PSYC 353 Final Paper Instructions

The purpose of your final paper is to apply what you have learned in this class about research in personality to design your own, new personality scale. Be creative, and think of a potential personality trait that interests you. The trait (e.g., “tendency to procrastinate”) must be narrower than the Big 5 variables (e.g., conscientiousness). Do a literature search (using PsycINFO) to ascertain whether a measure of your proposed trait already exists. If you do not find an already published measure of your proposed trait, then start designing your scale to measure that trait. If you do find an already published measure, keep thinking! You may be able to tweak your initial idea to come up with something novel. Using the guidelines from class, design your own personality scale to measure your variable of interest. Here are some examples from previous student projects:

• tendency to eavesdrop
• tendency to procrastinate
• gullibility
• loyalty

Part of your mark will come from creativity, so please do not select any of these traits for your own paper.

Once you have decided on your proposed trait, write 10-15 of your own, new items to create a personality scale to measure your proposed trait.

IMPORTANT: Write original items. The purpose of this paper is to apply what you have learned about designing personality scales. The purpose is not to lift items from published scales and pass them off as your own. In other words, DO NOT PLAGIARIZE your items.

You will then need to find two published measures that you would use to assess the validity of your measure. Find one measure to assess convergent validity and one measure to assess discriminant validity.

Please submit your paper via the assignment portal in Moodle. Do NOT email me your paper. Please upload your paper as a Word document in case I want to insert feedback within your paper.

Your paper should be in APA format. You will find some basic information about APA-style papers on the Psychology Department web site. (Click on “APA Format for Research Proposals.” For more details, you may wish to consult the 6^th Edition of the APA Manual.) *Please note that there are some guidelines in the web site document that are not relevant to this paper assignment. (For example, you do not need to include an abstract for this paper.) Please include only the pieces described below for this paper. Your paper should consist of these pieces:

1. Title page:

Your first page will be a title page in APA style.  

• Introduction:

(Remember that you will not include an abstract, as you will have no results to present.) The second page of your paper will begin your introduction. For this paper, your introduction should be two to five pages.

• You should think of the Introduction as the top half of an hourglass: start broadly and end specifically with your hypotheses.
• For this paper, your hypotheses should focus on reliability and validity. Think of your proposed study as a scale development study. If you were to run your study, you would assess the reliability and validity of your measure. *Be careful not to intermix reliability and validity in your hypotheses.
• Your introduction should tell the reader “what we know” about your topic, “what we don’t know,” and “why do we need your study (scale)?”
• Make sure that your literature review (the main part of your introduction) is not simply a list; integrate the work that you cite and make clear how the previous research provides a basis for your research question and gives grounds for your hypotheses. In other words, focus on the research and not the researchers.
• Your introduction should have a logical flow with clear transitions between ideas.  

**Notes on verb tense:

• In your literature review, describe research findings in past tense (e.g., “Experiments manipulating self-esteem found that…”)
• In your literature review, describe implications of previous research in present tense (e.g., “Thus far, the research on self-esteem suggests that…”)
• Toward the end of your introduction, present your hypotheses in FUTURE or PRESENT (not past) tense, as you will NOT actually conduct your study. Be careful to state your hypothesis as a prediction (e.g., “I predict that the proposed scale will…”), rather than as fact (e.g., “The proposed scale is…”)

• Method:

The method section has several purposes. Consult the APA manual for information on how to write a good method section. Reading method sections from other studies should also give you an idea of the level of detail necessary for this section. Be specific! 

• One of the most important purposes of a Method is to describe what you would do so that other readers could replicate your study. Thus, your Method should be rather detailed, but you do not need to go overboard in providing details (e.g., stating how many pens would be provided for participants, stating what time(s) of day you would collect your data).
• You must include your original scale as an appendix. Be sure to refer the reader to the appendix in the text where appropriate (e.g., “See Appendix for the Procrastination Scale.”)
• Be sure not to include irrelevant information (e.g., proposed results, speculation about hypotheses) in your Method section.  

