Paper 3: Survey Research
NOTE: Your paper must be saved as a .pdf, .doc or .docx word document and uploaded to Canvas by the due date to be eligible for grading and credit.
Your paper should be between 3- to 6-pages of text, not including your title page, references, and appendices. However, it is rare that this paper can be completed adequately in fewer than 4 full pages.
For this assignment, you must carry out an ethical study based on your proposal (paper 2) and ALL assignments and feedback you received regarding your proposal. Your study is your culminating assignment for the class and will be graded based on all relevant aspects of research, including proper data collection, analysis, and interpretation.
Required Sections for the Paper
Title (16 words maximum)
You should include a clear and succinct title for your paper. This should appear on your cover page. A running header is required for this paper and should be no more than four words. See this link for information and an example of how to construct a title page.
Introduction (1-2 pages)
This section should NOT have a heading. Tell your reader about previous research that supports your current hypothesis or the need to test the current hypothesis. You have two main goals here:
MY HYPOTHESIS: Students who eat a healthy breakfast before class will do better on their quizzes by having energy and paying more attention than those who don’t eat breakfast before class.
1. Teach your reader about the hypothesis.
2. Provide a rationale for this hypothesis.
This section should succinctly provide evidence of a specific hypothesis and why it is important. Your reader should get a clear sense of why the hypothesis is being tested and what the meaningfulness and application of the results might be if the hypothesis is supported. This section must end with a clear statement of the hypothesis. One bivariate hypothesis is required. However, if you wish to test more, your paper should be limited to no more than two bivariate hypotheses. Your hypothesis should include only two variables and must be able to be assessed using one of the following analytic techniques:
a. bivariate correlation
b. independent samples t-test
c. dependent samples t-test
d. ANOVA
e. Chi-square
Use research findings to back up all statements of fact and to support your ideas. The introduction should include a minimum of three peer-reviewed journal articles. Citations and references must follow APA format. The citation is the information that occurs in the text (e.g., Nielsen, et al., 2004) and reference refers to the publication information that is disclosed at the end of the document in the references section (see example later in this document).
Method (1-3 pages)
Tell your reader the three key subsections of the method here: Participants, Measures, and Procedures. Methodological information should appear only in the subsection in which it is most appropriate. The length necessary depends upon the design of your study. Be detailed, yet direct and with no redundancies.
Participants
The Participants section should tell the reader the sample size and report any demographic variable results. The goal is to tell who was in the sample because this has implications for the generalizability of results. This includes reporting mean and standard deviation for age, and the proportion of persons sampled who identified with various genders, ethnicities, or any other variables that might be important to generalizing the findings. This is NOT the place to state whether hypotheses were supported or to provide inferential statistics.
Measures
The Measures section should tell the reader how you measured variables. Here you should overtly state how each of the variables was measured. It can be helpful to provide sample questions for the reader and to refer your reader to an appendix showing your measure. If you are using a measure that was established in previous research, you must state that in this section and provide an APA formatted citation to the original study where that measure was published or used.
Procedures
The Procedures section should tell the reader how the research was conducted. Here the form of data collection (e.g. online survey, paper survey, in-person interview, behavioral observation) should be stated. The steps involved should also be reported with enough detail that another researcher would know how to replicate your study. Use complete sentences to state the steps in the order in which they occurred.
Results (1/4 page to 1 page)
The goals of this section are to 1. Tell your reader how you analyzed the data and 2. To report the results of those analyses. If you used software such as Excel or SPSS to analyze your data, state that here. Then, tell exactly which statistical procedure was used to test the hypothesis (e.g. bivariate correlation, independent samples t-test). Finally, report the results of the test in APA format and state whether those results support the hypothesis.
Discussion (1- 1½ pages)
Tell your reader the meaningfulness of the results in relation to: 1. Other research that was detailed in the introduction and 2. The hypothesis for the study. This is the section where you interpret the results. The discussion should also have a short paragraph that tells the limitations of the study and future directions. Future directions are recommendations for what researchers should do next to understand the variables based on the findings and/or limitations of the current study.
References
This should be an alphabetized, APA-formatted list of all references used. Use as many pages as is needed; this section does not count toward total page count limits. Here is an example of how the title and a reference should look. The references must start at the top of a new page (see example below).
Nielsen, A., Pinsof, W., Rampage, C., Solomon, A. H., & Goldstein, S. (2004). Marriage 101: An integrated academic and experiential undergraduate marriage education course. Family Relations, 53, 485-494.
Appendix A
Create an appendix to show your measure. Be sure to refer your reader to this appendix for more details in the measures section.
Appendix B
Create an appendix to show any materials presented to participants other than the measure. Be sure to refer your reader to this appendix for more details in the procedures section. Note: not all studies will need this.
Data
You will be asked to submit your data and/or data file with your paper. You can submit it as a separate file within the submission portal.
Additional Requirements for the Paper
Formatting:
Use the format of the American Psychological Association (APA, 6th edition)
Double-space all sections, including the references page. Appendices do not need to be double-spaced.
12-point font in Times New Roman
