Reference no: EM132275225

Part A: Psychology in the News

In the first part of Assignment you have an opportunity to see how psychology is reported in the media, and to think what improvements could be made in how reporters explain news stories with psychological content. This activity will help you to identify pseudoscientific thinking.

Your first task is to find a report of psychology in the news on a credible online news site such as CBC, ABC, BBC, etc. You may find it useful to look at stories in categories such as health, technology, culture, etc., rather than in front page news.

Then complete the following. Use the same numbering and answer in complete sentences. Everything must be in your own words (no quotations) with sources cited and referenced in APA style.

Provide the link to your news article, and then summarize it in your own words.

Describe the psychological content reported in the article (use and cite the textbook).

Evaluate the credibility of the psychological claims made in the article. Note that we're not asking you to research the topic here, but to apply the critical thinking guidelines as a consumer of information. Make suggestions for improving the accuracy, clarity, or thoroughness of the article.

List eight original follow-up questions that arise after reading the news story. The follow-up questions should be based on any of the eight critical thinking guidelines in Chapter 1 the Wade et al. textbook; i.e., the questions should relate to examining evidence, considering other interpretations, etc.

Part B: Psychologists' Careers

The second part of Assignment 1 provides you with the opportunity to expand your knowledge of what psychologists do. For this part of the assignment, you will be required to do some research online to discover two psychologists with different jobs in Canada. You will then write a profile for each, and describe what each does in their work life. You may choose from any of the three broad categories of professional activities described in Chapter 1 of the Wade et al. textbook, provided your choices have a PhD, PsyD, or EdD. The two people must engage in different sets of professional activities. For example, if one of your choices does clinical work providing behaviour therapy to adolescents who have experienced family violence, your other choice must be non-clinical.

For psychologists engaged in clinical practice, you may wish to search the website of professional organizations such as the British Columbia Psychological Association.

For psychologists engaged in research and teaching, you may wish to browse the faculty listings at universities.

For psychologists engaged in research or applications in non-educational settings, you will need to be creative and search the websites of organizations that employ psychologists, or search in Google by area: professional sports, forensic psychology, the federal government, or the armed forces.

For each psychologist you choose, provide a link to their website and write a profile that answers the following:

Describe the activities that the psychologist does in their work life.

Describe the educational background of the psychologist-what degrees; where were they were educated; how long did it take; the topics of their dissertation; and any other educational experiences. Describe any other professional activities that are relevant to their career.

What perspective in psychology does the psychologist appear to work from, and how do you know?

Suppose the psychologist were to look for work in another province in Canada; can you find any job listings that they would be qualified for? For this you can search both provincial and federal job banks. Speculate about "portability" of their chosen career.

What salary range would you expect the psychologist to have? You will not find this on their website! You may have to do some digging for this, but speculate and cite your sources.

Part C: Reading Scholarly Articles

Of fundamental importance in the science of psychology is the ability to communicate and understand scholarly research. You will notice references to research throughout the Wade et al. textbook. The research has been comprehensively reported on in scientific articles published by scholarly journals. This scholarly work requires strict adherence to critical thinking guidelines and the use of the scientific method referred to earlier in the unit. Being able to dissect and understand scholarly work is a tool that allows students of psychology to differentiate between claims based on empirical evidence, and claims based on opinion, folklore, intuition, etc.

In this part of the assignment, we are going to hone the skills needed for understanding psychological research. You will be introduced to scholarly literature and begin to gain practice in finding the key information contained inside. Reading scholarly articles will help you gain insight into how psychologists make decisions when doing research and also help you understand the different types of research methods that are referred to throughout the course. This activity will provide an introductory framework for analyzing and understanding scholarly work. Specifically, this part of the assignment will require you to read a published article, and then demonstrate your understanding of it by responding to series of questions

This activity is adapted from:

Sego, S. A, & Stuart, A. E. (2016). Learning to read empirical articles in general psychology. Teaching of Psychology, 43(1), 38-42.

The articles chosen for this activity are relatively brief, and have the added advantage of being written by undergraduate students such as yourselves-thereby exposing you to models of excellent student writing, and perhaps nudging you towards a potential future career path!

Please choose ONE of the following articles for this part of the assignment.

España, L. Y. (Winter 2016). Effects of password type and memory techniques on user password memory. Psi Chi Journal of Undergraduate Research, 21(4), 269-275.

Partika, A. C. (Spring 2017). Donate, everybody's doing it: Social influences on charitable giving. Psi Chi Journal of Undergraduate Research, 22(1), 39-45.

Stover, J., Dismuke, T., Nelson, C., & Grahe, J. E. (Summer 2006). Can you raed this srcmabeld msesgae? Testing a mass e-mail assertion. Psi Chi Journal of Undergraduate Research, 11(2), 77-83.

After you have thoroughly read your chosen article, respond to the following questions. Use complete sentences and be sure to proofread for grammar and spelling mistakes.

What is the title of the article?

What are the three or four main things you learned from the introduction?

What is the hypothesis?

How many participants were in the study?

Who were the participants (e.g., college students, infants, etc.)?

What was/were the independent variable(s)?

What was the dependent variable?

Summarize what the participants did.

How was the data analyzed (i.e., what statistical analysis was used)? Report the means and standard deviations for each group.

What did you learn from the results section?

Was the hypothesis supported?

What can you conclude from the study?

What, if any, suggestions did the author(s) make for future investigation?

How many references were cited in the article?

Do results generalize to real life? What real life conditions were not replicated well in the study?

Part D: Conducting a Correlational Study

The final part of Assignment will give you the opportunity to build on your understanding of research methods by conducting a small study.

Choose ONE of the following predictions to test:

There is a positive correlation between height and weight.

There is a negative correlation between rainfall amount and hours of sunlight.

For each option, you will need some data. For option 1 you could ask 10 people you know to report their height and weight, or you could use archival data that were collected for another purpose and reported on a website, from which you can extract height and weight data. Examples here are any major sports league website, whose statistics include height and weight. You can see an example of archival data at:

Scheig, M. (2017, June 3). 2017 NHL combine heights & weights.

For option 2 you will find historical rainfall and sunlight data archived at weather sites such as the Government of Canada's Historical Climate Data. You could choose ten days in a particular month to look at, or the same day over ten years. Make sure that in the time period you choose there is some variability in rainfall and sunlight amounts.

For either option, you will need at least ten cases. If you imagine a table with two columns of data, one column for each variable, each row is a case. If you choose option 1 then you would have ten rows with two columns; each row is one person, and the two columns are height and weight.

Next, you will need to calculate the correlation. This is a measure of the strength of the relationship between the two variables. See the discussion in Unit 1 and in Chapter 2 of the Wade et al. textbook. You can calculate the correlation using a calculator, or there are many online calculators you can use.

For example, try:

Stangroom, J. (n.d.). Pearson correlation coefficient calculator.

Now you are ready to write-up your results. For either option, report the following:

State your prediction.

Provide a brief rationale for the logic of the prediction.

Provide a table displaying your raw data (see the description above).

Create a scatterplot displaying your data.

Calculate the Pearson r correlation coefficient. Report it as "r = xxxx".

Report the effect size of your correlation.

Was your prediction confirmed and how do you know?

How is your study a poor test of the prediction; i.e., what are the limitations in your study that prevent you from asserting confidently to the world that your results represent the ways things are in real life?

Attachment:- Psychology.rar