Research/Methods Section - Essay Example

Forty participants had Spanish as their first language, 1 participant had Italian as the first language and another 1 participant had French as the first language. In order to test for conformity, students in the research methods class at FIU gathered information based on the amount of time participants took to complete the task. After hearing some initial information about what the study entailed (filling out a survey), participants who consented to be in the study were handed a “Book Survey”.

They received one of three versions of this survey: hard, easy, or moderate. All surveys contained 12 slots and asked participants to provide their name, their age, and the amount of time spent to complete the task (“How long did the participant take to complete the task?”). Researchers approached participants at FIU and had them complete the surveys. The independent variable, therefore, was whether or not participants were in the hard, easy or moderate condition while the dependent variable was participant responses regarding the amount of time taken to complete the tasks.

Finally, we asked them whether they actually knew how much time they spent to complete the task. Our main hypothesis was that participants would spend less time to complete the tasks if they fall under easy condition and more time if they were in hard condition. We ran a one-way ANOVA with test condition as the independent variable and the amount of time participants took to complete the task as the dependent variable. There was a main effect for condition, F(2, 141) = 7.071, p=0.001 < .05. A significant Tukey post hoc test showed that participants took more time to complete the tasks in the hard condition (M = 183.

38, SD=257.555) and moderate conditions (M = 149.23, SD = 168.678) than in the easy condition (M = 50.94, SD = 39.976), but there was no