PSYC30013: Research Methods for Human Inquiry

Assignment (35%) and Multiple Choice Exam (65%)

This is one of the two compulsory third year psychology subjects. I know that a lot of people (me included) dread and despise the statistics-based part of psychology, but in the later years you really start to understand how necessary it is in research and is super important if you want to go on and do Honours/Masters. The content from this subject also helps a lot with the major assignment for Psychological Science: Research and Practice, in which you are actually required to apply the principles learnt in this subject. I personally found this subject very challenging (I am not a statsy kind of person at all), I put twice as much work into it as my other subjects and just scraped an H1...it didn't help that the content itself was mostly quite dry. Having said that, the lecturers all did a great job at making statistics somewhat interesting and engaging.

Paul Dudgeon takes most of the lectures for this course - Weeks 1 & 2 were focused on research designs and 'underlying principles' in psychological research. Week 3 focused on research questions for Associations (correlations, chi-squares, odds ratio). Weeks 4 & 5 were about research questions for Predictions (simple regression, multiple regression). Then Weeks 6-10 were all about Group Differences, so mostly ANOVA (Analysis of Variance). I found all the ANOVA stuff the most challenging by far, it was quite complex and there was a lot of terminology that sounded similar but described different concepts. Then in Week 11, the first hour was taken by Geoff Saw, who went over the last bit of ANOVA and gave a brief overview of the whole course (Geoff is a great lecturer, did an awesome job of tying all the content together). The last two weeks were spent on Psychological Assessment, which was quite different from the Research Methods component. This was mostly all about the different types of reliability and validity. I felt like this part of the course was a bit rushed, as it was covered in just 3 hours of lectures but a decent proportion of the exam was focused on it. Also, Stephen's lecture slides were a bit minimal, but the readings provided were really helpful.

The lab classes/tutorials had an 80% attendance hurdle. I found them really useful - it was basically computer work every week, going over how to perform all the analyses that had been covered in the lectures in SPSS. My tutor went through everything really slowly and clearly, and actually doing the analyses and writing them up made it much easier to understand what we were actually measuring than just passively listening in the lectures. Although we didn’t do the analyses for the assignment in class, the labs really helped with the assignment, as we basically just had to do what we did in the labs but with different data.

The assignment was pretty tough, it had two parts: in the first, some information was given on IVs and what was being measured, and then the task was to form research questions, perform some analyses in SPSS and write up a kind of extended response. Everyone was given a different set of data. The hardest part was forming the research questions, the instructions weren't the clearest so I wasn't sure if I was on the right track and most of the questions people asked on the discussion board couldn't be answered as we were expected to take initiative. The second part was easier, it was just short answer questions that were fairly straightforward. The exam consisted of 90 multiple-choice questions, 72 on research methods and 18 on psychological assessment. I found it quite challenging as there was so much content covered and a few of the questions were ambiguous. On the plus side, we were not required to memorise any formulas - a formula sheet was given so that made most of the calculations quite straightforward. But it was really really important to study well and properly understand all the concepts for the exam.
Overall, I gave this subject 4 out of 5 because even though I didn't really enjoy it, statistics is a necessary evil in psychology, and this subject helps build a great foundation for later study. It was also very well-taught - for each week, detailed lecture notes were provided in addition to the slides, as well as a very large amount of feedback questions/revision material (MCQs, short answer questions and problem sets for each lecture). There were also "Terminator Salvation Sessions", I didn't attend them but I think they were basically consultations to help people better understand the content, and there was an additional revision lecture during SWOTVAC (it was even recorded!) which helped a lot.

Yes, with screen capture.

Paul Dudgeon (Weeks 1-10), Geoff Saw (Week 11), Stephen Bowden (Weeks 11-12).

No, but some practise questions and weekly problem sets were provided.

4 out of 5

No prescribed textbook. They did recommend a standard first year stats textbook for additional readings (Statistics for the Behavioural Sciences by Frederick J. Gravetter), but the detail provided in the lecture material was more than sufficient.

1 x 2-hour lecture and 1 x 1-hour tutorial each week.

2016, Semester 1.

H1 (83)