About this Assignment
In this Advanced Social Psychology course, you have examined how interpersonal communication and social psychological principles affect real-life events, attitudes, and beliefs. Studying these effects correctly and thoroughly is essential for research psychologists working to better understand human behavior. In this assignment, you will work on your research skills by developing a 2,000-word proposal that satisfies one of the following prompts.
This assignment will emulate creating a real research proposal that would lead to full experiments on your topic. For this assignment, you will only be creating the proposal and will not conduct a full research study. The goal is for you to craft the proposal thinking realistically about doing actual social psychology research.
Prompts
What element of social psychology interests you the most? For this assignment, you will select a theory from an area of social psychology, such as obedience or emotion, and develop a research proposal for a new experiment. This study can either:
1) Broaden the application of the topic to a new area, such as analyzing how the principles of social conformity function in social media
OR
2) Test a new hypothesis from the theory, which may serve to narrow or expand upon the theory.
Regardless of which option you choose, your research proposal must contain the following:
- Abstract and introduction: discuss intent, context, rationale, and hypothesis of study
- Review of relevant literature: summarize related peer-reviewed studies that inform your experiment and explain their significance
- Method section: a thorough step-by-step plan for your study
- Plan for analysis: the data you will collect and how you will analyze it
- Expected results: explain your potential findings, including sample data in chart, table or graph form and analysis of the data
- Broad implications: describe how your results affect existing theories and beliefs about human behavior and suggest further research
- References list in APA format. Limit your review of relevant literature to papers that have been published in the last 20 years.
Please write your research proposal in APA format. You may refer to the course material for supporting evidence, but you must also use five sources and cite them using APA format. Please include at least three primary or secondary sources from a scholarly peer-reviewed journal.
