First Major Group
Project
The objective of this first “major” group project is to give you experience in seeing a research project through, from the beginning to the end. Specifically, you will be asked to design a research study, collect and analyze the data, and write a brief report that summarizes the research. Although you may design, collect, and analyze data with other group members, you will need to turn in an independent written report on the research.
I’ve listed a few ideas for manageable research projects below. However, these ideas are not listed here to constrain you; if you have a creative idea that you would like to pursue, please discuss it with me or your TA.
The paper will be due on Friday, April 21st. (I will leave it between you and your TA to decide whether the paper should be turned in via his or her mail box, via e-mail, etc.) The paper should be typed and double spaced. Although there are no firm guidelines for paper length, a typical paper will probably be about 10 pages long. I doubt that one could do a decent job in less than 5 pages, and anything that is much longer than 12 pages runs the risk of being wordy for the sake of wordiness. You should strive to report your project in a manner that is brief, coherent, and to-the-point.
The paper should be written in a manner that is informed by APA style, although we will not grade on the basis of this per se. To see a good example of a paper that is formatted according to APA style, please see the following web site: http://www.thewritesource.com/APA/APARESEARCH.HTM. You should model the format and organization of your own paper after that example paper.
Please use the following structure:
1. Title Page. 1 page, by itself. The title page should contain the title of your report, your name, and a listing of the names of other group members for our reference.
2. Abstract. 1 page, by itself. This page should contain an abstract or one-paragraph summary of the research. To see some good examples of abstracts, check out the following web page: http://www.psych.utah.edu/pspb/.
3. Introduction. Length: about 2 to 3 pages. The Introduction section of your paper should explain the basic research question, provide a short summary of what is known about the question already, a brief outline of the way in which your research contributes to that knowledge, and an overview of the research project you’re reporting.
4. Method. 1 to 3 pages. This section should summarize the procedures and materials used in the research. It should also summarize the nature of your sample. If you’re working with human participants, for example, please note how many of those people were male vs. female, their ages, etc.
5. Results. 1 to 3 pages. This section should summarize your data analyses. Report things like means, standard deviations, correlations, tables, and figures, as appropriate.
6. Discussion. 1 to 3 pages. This section should summarize your major findings and discuss the implication of your findings for the broader questions that motivated your research.
7. References. 1 page. Please include a reference for any articles or books you cited. To see a good overview of what a reference page looks like and how to format references in APA style, check out http://www.vanguard.edu/faculty/ddegelman/index.cfm?doc_id=796.
1. Inferring personality traits
Jessica has agreed to go on a blind date. She knows nothing about Ben except his name. Naturally, she wonders what he is like and she begins to browse the Internet for information. After entering his name into a search engine, she soon finds Ben's personal website; here she discovers that Ben has read all of Steinbeck's novels, minored in Eastern philosophy in college, pays homage to his heroes Ralph Nader and Malcolm X, and keeps meticulous records of his stamp collection. An impression begins to form of Ben in Jessica's mind as a quiet, intellectual, organized, politically liberal neat freak. But how accurate is Jessica's impression of Ben? Would other visitors to Ben's website form the same impression? How does Jessica's impression differ from the impression she would get from another source of information, such as actually meeting Ben or visiting his office?
These kinds of questions—questions about the accuracy of personality judgments—have been debated for decades in personality research. In one particularly creative study on these issues, Simine Vazire and Sam Gosling studied the accuracy of personality impressions based on people’s personal web sites (Vazire & Gosling, 2004). Specifically, they had research assistants make judgments about the personalities of the authors of various web sites and compared those impressions with self-reports of personality from the authors of those web sites as well as friends of the authors.
Your goal would be to replicate and extend the work of Vazire and Gosling. Although Vazire and Gosling (2004) studied the accuracy of personality impressions based on web sites, there are a variety of ways in which personality traits may leave a “behavioral residue.” For example, Gosling et al. (2002) studied the accuracy of personality impressions based on offices and students’ dorm rooms. They noted that certain traits, such as openness to experience, could be coded with fairly high accuracy and that judgments of openness could be traced to certain cues, such as varied (vs. homogenous) CDs and books.
To get some back ground on the research in this area, please read the following article:
Vazire, S. & Gosling, S. D.
(2004). e-perceptions: Personality impressions based on personal
websites. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 123-132.
You can download a PDF version of the article here:
http://www.yourpersonality.net/psych350/Vazire2004.pdf
Your project:
1. Identify an observable context (i.e., web pages, dorm rooms, Face Book, photo albums, journal entries on livejournal.com, dress and appearance) in which people may leave traces of their personalities and identities. For the sake of discussing the remaining points, let’s assume that context involves people’s personal web pages.
