Research Methods & Analysis in Psychology - Essay Example

Researchers compared two groups of 15 children on the time taken, in weeks, to learn how to ride a bicycle. The first group of children were shown a video of children cycling and then expected to learn without adult assistance. The second group were taken out by their parents who ran beside them and let go of the bicycle for increasingly longer periods until the child had learned. The researchers hypothesised that the second method would produce faster learning. Prior to analysis the data were screened to ensure that they met the requirements for a parametric test.

As the data met the requirements, an independent samples t-test was used to compare the mean reading scores obtained for children taught by formal and self-paced methods. The study revealed that there is significant difference in the time taken to learn cycling between the children who watched video and those who followed what their parents did at 5% significance level. Researchers were interested in the relationship between the proportion of smokers in a country in 1930 and the number of deaths (in males) per million from lung cancer in 1950.

The researchers predict a positive relationship between the two variables. The raw data can be found in the table below. We used the correlation measure to test for the relationship between the mean yearly cigarette consumption and the male death rate in any of the countries. Since there were only two sets of variables, bivariate test was conducted. A qualitative researcher is interested in capturing group discussions between men aged between 18-20 about ‘lad mags’ such as Loaded and Nuts.

The researcher is particularly interested in how these magazines represent masculinity. d. Give an example of a semi structured question that the researcher might ask