• To develop expertise in the design, administration, analysis, and synthesis of research methods with applications across a variety of social and community issues.

• To be able to read the literature intelligently.

• To understand the critical issues in data interpretation for life as well as for class.

This course is a required course for the M.A. program in Social and Community Psychology. For students from other graduate programs, it is your responsibility to ensure that this course meets whatever requirements you need to fill in research methodology within your own degree or certificate program. Advanced undergraduates (seniors) may enroll with prior permission of this instructor and a 3.5 GPA.

Students come to this course with a wide variety of backgrounds in research methods and statistics. Some have very little. Some have taken extensive coursework and may have participated in research programs.

For those of you who would like additional information, it is available in the library as well as in the graduate student lounge. For those of you who feel totally lost and a little panic stricken, there are a number of possibilities. I will be happy to refer you to additional sources. There is a statistical videotape series in the O’Leary Media Center. We will be organizing a cooperative list of student names and phone numbers. Watch for a course web site to facilitate communication and provide additional resources.

By the time you are have finished this course, you should be able to:

Identify the basic survey and observational methods available to study social and community issues, as well as the strengths and limitations of each

Formulate a research question and operationalize it to testable hypotheses or specific exploratory questions using methods that are reliable and valid

Identify the ethical considerations involved in conducting research with human participants and complete a proposal to the Institutional Review Board

Construct a reliable survey questionnaire

Apply the basic principles of sampling and estimation

Identify appropriate uses for qualitative and quantitative types of data and the strengths and limitations of each

Identify appropriate ways to summarize and compare both qualitative and quantitative types of data

Summarize a set of data with the appropriate descriptive statistics, and construct appropriate corresponding graphs and tables

Identify the appropriate comparative statistical tests for specific data and questions, including between and within comparisons, comparisons of means, and correlations, and compute and interpret those statistics

Use SPSS—or another statistical program of your choice—to perform descriptive and comparative statistics

Distinguish between significance and effect size; explain how significance is a function of the size of the effect and the size of the study; and apply that understanding to statistical power charts to determine sample sizes for study protocols.

Identify the basic components of good grant writing

Integrate these points in a comprehensive proposal for a research project that is feasible, theoretically sound, and applicable to substantive problems in social-community psychology

The class will be organized around components of the research proposal. Outside assignments will be given out over the course of the semester to be due every other week; they should be completed to the best of your ability and handed in on time.

Please keep all your materials in a 1" 3-ring notebook that you can turn in for grading on the due date and that I can return to you the following week in class (earlier via your UML Department of Psychology mailbox when possible). This notebook system will permit me to see your progress over the course of the semester.

There are three texts that have been ordered for class:

Bernard, H.R. (2000). Social Research Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Leavitt, F. (2000).  Evaluating Scientific Research.  Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Prentice Hall.

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.). (2000). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

There is one additional recommended text that has been ordered bundled with the student version of SPSS.  If you are facile at using SPSS and have sufficient access to the program using University facilities, you need not purchase this text.  It is a useful reference though for a powerful statistical and organizational tool.

George & Mallery (2000).  SPSS for Windows (11.0). Boston:  Allyn and Bacon. 

Written assignments must be prepared in APA style as detailed in the publication manual of the APA. This is not optional. Although you do not have to buy this book specifically for this course, you must have access to it in order to write your final research paper.

The final research proposal will be a 15 page paper (12-18) written completely in APA style—for organization as well as citation. You will include a solid but concise review of the literature based primarily on sources in refereed journals relevant to your research question. 

• You will pose a research question and a hypothesis. 
• You will present your own original analysis of preliminary data from existing sources using appropriate descriptive and/or analytic statistics to inform your research question. 
• You will define the relevant population and the sample you will recruit into your study. 
• You will operationalize your terms and identify the procedures and tools you will use, including the psychometric properties of any surveys or questionnaires you choose. 
• You will describe your plans for analyzing the data and write a discussion section that puts the possible results in a context, reminding the reader what they will tell us and why they are important.

How will you be evaluated?

Grades will be based on class participation and assignments (30%), tests (30%) and on the final written research proposal and classroom presentation, including completion of work leading up to this paper (40%). This composition is approximate. Late work will be penalized. I do not plan to give grades of Incomplete.