2. Study 50 people’s web pages. Have all members of the group who do not already know that person rate the person’s personality with respect to the Big Five personality traits and any other dimensions that might be of interest to you (e.g., self-esteem, political attitudes, religiosity).
3. Obtain self-reports from each of the 50 people regarding their own personality traits.
4. The big question you want to address is the amount of agreement between people’s self-rated personality traits and observer’s ratings of their personalities based on their web pages.
2. Personality
Development
In the early
1960’s, filmmaker Michael Apted interviewed 14
British 7-year-olds about their dreams, fears, and aspirations. The documentary
that resulted, 7 Up, was a critically acclaimed
film about the lives of a diverse group of children who would ultimately become
The 7 Up series is remarkable to watch because it allows the viewer to observe the unfolding of lives—from childhood to middle age—over the span of a few short hours. When watching this series, one cannot help but be struck by the degree of continuity that characterizes some of the children. The child interested in astronomy grows up to become a tenured professor of physics, and the timid, introspective child spends decades trying to discover his place in society. In contrast, other children exhibit marked discontinuities, coming across as arrogant and rebellious at age 21, for example, and humble and conventional 7 years later. The diversity of developmental trajectories captured by the series prompts the viewer to ask, “How stable are personality traits from infancy to adulthood?”
Indeed, it is precisely this kind of question that lies at the heart of much research in personality psychology. Psychologists have spent decades debating the extent to which personality traits are malleable, how easily they change, and how easily it is to predicts a child’s personality in adulthood from nothing more than knowledge of what he or she was like at age 1. In this project I would like for you address some of these issues by watching the videos from the 7 Up series and rating the personalities of the film subjects at different points in their lives.
To get some back ground on the research in this area, please read the following article:
Roberts, B. W., Caspi, A, & Moffitt, T. (2001). The kids are alright: Growth and stability in personality development from adolescence to adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 670-683.
You can download a PDF version of the article here.
http://www.yourpersonality.net/psych350/Roberts2001.pdf
Your project:
1. Each person in the group should be responsible for watching the clips of the film subjects at a specific age and only at that age. There are 6 ages studied in the series to date: age 7, age 14, age 21, age 28, age 35, and age 42. Thus, if there are fewer than 6 people in your group, coordinate with another group to ensure that you’re covering the age spectrum well. (The TA’s will be happy to assist in this manner.)
2. Once each person has been assigned an age period to code, he or she should watch the documentary and rate the personality of each of the 12-15 film subjects based on the information relative to that particular age period. The documentary itself contains clips from various age periods, partly for the purposes of allowing the viewer to compare and contrast the children as they grow up. Only focus on your age period—fast-forward though parts that are not relevant to the age period to which you have been assigned.
3. Make personality ratings with respect to the Big Five personality traits and any other dimensions that might be of interest to you (e.g., self-esteem, political attitudes, religiosity). If you focus on other dimensions, make sure each person in the group is coding those dimensions too.
4. Use test-retest correlations to study the stability of personality traits across age. Are some traits more stable than others? Across which age periods is stability the strongest (e.g., age 7 to age 14, age 7 to age 28, age 35 to age 42)?
3. The Undesired Self
Personality theorists have given a great
deal of attention to the relation between the real self and the ideal self. It is generally held that discrepancies between the way people
see themselves (i.e., their real selves) and the way they feel they ought to be or the way they wish they were (two forms of the ideal
self) have profound implications for people’s emotional experiences. In 1987 Dan Ogilvie
published an interesting paper in which he argued that the discrepancy between
the real self and the undesired self may play a more powerful role in emotional experience.
Specifically, he argued that the undesired self acts as a reference point for
making judgments of present-day life satisfaction.
To get some back ground on the research in this area, please read the following article:
Ogilvie, D. M. (1987). The undesired self: A neglected variable in
personality research. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 52, 379-385.
You can download a PDF version of the article here.
http://www.yourpersonality.net/psych350/Ogilvie1987.pdf
Your project:
1. For simplicity, your version of this
research will differ from that used by Ogilvie
(1987). Develop a questionnaire that
contains 4 sections. The first section
should instruct people to rate their personalities with respect to the Big Five
traits. The second section should
instruct them to rate their “undesired self”—the way they would not like to
be—with respect to those traits. The third section should instruct people to
rate the way other people think they should be.
The fourth section should contain a measure of life satisfaction, such
as the five-item measure that we have used in the past.
2. Obtain a sample of 50 people. These can be classmates, roommates, friends,
family members, etc. Administer your
questionnaire to these people.
3. You will need to create composite
scores for each of the five personality traits in each domain (i.e., real,
undesired, and ought). For each person
and each trait, compute the difference between people’s (a) real selves and their
undesired selves and their (b) real selves and their ought
selves. See how these differences
correlate with life-satisfaction.