Thesis session 3: Your level 6 project

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.title[
# Thesis session 3: Your level 6 project
]
.author[
### Prof. Dr. Thomas Pollet, Northumbria University (<a href="mailto:thomas.pollet@northumbria.ac.uk" class="email">thomas.pollet@northumbria.ac.uk</a>)
]
.date[
### 2024-10-17 | <a href="http://tvpollet.github.io/disclaimer">disclaimer</a>
]

---

## Reflecting on last week's task: the rationale

- What challenges did you have when writing the rationale?
- Did you have any successes?
- What might you do differently next time?
- What skills have you learned?
- How might you apply them to your future career?

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## Peer support on rationale

- Please exchange your rationale with another person.

- Read their rationale and provide feedback.

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## Reflection on peer support

- Were there any common issues that you both noticed?

- What kinds of recommendations did your peer-supporter provide?

- What are you going to do with the feedback?

---

## Study Design

**Things to consider when choosing your design:**

- What design fits the hypothesis you want to test?

- Consider:
  - Type of study that's appropriate
  - Practicality (measurement, number of participants, analysis)
  - What type of analysis should I use to answer my research question?
  - What could be some potential problems?
  
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---

# Study Design (cont.)

- Spend 10 minutes discussing your design ideas with your partner

- Some of this will be easy - if you are doing a replication study: you will be doing something as close to the original!

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# Participants

- Who do you want to recruit?

- How many do you think you need?

- How will you recruit them?

- Do you have a backup plan if you run into issues?

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# Interventions

- Some studies involve an intervention
  - E.g. You do some surveys, you do an hour of mindfulness, you do the surveys again.
  
--

- Does your idea involve an intervention?
  - If so, what does it look like, how is it delivered, etc.?
  - Do you think this is feasible for your project in the timeframe?

---

# Survey measures

- Which one to pick?

- In your literature review, is there one scale that is used by everyone (many people)?

- Is it practical? (Length, language, applicability)

- Can you find it online?
    - How to find an actual copy of it?
    - Is it in any of the papers which mention it?
    - Is it in any of the appendices/supplementary information?
    - What about the original article it comes from?
    - Try the [OSF](https://osf.io)
    - Try the resources provided by your module tutor
    - Literally ‘having a google’ brings up a surprising amount of resources!

---

# Designing items

- We would only do this if there’s nothing close which is ‘good enough’.
- But, sometimes you just need to ask about one thing or there's no scale for what you're interested in
- Things to consider:
  - Is it easy to read/understand by my target audience
  - What type of response options should I use?
  - What type of data will this question give me
  - More importantly, can I analyse it?

---

# Other measures

- Some studies involve other measures
  - E.g. a reaction time task, a reading task, a driving simulator

- If you are using one of these, does it exist already?

- If it is new, what is it going to look like/how are you going to create it?

- What sort of data does this produce and how will you analyse it?

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# Procedure

- Have a clear idea what will happen in your study

- You need to know everything both the researcher and participant is required to do

- Set this out as a timeline with at least two columns: participant/researcher

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# Analysing your data

**Again, easier if you are doing a replication project!**

- Before you start doing anything have a good idea about what the data and analysis will look like

- Before collecting data you must know what to do with it
  - E.g. you know you need to run a regression and you know how to turn a spreadsheet of raw data into a readable output which you can report from

- Next page has a helpful flow chart to help identify an analysis

- This is a good general overview, but you need to know how your data will work in reality

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## (Grossly oversimplified) Statistical decision tree

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# Ethical considerations

- What ethical considerations do you have?

- We recommend avoiding high risk studies as the ethics process is longer and can hold you up

- We can talk through this and see how we reduce the ethical risk

- Some groups automatically are high risk (e.g. children) or people with specific diagnoses

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# It's your turn!

- Work with your partner to design your study, find measures, and decide which analysis to use.

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# For next time…

- Bring a clear design for your project

- We will use this to start the ethics form next week - but you can already start this!

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## References (and further reading.)

* Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2018). *Research methods in education* (8th ed.). Routledge
* Coolican, H. (2019). *Research methods and statistics in psychology* (7th ed.). Routledge.
* Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018). *Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches* (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.

[https://tvpollet.github.io/thesis_projects/](https://tvpollet.github.io/thesis_projects/)