Psych 241

Dr. David Allbritton

Homework 3: Reading a Research Article

The article you are to read is by Kassin and Kiechel, in the journal Psychological Science, vol. .7, no. 3, May 1996. If you did not get a copy in class or from Blackboard, you will need to go to the library and make a copy for yourself.

Read the article, then refer to the article to answer the following questions. Your answers should be typed and numbered. This assignment will be worth 50 points.

This is an individual assignment. You must do your own work and may not collaborate on this assignment.

1. Give the correct APA-formatted reference for the article (as it would appear in the "References" section of a manuscript).
2. When did the paper appear? (month and year)
3. When was the paper accepted for publication? (month and year)
4. When was it submitted? (month and year)
5. How long did the peer review process take (in months)? [Note: this does not include the time between when the paper is accepted and when it appears in print.]
6. How long was the article "in press" (in months)?
7. At a minimum, how much time passed between the completion of the research and its publication?
8. Which of the authors was a college student when the research was conducted?
9. How do you know that?
10. This research employed deception. What was the nature of the deception?
11. The APA code of ethics specifies 3 requirements for the ethical use of deception in research. Identify them, and evaluate whether this study met each of the 3 requirements. Conclude by stating whether the use of deception in this study was ethically justified, according to APA standards.
12. State the hypothesis of the study.
13. For each of the two IV’s in the study, (a) list the theoretical construct or concept the variable represented, (b) describe how the concept was operationalized to create the variable, (c) state the name given to the variable in the paper, (d) tell how many levels of the variable there were, and (e) state what levels were used. Your answer should have 10 parts: IV1-a, IV1-b, IV1-c, IV1-d, IV1-e, IV2-a, IV2-b, IV2-c, IV2-d, IV2-e – each on a new line.
14. For each of the 3 DV’s in the study, (a) list the theoretical construct or concept the variable represented, (b) describe how the concept was operationalized to create the variable, and (c) state the name given to the variable in the paper. Your answer should have 9 parts: DV1-a, DV1-b, DV1-c, DV2-a, DV2-b, DV2-c, DV3-a, DV3-b, DV3-c – each on a separate line.
15. Which of the 3 DV’s was most crucial for supporting the authors’ argument (supporting their conclusion)?
16. What type of study was this? (survey, naturalistic observation, experiment, quasi-experiment, etc)
17. How many participants were there and what population did they come from?
18. How many participants were excluded from the results, and why were they excluded?
19. Is that ok, or is their exclusion a problem?
20. Paragraph #1 of the Method section contains information that should (if subheadings were used) go in two separate subsections. Name each subsection, and list the information from paragraph 1 that should go in each.
21. The first sentence of paragraph #2 in the Method section contains a violation of (current) APA style. Identify the violation.
22. Which paragraph in the Method section (#1, 2, 3, 4, etc) contains information about the Apparatus used?
23. Paragraph #3 of the Method section reports two sets of means and two associated F tests. Should this information be in the Results section instead? Why or why not?
24. How was "internalization" measured? Was this measure sufficiently objective? Why or why not?
25. The Results and Discussion sections are combined in this paper. If they had been given separate section headings, which section would each paragraph belong in? Number from 1 to 7 and for each paragraph number of the current "Results and Discussion" section, state whether it should go in the Results section or the Discussion section.
26. Was the hypothesis confirmed? What 2 percentages in Table 1 are the most important for showing that the hypothesis either was or was not confirmed?