Designing Psychological Research

Paper Summary:

This paper demonstrates a beginning knowledge of psychological research methodology. The author designs a correlational study to identify any relationship that may exist between sports participation and academic achievement, be it positive or negative. The author also designs an experiment in which one variable is manipulated in order to try and determine a direct cause/effect link between the two variables and tests the same hypothesis: When activity in sports is increased, the academic achievement scores will gradually decrease.

From the Paper:

"After the experiment is completed and information is totaled, there are questions of validity and ethics to be addressed. Concerning the internal validity of the experiment, many things can affect the GPA of students including personal problems and family traumas. Unfortunately, in order for the experiment to have the highest possible hypothetical internal validity, experimenters would need to control every aspect of a subject's life in order to get a completely accurate description of causality between the two variables. Ethically and practically this cannot be done, since it is impossible to control a boyfriend's mood or a parent's health, so experimenters can only make certain that all participants are exposed to the same amount of school. These already full-time students would be required to attend every class unless sick or injured. Practices would not be scheduled during class time so this would not affect the independent variable in any way. If students were not required to attend their classes all of the time, this could skew the results because of a few "students" who weren't really students at all, and just enrolled in school, but who still had their lower GPA introduced into the results. In addition, participants during this semester would not be allowed to participate in sports over the time allowed for their particular group. For example, if a ninth grader was placed in the group that participated in 1-3 hrs. on average per week but practiced more hours in addition to the required practices, this would cause the results to be skewed for the 9th-10th grade group."

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