topic. Each researcher builds on the work of other researchers before sharing their own findings publicly. Prior to and after publishing their work, researchers receive feedback about their work from other experts in their field. One published article at a time, this transparency takes us closer to a full and accurate understanding of our world. The goal of Part D of Practice Assignment 1 is for you to experience and benefit from a version of the peer-feedback process that operates in the scientific community.

To complete this optional but recommended part of the practice assignment you are required to do two things:

1. Create a new thread in the discussion forum (use discussion tab above) for Practice Assignment 1. Enter your proposed research topic as the topic of the thread (e.g., “The relationship between X and Y”) and paste a copy of your answers to Part A of this practice assignment into the text box. Doing so invites other students working through this course to provide you with feedback on your proposed topic and design. The feedback you receive may come in the form of suggestions, questions, or simply comments.
2. Visit the discussion forum for Practice Assignment 1. Browse through the list of proposed topics uploaded by other students working through the course and select any two topics that capture your interest. Reply to these threads with suggestions, questions, or comments that you think will be useful to the students that designed those proposals or anyone reading them. A positive and respectful tone should be maintained throughout your comments. Your feedback will be useful to other students. As a general guide, try to make at least two comments on the topic or method of data collection of each study. If you perceive there to be a problem with some aspect of a research question or data collection method, try to provide a suggestion for how the student might address that problem.

Note: This practice assignment, in conjunction with Practice Assignment 3 in IRMP102, will form the backbone of your research paper in Practice Assignment 4 in IRMP103. Therefore, retain a copy of this portion of the practice assignment, along with any feedback you obtain, to help you write the formal research paper.