Generalizing

1
Generalizing Writing- Up Your Results

• Psych 7
• March 13th

2
Outline

• Generalizing your results
• Your participants
• Cultural considerations
• Generalizing from lab settings
• Replicating your results
• Meta-analyses
• Writing-up your results
• The goal of a research report
• Elements of an APA-style research report
• Evaluating Research

3
What to do with your results

• Now that youve run your study and have some
  amazing results, what do you do with them?
• Do they generalize to other populations?
• Write them up!!

4
Generalizing your Results

• Some things to consider
• Your Participants
• College students
• Young, high need for peer approval, high
  cognitive skills
• Volunteers
• Highly educated, need for approval, social
• Gender
• In psychology, often test more females than males
• Locale
• e.g., North vs. South, red state vs. blue state

5
Generalizing your Results, cont.

• Cultural Considerations

• American Cultural Context
• Expressive Individualism
• Uniqueness is good.
• The norm about norms is not to follow norms.

• East Asian Cultural Context
• Individual Responsibility to Collectives
• Uniqueness is bad.
• The norm about norms is to follow norms.

6
Generalizing your Results, cont.

• From the Lab to the Real World
• Mundane Realism
• Experimental Realism

7
Replicating Your Results

• The science of psychology is based on testability
  and falsifiability
• It helps if you can replicate your results!
• Exact replications
• Conceptual replications

8
Meta-Analysis

• Statistical techniques used to summarize and
  evaluate the results of multiple studies
• So many studies, so little time!
• Example
• Effects of gender on conformity and social
  influence (Eagly, 1978)

9
Meta-Analysis, cont.

• How to Conduct?
• Collect as many representative studies as
  possible
• Convert results of studies to common metric
• e.g., effect size
• Code dimensions of the study
• Participants, manipulation/treatment, research
  design, conclusions, etc.
• Use a variety of descriptive and correlational
  techniques to describe overall results

10
Eagly (1978) Eagly Carli (1981) Meta-Analyses

• Are women more easily influenced than men?
  (Eagly, 1978)
• Before 1970 yes
• Mid-1970s not so much
• Does conformity depend? (Eagly Carli, 1981)
• Yes!
• Gender of researcher conducting study
• Specific influence topic

11
Writing-up Your Results
12
The Goal of a Research Report

• Provide 3 kinds of information
• What was done
• What was found
• How your research study is related to other
  knowledge in the area

13
The Hourglass Approach to Empirical Research
Papers

• INTRODUCTION
• METHODS
• RESULTS
• DISCUSSION

14
Elements of an APA-Style Research Report

• Title Page
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• References

15
Sample APA Style Paper

• http//www.thewritesource.com/apa/APA.pdf
• OR
• http//www.thewritesource.com/apa/apa.htm

16
Title Page Abstract

• Title page contains
• Title
• Author names affiliation
• Running head
• Abstract
• A brief summary of the paper that focuses on what
  was done and what was found

17
Introduction

• General intro to topic
• Review of relevant literature
• State the problem/purpose of your study
• Briefly and broadly describe your method
• State your hypothesis about how variables are
  related

18
Method

• A detailed description of how your research
  studies were conducted
• Typically divided into 3 subsections
• Participants/Subjects (if using animals)
• Apparatus or Materials
• Procedure

19
Results

• A summary of the data and the statistical
  analyses
• Reporting your stats
• Type of test used
• Degrees of freedom
• Outcome of the test
• Level of significance

Recap hypotheses or statement of the primary
outcome
Descriptive Statistics
Inferential Statistics
F(2, 63) 3.82, p lt .05
20
Discussion

• Provide your interpretation, evaluation, and
  discussion of the implications of your findings
• Restate your hypothesis
• Restate your major results
• Do they support your hypotheses?
• Do they support or refute past research?
• Identify any limitations
• End broadly

21
References

• Complete info about every item cited in your
  paper
• Listed alphabetically, then by year

22
Evaluating Research
Now its your turn to evaluate some research
claims
23
Testosterone Makes Better Dive Bombers

• A researcher recently argued that, because of our
  cultures emphasis on competition among boys and
  men, men should perform better than women under
  the pressure of competition. To test this
  hypothesis, he gave 20 women and 20 men the task
  of assembling a model airplane as quickly as
  possible. To create a competitive atmosphere, the
  researcher promised that the person who assembled
  his or her plane most quickly would win four
  tickets to the Super Bowl. As a group, the men
  assembled their planes in about half the time
  required by the women, and a statistical test
  showed that this difference was highly
  significant. The researcher concluded that men do
  indeed work better than women under competitive
  conditions. What are some problems with this
  study/conclusion? How would you correct them?

24
Working Your Fingers to the Deans List

• An ad in a student newspaper suggests that we
  should all take on as many part-time jobs as
  possible. The ad depicts an attractive young
  woman who claims, Last quarter, I earned 3,000
  and a 3.5. The ad implies that being employed by
  UPS can actually improve ones GPA. Think of it
  great pay, flexible hours, and maybe even
  better grades. Although UPS may run the tightest
  ship in the shipping business, it appears to run
  one of the loosest ships on the methodology
  business. What are some of the problems with its
  claim?

25
Can a Couple of Beers Really Go Straight to your
Belly?

• The results of a recent study of 12,000 people
  conducted by a group of researchers in North
  Carolina (reported in News of the Weird) showed
  that people who drink a lot of beer tend to put
  on a lot of weight in their bellies. In contrast,
  people who drink a lot of wine do not. Thus,
  there appears to be empirical support for the
  existence of beer bellies. Can you think of any
  factors that should be controlled before we
  conclude that beer bellies are truly a direct
  consequence of beer consumption?

26
Whats in a Name?

• In a classic experiment published in 1968,
  Goldberg devised a simple and elegant way to
  study gender discrimination. Goldberg simply
  asked people to evaluate an essay. However, he
  gave some people the impression that the essay
  had been written by a man but gave others the
  impression that the essay had been written by a
  woman. He did this by merely providing bogus,
  sex-typed author names on otherwise identical
  versions of the essay. For example, people
  learned that the essay was written by John or
  Joan, Stephen or Stella, or Paul or Pauline.
  Goldberg found that people evaluated the essay
  more favorably when they thought it had been
  written by a man. Following the publication of
  Goldbergs findings, the use of sex-typed names
  became a very popular way to study topics such as
  gender discrimination and stereotyping. Do you
  notice a confound?

27
Whats in a Name Results
28
Thursday

• Final in class
• My Office Hours on Wednesday
• 130-330