The Psychology of Women

PSYCHOLOGY OF WOMEN RESEARCH PROJECT HANDOUT Psychology of Women Dr. Margaret W. Matlin Psychology 308 Department of Psychology Spring, 2007 SUNY Geneseo Psychology of Women Research Project The purpose of this project is to introduce you to research about the Psychology of Women. You are not expected to conduct the ideal, perfectly controlled experiment. Instead, I hope that this exercise will provide you with a first-hand experience of the kinds of issues that researchers need to consider and the variety of challenges that research often presents. The projects generally fall into four categories: 1. Archival analyses, or quantified inspections of magazines, books, and other aspects of media, etc. A typical project here would be whether males and females are represented differently in the illustrations in elementary-school mathematics textbooks. 2. Questionnaires about interests, activities, and beliefs. A typical project would be whether students think that a wife should perform a greater portion of the household tasks than a husband performs. 3. Naturalistic observation, or recording of behavior in a natural setting. A typical project would be to determine whether girls and boys differ in their aggressive behavior at a public playground. 4. Experiments, with the controlled manipulation of variables. A typical project would be the study about aggression, described in the preview on p. 2. In all cases, you must test at least three hypotheses. Each hypothesis typically compares two numbers (e.g., “This sample of mathematics textbooks will show more males than females in the illustrations.”). Instructor’s Manual with Test Bank for Margaret W. Matlin’s Psychology of Women, 7e (2012) 9 of 381 Preparing the Preview of Your Paper As specified in the course syllabus, you must turn in your paper preview in advance. This precaution is designed to assure that your topic is appropriate from the standpoint of both research design and ethics. I want to make certain that you have chosen a topic that can inspire a good paper! It’s fine to change topics, but you must provide me with a written copy of your new proposal before you begin the project. Again, this precaution is essential because I’ll need to make certain that your new proposal is methodologically and ethically appropriate. For this reason, I will not accept your actual paper unless I have approved your preview. (If you turn in a paper—for which I did not approve the preview—you will receive a score of 0 out of 55 on your paper.) Your paper preview must describe at least two of your three hypotheses, and it should provide a clear description of how you will test these hypotheses. If your preview is not satisfactory, you will lose points, and you will get a late start in conducting your research. I will distribute more information about the preview in several weeks. This handout will also describe the information you need to include in your preview. Here is an example of a good preview. Preview: Do People Judge an Aggressive Woman Differently from an Aggressive Man? The goal of my project will be to determine whether people judge an aggressive act differently, depending on the gender of the aggressive person. I will be constructing four separate vignettes, each describing an individual who is being aggressive. Here is a sample vignette, describing a male being aggressive: Joe is a 20-year-old college student. He has been having trouble with his car, so he took it in to the repair shop this morning. They promised that they would have his car ready by 3:00 this afternoon. When Joe returns to the shop at 3:00, he is told that it will not be ready until 4:00. At the top of his lungs, he screams, “You’ve got to be kidding! You promised me it would be ready by now! You can bet I’ll never come back here again!” How appropriate do you think Joe’s response was? (circle a number) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 not at all appropriate very appropriate I plan to test 40 Geneseo students, and I’ll gather my sample (a convenience sample) on two different days from people passing through the College Union. I’ll have four groups of 10 students each: 1. 10 males, each judging four vignettes about males; 2. 10 females, each judging four vignettes about males; 3. 10 males, each judging four vignettes about females (i. e, the same vignette as above, but using a female’s name); 4. 10 females, judging vignettes about females. So far, I have two hypotheses: 1. People will give higher ratings to males than to females; that is, they will judge an aggressive male’s actions to be more appropriate than an aggressive female’s actions. 2. Male participants will be more likely than female participants to show this kind of biased judgment. Instructor’s Manual with Test Bank for Margaret W. Matlin’s Psychology of Women, 7e (2012) 10 of 381 Ethical Considerations In class, we will consider ethical issues involved in studying human behavior. Three especially important issues are potential harm, anonymity, and informed consent. One of the most important concerns is that we must not psychologically harm the individuals we study. For that reason, certain topics will be considered “out of bounds” for this project. These topics are sexuality (e.g., sexual behavior, sexual orientation, abortion, unwanted pregnancy), violence (e.g., rape, battering, sexual harassment, child abuse), and drug issues (e.g., personal experience with alcohol and other drugs). If you turn in a preview that focuses on any of these topics, I will automatically reject the preview. However, you can conduct archival analyses on these topics because no people would be tested. We must also protect the anonymity of all participants. “Anonymity” means that the experimenter cannot identify which person provided which data. Thus, the participant’s name must not appear anywhere on any questionnaire or data sheet. Furthermore, data on individual people should be kept confidential and should not be supplied to anyone. It is important that we respect individuals’ rights to privacy. We must not harm humans in the process of learning more about them. If you conduct an actual experiment that does not include a written response sheet, you must obtain informed consent from each participant. Ethical guidelines specify that each participant must sign a sheet saying that they are participating without coercion and that they will experience no harm. We cannot require informed consent for naturalistic observation studies (by their very nature). Therefore, we will poll the class to determine whether any questionable naturalistic-observation study does indeed seem harmful. (Informed consent is not relevant for archival analyses. Informed consent is also not relevant for questionnaires; the SUNY Geneseo ethics review board says that a person automatically gives informed consent when she or he fills out a questionnaire.)