Assessment Brief

Assessment - Research methods report

Assessment Description

The coursework for this module involves designing, executing, analysing and reporting a factorial experiment that you carry out on the topic of helping behaviour. You will start working on this in your week 2 seminar, where you will receive further instructions (see the additional coursework document on Moodle in the coursework folder). You are expected to carry out some of the coursework activities outside of class. You will be given the opportunity to receive feedback on a partial draft (title, introduction, methods, references). You will be working as part of a group for the design and execution (data collection) of the experiment but you are expected to analyse and write up your report independently.

Learning Outcome 1: Knowledge and understanding
Select appropriate quantitative research methods and related analyses to answer a research question.
Communication
Be able to write research reports of increasing complexity.
Critical thinking
Be able to compare methods and techniques, and be able to compute, manipulate, interpret and evaluate numerical data.
Employability
Be able to use numerical data appropriately.

Week 1

Although this week's seminar activities are not directly related to the coursework, you will be getting into groups so you are ready to start your group work in Week 2. Get Instant Help!

Week 2
Start reading about the topic

This week you will start familiarising with some of the literature relevant to your coursework. You should do so as a group. The topic of your research report is the bystander effect in the area of helping behaviour. Experiments on helping behaviour grew out of a real-life incident in New York. On March 13th 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was assaulted and murdered in the street. Although the incident involved repeated attacks and the woman's screams were heard by over 30 people in the adjacent apartment blocks, no one intervened to help or phoned the police. Seminal work on why no one helped was carried out by Latane and colleagues over several years. In a classic study, Latane and Darley (1968) showed that a person was less likely to help a stranger in distress if there were other bystanders present than if they were on their own. This observed effect was called the bystander effect, and was explained according to the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis. This hypothesis proposes that the responsibility for helping others is diffused (distributed) among all bystanders; so the more bystanders there are the less the responsibility felt by any one person. The full reference for this paper by Darley & Latane (1968) can be found below.
You should spend the rest of this seminar reading about the bystander effect and the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis. Familiarise with the literature, starting from these classic papers:

Darley, J. M. and Latane, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: diffusion of responsibilities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8 (4), 377-383.
Latane, B. and Nida, S. (1981) Ten years of research on group size and helping. Psychological Bulletin, 89(2), 308-324.
Continue browsing the relevant literature by going on Google Scholar or PsychInfo. Useful keywords to search for are: "the Bystander Effect", "bystanders and helping behaviour", "diffusion of responsibility". Are there any current studies that investigate the bystander effect? What types of variables do they investigate and what are the findings? This information will be useful ahead of next week's seminar, where you will start to design your own experiment.

Week 3

Choosing your second IV
The purpose of your study is to test the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis by manipulating the number of bystanders present. Also, your aim is to find out how the bystander effect may interact with another variable that is likely to affect helping behaviour.
Which independent variables to use?
You are required to use two independent variables in this experiment. One of the independent variables is already provided to you: number of bystanders, with two levels (e.g. none, multiple). You have already done some literature review last week around the topic and the diffusion of responsibility hypothesis. Now you should spend some time during the seminar to decide which second IV to investigate.
When deciding which variable to use, think about the literature you read last week and what you may want to investigate that could affect the bystander effect. Do go back to the literature to see what other studies have done to help you develop a rationale for investigating this second variable. However, do not make it overly complicated. This report will not assess you on how creative you can be in choosing your second IV, but on the quality of your final report. Make sure your argument is supported by empirical evidence and/or grounded in theories.

Measuring your DV
Once you have decided on your second IV, you need to figure out a way to obtain your DV (what you want to measure). For this, you will need to create written scenarios. The precise nature of these will vary according to the variables you are investigating. For an example of scenarios used by students in previous years, see here.
Note that it would not be practical or ethical to "fake" a real-life scenario, e.g. having a student pretending to be in distress or ill in a public place and observing how many people come to help.

To obtain your DV, you will need to ask your participants how likely they would be to help if they experienced the scenario presented to them. Each participant ONLY sees one of the four scenarios. It is important that your DV is derived from a scale, not a yes/no answer (please note: no questionnaires are needed, just one question and a Likert scale).

What to do next?
Create your scenarios. These should include a question and a Likert scale for your participants to respond on. Note that you will need one scenario for each of your four conditions. Because it is a between-subjects design, each of your participant will only see one of the scenarios. Example scenarios can be found on Moodle, in the coursework folder.
Do not forget to collect information about each of your participants' age and gender. You can ask this before each of the scenarios. You should include their age in number of years and the following recommended options for gender: Female, Male, Other (with an option to describe themselves), Prefer not to say. Templates are available on Moodle

In summary, your experiment will have:
Two independent variables (factors), each with two levels
One dependent variable
The design will therefore be a 2x2 factorial between-subjects design.

Next week you will start working on an ethics form for your study
Week 4

The ethics form
Now you are ready to fill out your group's ethics form and proposal. You should aim to spend the time in this seminar to complete the ethics form. First you should read the ethics guidelines provided in the coursework documents folder on Moodle. You can then start filling out the Ethics form, Information Sheet, Consent form, and Debrief.

Note: If you run out of time during your seminar, you should continue working on the ethics form outside of the class. You should spend time outside your class to finalise all documentation, and show your ethics form (including your materials) to your seminar leader by Week 5 at the latest.

You MUST receive ethical approval before starting data collection and aim to get your ethics application approved by your seminar leader by Week 5.

Week 5 onwards

Start data collection

As soon as your ethics form has been approved, you can start collecting your data. You are responsible for finding participants for the experiment (aim for a minimum of 10 participants in each of the 4 conditions). Note: You should aim for each condition to have the same number of participants. Probably the most convenient source is other students in your class or more widely at LSBU. You are advised against approaching strangers outside the confines of the University, particularly on the street or in shopping centres.
Note: You will all be contributing to collecting data, so aim to share this task equally amongst the members. At the end, you will be merging all your data together for your analysis.
From Week 5, you should start writing your methods and introduction, and you should be able to analyse your data in class in Week 7 and write up your results at home. Aim to have your results written by Week 8 and finalise your report by the deadline, in Week 10.

Format of the practical report

Your report should be similar to the reports you wrote in your first year. You should therefore use the required structure, including headers, with the following elements: title, abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion. On Moodle, you can find detailed guidance on report writing for each section.
Note: The word count includes everything except title, references and appendix.
Feedback
In Week 9 we want you to assess you draft in line with the feedback you received for your report writing in RM1 and RM2 as well as the report writing guidance. Use this feedback to make changes before your final submission.
Your final report.
The final submission will include all required sections of a report, as well as an appendix.
Note: for the purpose of this coursework, you should include an appendix which includes the following: your submitted ethics form; the scenarios you used for your experiment and the Likert scale. Do not submit your SPSS output.