Coursework Assignment

Writing up your results:

1. When presenting your analysis, begin by stating what analysis you have selected and why. E.g. 'An independent t-test was used to assess whether anxiety scores differed significantly between the groups. Histograms showed that anxiety was positively skewed. As the data were not normally distributed bootstrapping was used, etc...'
2. Present both descriptive data (e.g. mean or median, standard deviations) and inferential statistics (e.g. \(r, t, F, \eta^{2}\) ). Inferential statistics should usually include degrees of freedom and associated $p$ values, effect sizes, and confidence intervals where appropriate. Report both significant and non-significant results, but select your statistics carefully - do not report a lot of superfluous information
3. Make good use of figures and/or tables to present your data. Do not leave tables and figures to speak for themselves - provide a brief summary of the data presented in the text as well. This does not mean giving a blow by blow account of all the descriptive data provided. e.g. if you present a table of correlations between a number of variables rather than re-stating the actual correlations and the \(p\) values you could say something like: Table 1 shows that the majority of the correlations between the various dimensions of social support and psychological well-being were small to moderate in size. All the correlations were significant except the relationship between network size and psychological well-being.
4. When presenting the results, you should interpret and emphasize the meaning of the statistics, i.e. clearly describe what is being tested and what significant results mean for the concepts involved and the research questions.
5. Formal results sections must be presented in APA format (you should refer to the APA manual to get information on the format of tables, figures and how to report your data). Many marks are typically lost each year through not giving sufficient attention to APA formatting guidelines.

Question 1 [40 marks]

It has been argued that active learning strategies promote better understanding of material than passive learning strategies. Students were provided with information presented as a printed book chapter, or a website with multiple sources. They were then asked to write either a: narrative, summary, explanation, or argument about the studied material. Quality of learning was assessed by the proportion of sentences containing: (i) information copied from the text (ii) completely new information (not originating from the text), (iii) new combinations of information from text, or pairing text and prior knowledge; and (iv)by the number of correct inferences made about the material.

Carry out an appropriate MANOVA, to assess the effects of presentation format and writing task on quality of learning.

Write up your results formally (i.e. using APA format) describing and interpreting your analysis, results and conclusions.

The data can be found in the file Learning.sav

Question 2 [60 marks]

A psychologist was interested in how patients' perceptions of the cause of their illness may affect their response to an intervention for Ménière's disease, a progressive long term condition which affects the balance and hearing parts of the inner ear. Participants were grouped according to whether the endorsed more psychological (e.g. my emotional state, stress or worry, my mental attitude, family problems or worries) or physical (a germ or virus, alcohol, environmental pollution, smoking, accident or injury) factors as being the mostly likely causes of their illness. The intervention was a programme of vestibular rehabilitation which involved provoking dizziness in a controlled manner using repeated head movements.

Patients filled in the Vertigo Symptoms Scale - short form (VSS-SF) at baseline, three months, and six months after commencing treatment.

Test the hypothesis that patients who believed their illness was due to psychological causes would be more likely to persist with treatment following the end of the research project.

Calculate total VSS-SF scores by summing the responses on the VSS-SF

Present a table of descriptive statistics in APA format.

Conduct a mixed model ANOVA and appropriate follow up analyses to assess whether perceptions of illness cause affect how symptoms change over time in the three groups.

Data can be found in the file MenieresVSS.sav

Price: $49.99

Solution: The downloadable solution consists of 70 pages, 1253 words and 15 charts.
Deliverable: Word Document