The research report you submit will be based on an “in-class” research study that explores the relationship between “personality traits” and “happiness”.
Previous research has suggested that measures of happiness are correlated with some personality traits (Chamorro-Premuzic, Bennett, E. & Furnham, 2007). However, it may be that some personality traits are related to happiness more than others. For this assignment, you have the opportunity to explore these relationships further. Specifically, you will need to select two of the “big-five” personality domains and provide a correlational hypothesis at the end of your Introduction section that describes how the two personalities you choose might relate to “happiness”. Your hypothesis will need to be based on evidence from recent research (publications within the past 10 years). You may include the Chamorro-Premuzic reference as evidence to support your hypothesis but you should aim to provide an additional 4 (or more) recent research references in the Introduction section to provide a strong rational for your hypothesis.
The participants for your study will be your fellow classmates on the module and data for your report will be collected using Quatrics. The measure of personality traits will be made using the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) and the measure of happiness will be made using the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ) as outlined in the following references:
Gosling, S. D., Rentfrow, P. J., & Swann, W. B. (2003). A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(6), 504–528. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(03)00046-1
Hills, P., & Argyle, M. (2002). The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire: A compact scale for the measurement of psychological well-being. Personality and Individual Differences, 33(7), 1073–1082. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(01)00213-6
After reporting all the information needed in the Methods section, you will need to provide information in the Results section. For this you will need to report any steps you took from getting the raw data collected to the data ready for analysis (i.e., scoring, dealing with missing data, etc.), your descriptive statistics and checks for parametric assumptions. To visualise the relationship between your variables, you will need to provide two separate “scatter plot” figures representing the two personality traits and the measure of happiness along with appropriate figure captions.
In the Discussion section provide a brief description of your findings. Because this assignment does not ask you to do an actual statistical analysis (we have not taught you to do that yet), you do not need to note if your hypothesis was supported or not. However, you will need to discuss how your findings may or may not be consistent with previous research results and if there were any methodological issues that may limit the interpretation of your findings. You may re-use references included in the Introduction section, but you can also include additional research references to strengthen the points you make. Importantly you will need to provide a clear conclusion based on what you have reported and any questions or applications to be explored next.
(Remove this text…The title of the study goes here)
Introduction
(As a guide this section might be around 350+ words)
Methods
(As a guide this section might be between 300+ words)
Participants: Add text here…
Design: Add text here…
Materials: Add text here…
Procedure: Add text here…
Results
(As a guide this section might be around 250+ words)
Discussion
(As a guide this section might be between 350+ words)
References
(formatted and presented in the APA style)
