Methods Paper Instructions Methods Paper Assignment 100 points

You must include all elements outlined on this page for your Methods Paper assignment. You should strive to be as descriptive and explicit as necessary, but you also need to be as succinct as possible. Below, you will see the rough outline of how the headings and paragraphs should look. For additional support, please refer to the examples posted on Canvas. This assignment is worth 100 points.

Methods

Describe your research method using the appropriate terms such as experiment or survey (questionnaire or interview). Also, explain why this type of method is being used (i.e., why the specific method is appropriate for this topic in terms of why exploratory or descriptive research is more appropriate than correlational or experimental – or vice-versa. You must use a quantitative method for this project. Please make sure to write in the future tense, as you will not actually conduct the study.

Procedures

Participants. This section describes, in detail, how the participants will be sampled, the characteristics of the sample that will be relevant to the study, the desired size of the sample, and a logical rationale that justifies this sample choice and size.

Procedures. Include your description of how your research will proceed (remember- we may want to actually conduct this study in the future [hint: COM 408]). Discuss where your participants will be studied, what will happen to them when they immediately arrive, the instructions you will give participants, etc. Describe how the data will be gathered, including specific procedures to be followed. Provide a brief rationale for why these procedures and measures are appropriate for the study, including how reliability and validity will be determined.

Measures

Describe how you will operationalize the independent and dependent variables. That is, explain how the variables will be observed, measured, and/or manipulated in relation to all questionnaires, physical observations, and any other applicable measures.

You must use pre-existing measures or procedures. If the instruments that you will use have been previously validated, report that information here, along with the reliability coefficient that other researchers have found that instrument to have.

Be sure to include examples here. If you are using any kind of instrument (if you are doing a survey), include the instrument in the appendix (at the end of the paper). If the actual instrument has not been published, then include the examples of the items that other researchers have described when they used that instrument. If you are using a pre-existing procedure (doing an experiment) then please thoroughly explain the experiment.

Data Analysis

In this section, you will restate your H(s) and/or RQ(s). Then, you will state what your IV is and what your DV is. Finally, state how you will test your H(s) using specific statistical tests (e.g., t-test, ANOVA, correlation) and why the test is appropriate given the IV and DV that you chose.

Limitations and Conclusion

Discuss some potential threats to internal and external validity, and how these threats will be (a) thwarted by your procedures, or (b) may impact the conclusions. It should not be difficult to be specific and accurate here, since your book discusses all of these issues in chapters that we have read. Conclude with a brief summary of your report.

References

List all references in alphabetical order using proper APA format. Please remember to add any new articles used in your methods paper, or else that is plagiarism.

Appendix

Please include all relevant study materials here. You should copy/paste or recreate the measures that you are using in your study.