General description

In this assignment, psychological research is practised in small scale. Your job is to create a research question from selected topics, create a research plan and implement your research. At the end of the term, you shall present your research results to others.

Topics for this assignment are related to welfare. Possible topics are:

- sleep
- happiness
- love
- stress
- addiction
- eating behaviour
- social interaction
- flow and 
- creativeness.

Two or more groups can have the same topic, but most of the topics should be covered during one course. Of course, you can choose topics outside of this list as well and combine different topics, but remember to ask for the teacher's approval, if you do so. The main thing is that you try to study a phenomenon related to welfare.

What should you do?

I Create your research question. What do you want to find out from your topic related to welfare? It goes without saying that your research question should be in form of a question. The more simple and concrete your research question is, the better it is for this assignment.

(Ib Not compulsory. Choose an existing theory or develop your own theory. Since we don’t have that much time to cover genuine psychological theories related to the topics, you can skip this part. But if you want to, you can try to find an existing theory or develop your own theory.)

II Form a hypothesis based on your research question (and possible theory). What will be the presumed outcome of your research? What kind of results do you expect? Formulate your hypothesis in a way that it can either get support from research results or be falsified by your research results.

III Choose a suitable research design for your research. Since you haven’t covered how to calculate correlations in maths, it’s better that you try to do a small-scale experiment or small-scale descriptive study. On the other hand, if you really want to do a correlational research or use correlation, you can use Pearson correlation coefficient calculator as a part of your research. In addition, case study is out of the question, because you won’t  find the kind of a case suitable for this assignment. So, choose from experiment and descriptive study (and use correlation if you really need to try this out).

IV Choose a suitable research setting for your research. If you go for experiment, try to arrange laboratory-kind environment into our classroom. If you go for descriptive study, try to conduct it in natural environment. But you can be creative with this. 

V Choose a suitable data-collecting method for your research. You can use one or several methods, but try to use only one, because it’s not that laborious. The methods can be quantitative or qualitatite or both. Since we don’t have fancy instruments to measure physiological activity, you have to be creative. You can create e.g. tests, questionnaires, observation methods and interview questions. Remember, the number of participants doesn't have to be that big in this task!

VI Compile some kind research plan based on the stages mentioned above. This helps you to actually implement your research. Remember, this is only a small-scale practise of psychological research. The experimental setting doesn’t have to be perfect and the number of participants doesn’t need to be that big with descriptive studies.

VII Implement your research! This is the fun part!

VIII Gather your research results and compile a PowerPoint or similar where you explain the whole research process (parts I to VII) with results. (E.g. number of participants, percentages, distributions etc.) In addition, try to evaluate your research. Were you able to produce scientific knowledge? Don't forget to contextualize your research for the audience. Prepare to present your research presentation to others.

Assessment criteria

20 points
- Research is contextualized for the audience in an excellent manner
- Research question and hypothesis are clearly and well formulated
- Presentation explains the research process and the results clearly and in a highly understandable manner
- Research process is evaluated excellently

15 points
- Research is contextualized for the audience well, with only some minor drawbacks
- Research question and hypothesis are clearly formulated, but they have some incongruences with the actual research
- Presentation explains the research process and the results in an understandable manner for the most part
- Research process is evaluated well, with only some minor flaws

10 points
- Research is contextualized for the audience, but with some major drawbacks
- Research question and hypothesis are formulated, but they have several incongruences with the actual research
- Presentation explains the research process and the results in an understandable manner only partially
- Research process is evaluated, but with some major flaws

5 points
- Research is contextualized for the audience very poorly, but there is still some connection to the actual research
- Research question and hypothesis are poorly formulated, but they have some relationship to the actual research
- Most of the research process and the results are explained unclearly and not in an understandable manner
- Research process is evaluated poorly with major flaws

0 points
- Research is not contextualized for the audience at all
- Research question and hypotheses are not formulated
- Presentation doesn’t explain anything about the research process or the results
- Research process is not evaluated at all