Explain when and where consent was obtained, when and where the participant engaged with each stage of the task and when and where each dependent variable was recorded, for both experiments.

Research methods

The details and structure of your research reports:
Both reports must contain all of the following sections and sub–headings:

Title
Your title should reflect what the experiment is investigating. More specifically, it should give an indication of what your independent variable was and what your dependent variable was in as few words as possible. For example: “The effects of sugar intake on self–reported happiness”.

Introduction
In this section, you should very briefly introduce the topic area and explain why it is an important area to conduct research into. You should then go on to discuss the methods and findings of 3 existing research studies from the same topic area. You should ideally consider your concepts of interest in the context of a relevant psychological theory. Next, you should explain how your own study builds upon (generates new knowledge or replicates) the previous studies that you discussed earlier. Finally, you should state the aim and hypothesis of your study. Your aim should be a general summary of what you are trying to discover. Conversely, your hypothesis should be a precise prediction of the effect that you expect your independent variable would have on your dependent variable, if you were to actually run the
study.(10 marks per report, 20 marks in total)

Methods
In this section, you should include contain enough information to allow someone reading your report to conduct a full and accurate replication of your experiment. You should also introduce the most important ethical and validity issues that are relevant to your true experiment/quasi–experiment. This section should be written in the past tense (as though you have already completed the studies). Use the following subsections within your methods section:

1) Design
Start by stating the type of experimental design used (e.g. repeated measures, independent groups or matched pairs) and very briefly explain why that design was the most appropriate one for your study. Next, state what your independent variable was and what the levels (conditions) of the independent variable were. Then, state what your dependent variable was and how it was operationalised. You should also outline the control and random variables that have been considered in your study. For your true experiment, you must use an experimental design, so that you can determine
cause and effect. Therefore, you must use an independent groups design with random allocation, a matched–pairs design with random allocation or a repeated measures design. For your quasi–experiment, participants will be assigned to groups, based on criteria that is not random.

2) Participants
This section should cover how many participants you collected data from, what the range, mean and standard deviation of their ages were, what the gender distribution of the sample was and what population you sampled from (you can make these up, as you do not have to collect any data for this assignment). You should also outline your sampling technique (e.g. opportunity sampling), You should also include your inclusion and exclusion criteria for participation in the study.

3) Materials
In this section, you will need to use full paragraphs (not lists!) to provide detailed descriptions of the make, model and setup variables of each material, for each experiment. If you are using questionnaires or similar materials, then you will need to explain how many questions were asked, which specific ones were used, on what topics and (ideally) to provide an example question. If you are using a computer task, then what stimuli were included in the task and how many trials did the participant have to complete?

4) Procedure
In this section, you should outline the timings of each experiment. Therefore, you should explain when and where consent was obtained, when and where the participant engaged with each stage of the task and when and where each dependent variable was recorded, for both experiments. You should also explain when and where the debriefing was conducted. If you used deception in your studies, then state how the deception was maintained during each
stage of the study and when the true intentions of the study were revealed to the participants.
(20 marks per report, 40 marks in total)