APU PSYC300 2019 January Week 1 Forum Latest

PSYC300 Research Methods in Psychology

Week 1 Forum

Below you will find the topic instructions for this forum.  General posting requirements can be accessed via clicking "View Full Description" under each Forum heading.

Our Week 1 Forum topic has two parts.

Part I

Introduce yourself to the class.

Who are you?

Do you prefer to be called by a particular name?

Where are you from and where are you currently living?

What is your interest in the course?

Identify three learning goals you want to achieve in completing PSYC 300.

Part I should be a maximum of 150 words.

Part II

Respond to the forum question below.  

Imagine that you have been a member of a research team conducting an Institution Review Board (IRB) approved study of interpersonal aggression among preschoolers for more than a year. In that time, your team has repeatedly employed a consistent set of procedures to study preschoolers' behaviors.  The procedures involve volunteer mothers bringing their children to your university's child development lab for an observed "play session". So far your young study subjects have been fairly racially homogenous (alike), from middle-class families and recruited (via contact with their parents) from a university preschool, affluent parts of town day-care centers, and a pre-kindergarten program being offered in the neighborhood school district. This means that, much to your frustration, you can't claim that your study results are useful in understanding the behaviors of different race/ethnicity preschoolers and those from varying socio-economic status (SES) and education level families.

But wait...now you have learned that a friend of a friend can help you gain research access to a group of unusually racially diverse preschoolers from varying SES and education backgrounds, if you can do observations of these children really soon and at their day care facility. Several of your team members want to pursue this option and move on it quickly, arguing that there is no time to prepare a formal research proposal before embarking on the study in a new setting.  "Besides the time issue," they argue, "except for happening in a different place, our procedures should go just like all the others we've done and we already had them reviewed and approved by the IRB."

Discuss how your team would be leaving itself open to problems by moving ahead with no revised study formal proposal.

Explain two problems you might encounter with this approach.

Then, provide a possible solution for each of the problems you have listed.

Part II should be a minimum of 150 words.

Place both Part 1 and Part 2 in a single post, labeling each with headings accordingly so everyone can easily see where Part 1 of your post ends and Part 2 begins.