Your project design assignment should be written in the style of an empirical short report/brief report. The final assignment should be a minimum of 950 words and a maximum of 1000 words, excluding the title page, abstract, and reference page. Your assignment should be typed in a Microsoft Word format (either .doc or .docx), and you should use Times New Roman font, a font size of 12, and the text should be double-spaced. The margins should be set at 1 inch, and there should be no additional spacing between paragraphs. Per APA style requirements, your final assignment should include a running head and page numbers. Your final assignment should not contain spelling, grammar, or punctuation errors and must consist of complete sentences. Please proofread your final assignment carefully.
- Title Page: The title page should include the title of the assignment, your name, and your affiliation (i.e., University of Houston-Clear Lake). You should format your title page using the APA specifications for an empirical paper, not the student title page. The title page will not be included in your overall word limit for the assignment.
- Abstract: The abstract is a brief description of the study. Your abstract should include a brief summary of results from empirical articles related to your topic, your primary research hypothesis/hypotheses for your proposed study, the general methods you propose to use, the main results you expect, and the primary potential conclusion from the proposed project. The abstract should be a maximum of 150 words and will not be included in your overall word limit for the assignment.
- Introduction: Offer a brief description of your topic and general research question(s). You must use empirical articles to provide context for your topic and research question(s), as well as to provide a foundation for your specific hypothesis/hypotheses. You should consider what other scholars have said about your topic, whether there is historic or current background information about your topic that is important to consider, whether there are debates in the literature around your topic, and what has not yet been addressed in the literature related to your topic. At the end of the section, you should introduce the hypothesis/hypotheses for your project. For the assignment, you need to have at least one specific hypothesis you plan to examine. Because this class is focused on nonexperimental research methods and statistics, your hypothesis must be appropriate for a nonexperimental study. This section should consist of approximately 3-4 short paragraphs and follow the “funnel” structure for the introduction in an empirical paper.
- Method: In this section, you should describe the type of nonexperimental study you are proposing and your rationale for using that method. For example, if you are proposing a survey, why are you choosing a survey instead of an observational study? You should also describe who your participants would be. This should include who your population of interest is and how you would sample from this population. You should also provide specific operational definitions of your primary independent/predictor variable, dependent/outcome variable, and any covariates you plan to include in your study. For your operational definitions, you should include your rationale for your choices and the measures you would use to collect data for your variables. You should also provide a brief explanation of the procedures that would be used for data collection. What steps would participants complete when participating in your study? It can be helpful to think about the perspective of a participant when writing your explanation of the procedures. Please note, you should only include nonexperimental methods we have discussed in this class. This section should consist of short paragraphs describing the sample, procedures, and measures/materials, and each measure/material should be described in short paragraphs within this section of the method.
- Analytic Plan: Because you will not be collecting data, you will not have results to report. Instead, you will need to describe the statistical techniques you propose using to both describe your sample and to test your hypothesis/hypotheses. This means you will need to address descriptive statistics, both those you plan to use to describe your sample and those needed to provide appropriate measures of frequency or central tendency and variability for the variables in your hypothesis/hypotheses, and inferential statistics, specifically the appropriate statistics to test your hypothesis/hypotheses. You should only include descriptive and inferential statistics we have discussed in this class for the analytic plan. If you propose a qualitative study, you should still include the statistics you would use to describe your sample and any quantitative variables included in the study, as well as how you would identify themes in your qualitative data. It is usually best to have separate paragraphs for the descriptive statistics and inferential statistics or identification of themes for qualitative data.
- Discussion: Because you are not collecting data, you will not have results to interpret. Instead, you should discuss the implications of your research. If your results supported your hypothesis/hypotheses, how would this further our understanding of human behavior? If your results did not support your hypothesis/hypotheses, explain what that could mean. Make sure to use existing empirical studies in your interpretation of your potential results and discussion of the implications of your results. The discussion section should also acknowledge the limitations of your proposed study. No single research study is perfect, as there are always things we can do better or cannot fully address in one study. What are the possible limitations for your proposed study? What would you modify from your proposed study? No single research study can answer all questions, so you should also briefly explain how you could follow-up your proposed study. What would your next hypothesis and study be if your proposed study supported your hypothesis? This section should consist of approximately 4-5 short paragraphs and follow the structure for the discussion in an empirical paper.
- Reference Page: All sources cited in the assignment should be listed in the reference page. This includes academic sources included in the introduction and discussion as well as measures or procedures written/designed by others that you cite in the method section. The reference page should comply with APA style and will not be included in your overall word limit for the assignment. Short reports/brief reports usually have a maximum of 20-30 references, and you should have at least 7 references for the assignment.