Final Assignment

For your final assignment, you will conduct original research using “found” or secondary data on a topic that relates to justice and/or social policy. The purpose of this assignment is to apply what you’ve learned about the links between psychology and justice, as well as what you’ve learned about data science and working with secondary datasets.

You may complete this project alone or with one partner.

The final assignment has three components:

Project outline

The purpose of the project outline is so that I can make sure you are on the right track, before you fully dive into conducting your research. Your outline should be approximately one page long, and should contain the following:

  • Topic, background, and psychological mechanisms: Explain the topic you are interested in researching, and briefly mention any relevant background literature, including relevant psychological mechanisms.
  • Research question: Think about a research question that is both feasible and interesting. Feasible means that it is possible to investigate this question using secondary data and in the timeframe of this course. Interesting means that the question is somewhat novel and has links to psychological theory, public policy, and justice.
  • Hypothesis: What do you think you’re going to find?
  • Data plan: What type of data are you going to use to conduct this research? Where will you find it? How will you access it?
    • A non-exhaustive list of potential data sources can be found on Canvas under Files, in a PDF called DATA_SOURCES.pdf.
  • Analysis plan: How do you want to analyze your data? What relationships between variables are you looking for?
  • Conclusions: What are the potential policy implications of your findings? What might a policy based on your findings look like?

If you are working with a partner, you will submit one project outline, together.

AI use: You may NOT use AI to help you write the project outline.

Rubric

Component Points
Background 1
Research question 0.25
Hypothesis 0.25
Data plan 0.5
Analysis plan 0.5
Conclusions 0.5
Total 3

Policy presentation

The purpose of the policy presentation is to think about how you can translate the findings from a research study into real social policy, and how you can best communicate your findings to a non-scientific audience. Your presentation should be 10-12 minutes long and should include the following:

  • Background: What is the context in which you are conducting your study? This includes societal context (i.e. what is the societal problem that your research seeks to understand? Where does your data come from?) as well as psychological context (i.e. what psychological mechanisms motivate your project? What do we already know about this topic?)
  • Research question and hypothesis: What are you investigating, and what do you expect to find?
  • Methods: Break your study design down for us. What datasets are you using? Where does that data come from and how was it collected? What are your IVs and DVs? How are you operationalizing them in your data?
  • Results: What analyses did you conduct? What did you find? Be sure to show statistics and at least two graphs.
  • Conclusions: What do your results mean for psychological theory? What do your results mean for public policy? Propose a policy that is informed by your findings, and how it might be implemented.

If you are working with a partner, you will give one presentation, together.

AI use: You may NOT use AI to create your final presentation. You MAY use AI to help you write code to conduct analyses and build figures in R.

Rubric

Your final presentation will be graded holistically, out of eight points. Some examples of what presentations that receive different grades might look like:

Points Description
8 points You include all of the required elements in your presentation. Your presentation flows well and tells a clear and compelling story. Your question is firmly rooted in psychological theory, and you make the case that this is a pressing question to investigate. Your findings and graphs are clear. The findings are directly linked to policy implications, and your policy ideas are thought-out and creative.
5 points You are missing 1-2 of the required elements. Your presentation tells a story but is a bit disjointed at times. The psychological and societal context of your research question is unclear, and your findings are not adequately explained. You don’t have a policy proposal or it isn’t clearly linked to your findings.
2 points Your presentation is missing several key elements to help us understand the complete story of the problem you are investigating. Your analyses are conducted or presented incorrectly. You have very little discussion of real-world implications of your findings.

Research paper

The purpose of the research paper is to formally write up your findings, in the same way that a psychology researcher would (well, almost – see the Results explanation). This document is intended for an academic audience, and should contain all of the elements of a traditional research paper:

  • Introduction: Provide proper literature review and background to your question, including relevant psychological theories and mechanisms. Be sure to clearly state your research question and hypothesis (and, ideally, alternative hypotheses).
  • Methods: Clearly explain the data you are working with, the context in which it was collected, and how you acquired it. Even though you yourself did not collect the data, it’s important to provide as much detail as possible on where it’s from, and what it consists of. Make sure it’s clear how this data speaks to your research question. Describe your planned analyses.
  • Results: Your Results section will NOT resemble a typical Results section of an academic paper. Instead, you will submit a separate Results document, rendered from a Quarto file. This Quarto-based Results document should include all of your code: cleaning, output of descriptive and inferential statistics, and at least three figures. Just like your Lab Assignments, this document should include descriptions of what your code is doing (no need for SPARCK explanations!) and should be clean and organized.
  • Discussion: This is where you zoom back out and tell us what your results mean in the context of prior literature, and what the implications are for society and for public policy. Provide explanations for what you found, and link those findings to the real world. Note any limitations or future directions in your research, and go beyond simply remarking on the characteristics of the sample (homogenous, too small, etc.).

Some other general guidelines for the paper:

  • 8-12 pages, double spaced, standard fonts/margins. Page count does not include references or the Results Quarto file.
  • You must include at least 5 references to academic articles. These can be cited in the Introduction, where you’re setting up your question, or in the Discussion, to help you make sense of your findings. You should have in-text citations and a separate bibliography section in APA format.
  • If you are working with a partner, you will each submit your own paper.

AI use: You MAY use AI to help you write your code to conduct analyses and build figures. You may NOT use AI to help you write your code explanations in the Quarto document, and you may NOT use AI to write any other section of the paper.

Rubric

Your final papers will be graded holistically, out of 14 points. Some examples of what papers that receive different grades might look like:

Points Description
14 points Your paper reads like a real research paper. You have a compelling introduction that includes relevant background literature, a clear characterization of your dataset, accurately and clearly reported results and graphs, and a broad discussion that links your findings to larger theoretical ideas in psychology and has some implications or future directions for justice and/or public policy. You include citations in APA format.
10 points Your introduction includes background literature but it is not adequately connected to your research question. Aspects of your data are clear, but the context or where it comes from is missing. You don’t report all relevant results, or you explain them improperly. Your discussion is limited in scope, and does not adequately explain what your findings mean in light of previous research.
6 points You do not have an adequate number of citations and you don’t explain why they are relevant. There is not a clear story or arc to your paper. You don’t provide information on your dataset and their contents. You report results improperly and don’t have three separate graphs. Your discussion is unclear or not compelling, and you do not speak about the implications of your findings.

Examples of final papers can be found in the Final_Examples folder on Canvas. Please note that these papers were completed for a prior version of the course that had slightly different Final requirements, including no Results Quarto file.