Psy 250 Group Research Presentation Requirements

Summary

You will have about 10 minutes of class time for your presentation. During this time you will explain to the class

  1. What it is you were studying and why

  2. Your predictions

  3. How you examined your variables of interest

  4. Tell us who your subjects were and how you assigned them to condition and/or what data sampling technique you used

  5. What were your results (frequency information for nominal variables or central tendency and variability presented in terms of graphs or tables)

  6. What conclusions you reached about the relationship between your variables of interest

  7. Anything that might have threatened the internal/external validity of the study.

Grading

Everybody in your group will receive the same score for the presentation based on the following criteria:

What follows is a summary of the type of information I expect you to include in your presentation. You only have ten minutes, so you might find it necessary to only present the essentials or to present your information in the most concise manner possible while still being coherent.

For each section I have provided some text as an example of the way you might choose to address each of the components. I just created this on-the-fly so do not adhere to it too closely. It's just supposed to serve as an example/model so you have a starting point for creating your presentation.

10 points - Quality of the presentation

Can we tell from the presentation what you did and why you did it?

Are the visuals clean, easy to see (even from the back of the room) and easy to interpret?

Does it look as if the group has practiced the presentation at least once?

5 points - Introduction

What are you examining with your study and why?

"We are looking to see what stereotypes get activated depending on the spelling used in Twitter/IM communications. This is important because, if it is true, it suggests people have formed stereotypes based on communication style (e.g., using a lot of abbreviations in status updates "chk da eml for da party deets" compared to spelling things out "check the email for the party details")
There is some evidence suggesting that such stereotypes exist. For example.....
There is also some evidence that these stereotypes affect people's perception of the personalities of the individual sending the message. For example...."

Your predictions

"Based on the previous research, we predict that potentially negative characteristics such as low intelligence or SES will be associated with greater use of abbreviations and code in twitter updates.

15 points - Method

How did you examine the relationship between variables?

"We created a series of Twitter updates for two mythical individuals. The content for each of the updates consisted of updates regarding a concert the individual was attending and comments about a shopping trip. The updates created for each individual were identical except that the updates for one used a lot of abbreviations and code whereas the second was completely spelled out.
You can see on this slide/poster the content we used for each individual (abbreviated, written out)"

How did you measure the DV?

"Previous research on social stereotypes suggests that people believe there is a relationship between the manner in which a person communicates and their intelligence and SES. Therefore, along with the status updates we created for each individual, we attached a rating sheet. On the rating sheet, we had participants rate the mythical person creating the updates on 10 dimensions (income level, age, intelligence, sociability,.....). We were only interested in people's responses on the first three variables but included the others to mask the true purpose of the study. We used a segmented graphic scale and had our participants place a check on the point they felt best described the picture (friendly___:___:___:___:___:___unfriendly).
Here is an example of the rating sheet we used."

Who were your subjects and how did you assign them to condition?

"Each of us in the group gave the status updates of one of the mythical people to be rated to five of our friends and the other mythical person's updates to another 5 friends. This gave us a total of 35 ratings for each mythical person. Participants ranged in age from 20 to 25 with a mean age of 22. With one exception, they were all psychology majors at Oakland University.
We ran this as a between subject design. Every participant rated one of the two mythical people based on their status updates. To control for individual differences, we used a random number table to decide which type of update we would give our research participants"

10 points - Results

"As you can see in this table, we found out that the highest mean ratings for SES and intelligence were given to updates that were spelled correctly and the lowest ratings were given to the abbreviated/coded updates. The standard deviations for these two variables were...."
"Surprisingly, we found that the means for age were about equivalent for both levels of status updates. However, as you can see from the graph, the standard deviation is much larger for this variable than for the other ones......."

10 points - Conclusions

Confirmation of predictions

"Our results confirm our predictions that negative personality traits such as low intelligence and SES will be associated with communication style. Negative social traits such as .... are associated with people who write status updates in an abbreviated/coded fashion whereas positive traits such as ... are associated with using correct spelling in status updates. This relationship didn't seem to hold as predicted for the variable of age. With age there appeared to be different social stereotypes associated with the form of updates.... This suggests to us......"

Potential problems

"The only potential problem with this study is that we only ran Oakland Psychology majors who were about 22 years old. This might threaten the external validity of our study because the results might not generate to a wider range of individuals. Perhaps older people would be less likely to rate people on the basis of their update style because they don't have the same degree of experience using social media and have not formed particular stereotypes of people based on the form their status updates take."

Electronic version of Presentation

Because it is difficult to grade a presentation as it is being given, I would like you to give me a copy of the presentation and presentation script (preferably an electronic version) for grading purposes. Whatever it is you choose to give me, I need to be able to use it to evaluate you on each of the previously listed components. If you are not using PowerPoint, be sure you provide me with the graphs, pictures, and whatever else you showed the audience (please - do not hand in a poster).

Creativity

Because I want to encourage creative thinking in the classroom and in your research endeavors, you can earn extra points for the creativity of your research. This creativity could be in terms of your research question, the manner in which you tested your hypothesis, how you obtained your sample, the stimuli/instruments used or even how ambitious your project was. These extra points should mitigate any drops in the score you receive because you tried do do something different or out of your comfort zone.

Group ratings

Your individual group score can be modified on the basis of ratings given to you by your fellow group members. You will be given a rating sheet with each group member’s name and you will rate them in terms of their contribution to the presentation and to the project as a whole. This is done so that individual's scores more accurately reflect the effort they put into the project. If the other group members indicate that you contributed little or nothing at all to the presentation/project, the group component of your score will be lower than members that contributed more. Conversely, if the other group members indicate that you expended a great deal more effort than the rest of the group, the group component of your score will be higher than members that contributed less.

These rating sheets are confidential and will be turned in with your write-up of the presentation.

Creative Commons License
This work by Cynthia Sifonis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.