Research Question: How does regular physical activity (independent variable) affect levels of self-reported mental well-being (dependent variable) among college students?
Here is what to submit as a double-spaced (12-point font also for headers) Word or pdf document. You will need time for this assignment and work on it over the two weeks you are given. This cannot be done in one day or a few hours. You need to find a minimum of FIVE peer-reviewed RESEARCH STUDIES that are relevant to the two variables you examine in your study. You will find appropriate articles on Google Scholar and the Cerritos Library websiteLinks to an external site. (go to A-Z databases by subject – Psychology – and use the recommended databases).
1. Title page with the title of your study (brief and descriptive containing the two variables examined, i.e.: The Relationship between X and Y for surveys or The Effects of X on Y for experiments). NO QUESTIONS AS TITLES, please. NO VAGUE titles, please. Use APA formattingLinks to an external site. for APA student papers.
The Introduction section will consist of the following parts, in chronological order:
2. Introductory paragraph: Lead with an important statistic (and cite your source) that is relevant to your paper. Use reliable sources like the CDCLinks to an external site. or the NAMILinks to an external site., for example. to introduce your topic and its importance. Avoid generic sentences without citing sources like ‘social media has become an integral part of our lives over the past years, rather: Recent research has a found a relationship between the frequency of social media use and mental health problems like anxiety and depression. American teens use social media an average of x hours a day (cite source APA style here) and anxiety and depression rates among this population has increased by x% over the past decade (cite source here). Then state what your study examines, i.e. This (survey/experimental) study set out to examine a relationship between the social media health news consumption and feelings of anxiety among teenagers in the greater Los Angeles area in order to inform education strategies around the use of social media in this population.
3. Literature Review: Find and summarize (possibly synthesize) a minimum of FIVE peer-reviewed research articles published with the last 7 years. You need to provide a lot of detail and you need to have access to the original research article not just and abstract. At a minimum, you need to report WHAT the study examined (variables), WHO the participants were (how many total, average age, gender and ethnicity breakdown), HOW the main variable(s) were measured and WHAT the findings/results were. You should use primary research articles where authors collected data. One peer-reviewed review article that reviews other articles on that topic is ok to use also.
You need to CITE your sources in-text according to APA-styleLinks to an external site.. Note that ONLY the authors last names and publication year is cited in-text (no first names, no initials, NO ARTICLE TITLES, no university affiliations, no journal names, nothing BUT last names and year according to APA rules). The FULL References will go into the References pageLinks to an external site. (named References and NOT Works Cited or anything else. Again, you need to use APA style throughout the report.
4. Your two hypotheses. Hypotheses are your research statements, and they are (typically) predictions of outcomes. Note that the first hypothesis makes a prediction on the relationship (or effect) of the two main variables, i.e: We hypothesize that teenagers who consume mental health information from social media platforms will show higher levels of anxiety than teenagers who consume mental health news from medical news platforms or teenagers who consume no mental health news. Your second hypothesis needs to be distinctly different (NOT the reverse of your first hypothesis) and may make a prediction on a gender difference, an age difference, or anything else that may be relevant in regard to one of the main variables of your study, i.e: We also predict that male teens will show higher overall levels of anxiety as compared to female and non-binary teens.