Overview: Your final paper assignment will provide you an opportunity to apply the skills you have learned in your lab and lecture for this semester. Importantly, your research manuscript must be formatted using APA 7th Edition style. This is includes the body of your manuscript, your title page, your abstract, your references page (which must be titled references page) and your appendices (The appendices is where you include any figures you made to visualize the results from your project).
Page Limit Guidelines: Your final research manuscript is estimated to be between 7 pages and 10 pages double spaced. Specifically, we are concerned with including the body of the manuscript along with the title page and abstract. As a rule of thumb, please ensure that you do not go over more than 1.5 pages or go under 1.5 pages if your manuscript page length is closer to 7 pages double spaced.
Note: Your references and appendices sections do not have to fit into the 7-10 page length. Your research manuscript must be submitted as a doc, docx file, or pdf (For those with apple computers, you can convert your document that you choose to write using pages into a docx file). If your manuscript is not either of those formats, your assignment will not be graded. Please use 12-point font and use either Times New Roman, Arial or Callibri font. Rule of thumb, as long as the font is readable, you should be good to go.
Abstract (5 points): Your abstract will be featured on its own page and typically follows the manuscript title page. Your abstract word count needs to be around 250 words as is customary for actual research publications. Your abstract needs to include information about your sample (participant demographics), a brief mention of your hypotheses, your research design, the main analyses that you ran and a sentence about your discussion (What is the take home message you want your reader to get from reading about your study?)
Introduction/Literature Review (15 points): In this section, your task is to summarize the relevant literaturethat became the foundation for the study you want to conduct. You do not have provide every single detail of the previous studies but instead focus on the highlights (What did this study find? And how is it relevant to your original project?) Lastly, at the end of the introduction, literature section, you need to clearly state your hypotheses. You can say them in words or you can state them using notations (Example: It is hypothesized that people who owned cats as a child are more likely to score higher on a measure of neuroticism or: H1 : People who own cats are more likely to be score high on neuroticism). Your culminating hypotheses should be seen as an extension of the previous research you introduced.
Methodology/Statistical Analytical Plan (7 points): This is the section where you explain what research methodology you employed, information about your participants, and the type of statistical analyses that you ran to test your variables of interest. For this section, you also need to talk a bit about the measures that you used (be sure to cite the authors of those measures). You can also talk about some example items of interestfrom your included measures (For example, The Fake Neuroticism Scale (Parker & Stark 2018) was utilized to measure participant neuroticism. It has items such as “I often feel like my spidey-sense is triggered way too often” and each item utilizes a Likert Scale such as 1: “I do not agree with this statement at all” and 5 “I very much agree with this statement”. Please note, you do not have to include the results of the analyses in this section that is reserved for the results section.
Results Section (10 points): For this section, you are talking about the results first using words and second using statistical notation (make sure that your statistical notation is in 7th Edition APA format!). Typically, the format I follow is this
What statistical analysis did I run?
In words, what was the outcome?
What were the results using statistical notation?
Was the result statistically significant?
Discussion/Limitations Section (7 points): In this section, we reiterate our results but this time, we just say it in words. For each analysis, after we reiterate the results, we then try to connect what we found to the previous literature that informed our project. Importantly, we do this whether or not our results were statistically significant and whether or not our results are consistent with previous research. After we put our results in context with the extant literature, we then discuss the limitations. Remember, when we conduct research on human behavior, there will always be limitations to talk about. The limitations can be based on a limited sample size or that we used a niche population (example: Psychology freshman at UCF) whose data may not be generalizable to the whole population of the United States. Other limitations can be about experimenter bias or selection bias (you get the idea)
References Section (3 points): As stated previously, you need to have a minimum of five sources (and at least four of those sources need to be come from peer-reviewed publications) Your references section needs to follow APA 7th edition formatting which includes ensuring that each of your references is listed in alphabetical order by last name of the first author. This also includes creating a hanging indent to allow for easy accessibility in differentiating your listed sources. References page must begin at the top of its own page (not at the end of the discussion).
Appendices (3 points): We typically use figures and tables to simplify accessibility our results through data visualization. Thusly, if you want to include figures and tables from your results you may do this so long as they go in the appendices section. If you want some examples refer to the figures and tables that were included as examples in Chapter 12 of our textbook. Be sure to give your figure/table a label and clearly label the parts of the visual (e.g., for figures, we would label the x axis, y axis, the categorical groups etc.)
Important: The textbook this course uses is: Methods in Behavioral Research
ISBN: 9781260380095
By: Paul Cozby, Scott Bates
Please use similar apa style from my lab 10 assignment and feedback of those for the manuscript for the SPSS data you calculated.
Below are files of the data needed to calculate in SPSS and my lab 10 assignment as an example how to write the data in Apa style.
Please use IBM SPSS Statistics 29.0.0.0 and Excel
