In this course, you will complete a statistical project across the remaining 3 weeks. This project provides you with the opportunity to apply statistical significance methodology to psychological research.
Select 1 of the following scenarios based on your field of interest in psychology:
Industrial/Organizational Psychology:
A large tech company wants to implement a 4-day workweek to try to increase motivation. The CEO read an article that showed an increase in employee motivation may increase performance. The company wants to implement a small change in two departments before they make any major organizational changes and would like to test this to see if this improves the performance of these employees. The corporation uses the Devine Company to measure employee satisfaction with an anonymous survey.
Applied Psychology:
A large medical facility is experiencing too many missed appointments in its primary and specialty care clinics. The facility has noticed that not all patients respond well to reminder calls regarding follow-up appointments. Some patients do not answer calls and do not seem to respond to voice mails requesting they call the facility. The result is that many follow-up appointments are missed. Facility management has read articles that indicate people respond very well to text messages and would like to see which method provides the least number of missed appointments. Missed appointments are tracked in the facility database monthly.
General Psychology:
Clinicians at a small clinic have been introduced to a new method to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in their clients for veterans. Research indicates that virtual reality (VR) is a highly effective treatment option for patients with PTSD. Currently, the clinic uses only cognitive processing therapy (CPT) for their patients suffering from PTSD. The clinicians would like to find out whether VR therapy has different results from CPT therapy. The measure used by the clinic to measure PTSD symptoms is the Combat Exposure Scale. Both therapies need to be applied for a minimum of 12 weeks to be effective.
Imagine you are an intern at a company that fits your chosen scenario. Your supervisor has asked you to prepare a statistical summary of your scenario.
You decide to refresh your knowledge about hypothesis testing. You find the example below about hypotheses testing. You will use this example to inform your work as you develop your statistical summary.
Example
Imagine you have developed a hypothesis. The hypothesis states that two drugs have different effects on lowering anxiety. You have anxiety scores for drug A and anxiety scores for drug B (all after 4 weeks of treatment). You run inferential analysis after 4 weeks.
Your null hypothesis is H0: drug A = drug B.
Your research hypothesis is H1: drug A ≠ drug B.
Your dependent variable is the anxiety score changed after treatment.
Your independent variable is drug treatment.
Because you did not state a direction in your hypothesis (better than or worse than), this will be a two-tailed test. You are looking for differences in either direction. You would set your alpha level at .05 and have a sample for each group of 30 people that were volunteers (what sampling method would this imply?) for the study.
Write a 525- to 700-word summary in which you:
Clearly define the problem or issue you are addressing.
Create a research hypothesis.
Find 2 to 3 peer-reviewed research articles (must have methods section) related to the topic/problem in your scenario. For more on peer-review, click here.
Provide a brief background of any research you have found that might affect your research hypothesis.
Note: You have been given a data set (Statistic Project Student Data) with two sets of interval data (just the numbers, as you must decide what they represent, such as method A results or method B results). This means you are going to test one thing against another, such as which method works best (step 1 of the steps to hypothesis testing; please refer to the example provided above).
State the null and research hypotheses.
Explain whether these hypotheses require a one-tailed test or two-tailed test and explain your rationale.
Describe the sample you will use. The sample size will be 30 for each group, which are provided in your data set.
Explain what type of sampling method you selected and why you chose it.
Are there limitations to this sampling method, and how might it affect your research?
Do you think you would also collect some descriptive data, such as gender, age, etc.?
If yes, explain why you think it makes sense to collect descriptive data.
If no, explain why you do not think it makes sense to collect descriptive data.
Format your summary according to APA guidelines.
(Note: You will need a cover page, reference page, and in-text citations at a minimum. No abstract is needed.) See the Center for Writing Excellence under the Library Tab for resources on how to format your paper in APA format.
Submit your assignment.