Assignment 4 Objectives
Assignment 4 is designed to help you achieve the following objectives.
1. Assess the impact and relevance of research in psychology on people’s everyday lives.
2. Evaluate critically information about research studies published in the media and offer constructive alternatives.
Preparation
As you go about your everyday life, keep your eyes open for media reports of studies that have psychological content. For Assignment 4, you will select one media report in a newspaper (e.g., edmontonjournal.com and nationalpost.com), a popular magazine (e.g., psychologytoday.com and sciencedaily.com), or on the Internet that describes a psychological study. SOMETHING FROM CANADA OR NORTH AMERICA
The report must contain information about the purpose of the study, the method used, the results, and any conclusions reached. For this assignment, short articles that describe the findings of a single research study work best. Longer articles tend to integrate findings from multiple studies so don’t tend to work as well. If there is a topic that interests you, you can try to search on Google.
Read the report carefully, asking yourself the following questions:
1. What is the research problem?
2. How was the study conducted?
3. What were the results?
4. What conclusions does the report imply?
5. Are the conclusions warranted by the research described?
You may find that you cannot answer one or more of the questions listed above. Do not be overly concerned about this. The most central questions to be answered are:
6. What questions would you like to have answered before you accept the conclusions implied in the media report?
7. Were there any distortions in reporting? If so, what were they?
If the original source of research is indicated in the media report, you may wish to locate the original report or journal article and use it to help you assess the accuracy of the media report. You are not, however, expected to do so. Most media reports fail to cite the source in enough detail to allow one to locate the original report.
Directions for Writing the Essay
Your finished essay is to be 500 to 800 words long and is to be divided into 3 sections as indicated below. Remember that the goal of the assignment is to critique the media report itself and not to critique the research itself.
Section 1: Describe briefly the research problem, the method used, the results, and the conclusions reported, as described by the journalist.
Section 2: Describe any essential information that is missing, that is, information that you, as a student taking a research methods course, would want to see but is not mentioned by the journalist. Discuss how different outcomes of the missing information may affect the validity of conclusions claimed.
Section 3: Draw your conclusions about the usefulness of this media report in disseminating information. Given all of the missing information, would you consider the media report useful for educating the reader? Would you need to read the original report before you trust the conclusion presented by the journalist?
