Description 1) Create a personality/individual difference measure consisting of 10-20 Likert-type i ...
Description 1) Create a personality/individual difference measure consisting of 10-20 Likert-type items. The content of the measure is up to your group, within the following constraints: (a) Your measure must fall in the domain of social/personality psychology, liberally conceived; and (b) The items may not ask about sensitive behaviors (e.g., sex, drug use, illegal behavior) or constitute a significant invasion of privacy. Your group must clear the topic of your scale with me prior to collecting any data (topic due 1/31). Obviously, this is to be a measure your group created yourselves; do not use existing measures or items. 2) In addition to creating your measure, find an existing scale that measures your construct of interest (or, if you have trouble, find one that measures a construct that should be related to your topic -- e.g., anger is typically related to aggression). 3) Complete the CITI Human Subjects Ethics Training found at: https://about.citiprogram.org/en/homepage/ Links to an external site. . Save and print the completion certificate. 4) Administer both your measure and the existing measure to 20 subjects. Try to get roughly equal numbers of males and females in your sample, and have your subjects identify their gender on the questionnaire. 5) Perform a reliability analysis using SPSS. You should report and discuss the following in your analysis: Means and standard deviations for each item of your created scale; item-total correlations for each item; and the internal consistency reliability coefficient (alpha). On the basis of these results, delete your worst item(s) from your scale. Explain in your write-up why you chose to delete them (in other words, what makes them bad items). Recompute the internal consistency reliability. Did it change? In what way? Explain why or why not. 6) Using the final version of your scale, create a dependent variable that consists of the mean of the (retained) items in your scale. Make sure you explain how you did that in your paper. Then, compute the mean across items for the existing measure that you used. Compute a correlation coefficient testing the relationship between the two measures. Are they significantly related? Explain what might account for whatever results you got. In addition, compute the means, standard deviations, and a t-test testing the difference between men and women on your newly created measure. 7) Write an APA-style description of your work. Your write-up should include the following: Title page Abstract, in APA style, not to exceed 120 words Brief introduction (2-3 paragraphs) to the issue you created your scale to measure. Your introduction should contain references to at least two social psychological / personality articles on the topic. Detailed method section, following APA style. Start off with a (very short) Participants section–how many subjects participated? What was the breakdown by gender? Then, have a Measures section. Describe how you actually developed your scale. What kind of response formats did you use? Why? Did you balance the wording of your items? Why or why not? What kinds of issues did you take into account in the wording of your items? How is your scale scored? etc. Include a table showing the items of your questionnaire. Finish with a (short) Procedure section, where you describe what you actually did. Where and how were participants recruited? How many people refused to participate? Did you have to throw out anybody’s data? Why? Detailed results section. Describe the analyses that you conducted. Present in a table the statistics you were asked to compute in part (5) above. Present the results and interpret what they mean. Describe all the steps you took (e.g., deleting items) and explain why you did what you did. Describe explicitly how you created the final scale score that you used to test your correlation and to compare groups (i.e., gender). Present the r and t-tests that you conducted. Brief discussion section (2 paragraphs). What did you learn about your construct/attitude? Is your scale a good scale? Why or why not? Do males and females differ in their responses? If any differences emerged, what do you think accounts for them?