Subsections of Method:

• Participants: See the APA manual for details. As always, seeing what other researchers have done may be helpful.
  • State the approximate number of participants you plan to recruit (e.g., “I plan to recruit approximately 100 male and female participants ranging in age from 18 to 25.”) DO NOT PRETEND THAT YOU HAVE RUN YOUR STUDY by making up specific numbers.
  • Specify the population from which you would draw your sample (e.g., community members from Antigonish, Introductory Psychology students).
  • Specify how you would recruit your sample (e.g., newspaper advertisements, introductory psychology courses).
  • Provide demographic information of your proposed sample (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity if relevant).
• Materials and Procedure: The purpose of this subsection is to let the reader know exactly what you would do in your study. Describe how you would run your study, and describe the measures that you would use. You will need to refer reader to the Appendix for your original scale, and you will need to describe (but not include copies of) your two published measures to assess validity. See “Proposed Validity Assessment” below for details.

**Note on verb tense:

• Please write your method section in FUTURE tense (e.g., “Participants will complete three measures…”). Remember, unlike a typical APA-style research report, your paper will describe a study that has not been conducted.

Proposed Validity Assessment

After you have designed your scale, think about how you would assess its validity. (You will not actually assess validity; instead, you should imagine that you have established your new scale’s reliability and propose how you would use published measures to assess your new scale’s validity.) Look in your lecture notes and the Funder text for more information about convergent and discriminant validity. Remember, assessing convergent validity begins with thinking about a variable that your new scale should correlate with, positively or negatively. Assessing discriminant validity begins with thinking about a variable that your new scale should not significantly correlate with.

In one or two paragraphs, describe two published measures that you would use to assess the validity of your scale. Be sure to describe not only the published scales themselves but also your rationale for selecting them. Here is an example:

After establishing the internal consistency of the Tendency to Overreact Scale, I would use the brief version of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; Ames, Rose, & Anderson, 2005) to assess its convergent validity. The NPI comprises 16 forced-choice items, each of which has one narcissistic (e.g., “I like to be the center of attention”) and one non-narcissistic (e.g., “I prefer to blend in with the crowd”) response. High scores on the NPI indicate a high level of narcissism. As people who are narcissistic tend to respond particularly negatively to even mild social rejection (e.g., Twenge & Campbell, 2003), they may also respond similarly strongly to everyday minor annoyances. Thus, narcissism should correlate positively with the tendency to overreact.

To assess the discriminant validity of the Tendency to Overreact Scale, I would use the Physical Aggression Subscale of The Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992). The Aggression Questionnaire consists of four subscales assessing four types of aggression: physical aggression (e.g., “I have become so mad that I have broken things”), verbal aggression (e.g., “I often find myself disagreeing with people”), anger (e.g., “I have trouble controlling my temper”, and hostility (e.g., “I am sometimes eaten up with jealousy”). High scores on each subscale indicate a high level of aggression. Although some people who tend to overreact to minor annoyances may become aggressive, others may not. Therefore, the tendency to overreact should not significantly correlate with physical aggression.

Some notes on finding published measures: 

• Note that the measures that you select to assess validity must be published in a scholarly outlet—typically, a peer-reviewed journal article in psychology. In other words, please do not use outlets such as non-academic web sites or magazines for your scales. These sources are unlikely to have validated measures.
  • To find published scales, one resource is the book Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Attitudes, which is on reserve at the library.
  • An additional resource is a web site developed at Columbia University: https://sjdm.org/dmidi/. Although designed for Judgment and Decision-Making (JDM) research, the site contains many measures that may be of interest to personality researchers. Another academic web site, Personality Pedagogy, has a full page called Tests, Measures, and Scales that you may also find helpful: https://www.personalitypedagogy.net/?page_id=312

Several measures also appear on this site, developed at York University:

http://www.yorku.ca/rokada/psyctest/ . Finally, this site also contains links to many measures: http://www.webpages.ttu.edu/areifman/qic.htm

• Another way to find published scales is to search PsycINFO for the relevant variables (e.g., conscientiousness, laziness) and find the earliest study(ies) that measured the variables. Typically, a scale used for the first time in a published study will appear in the original journal article as an appendix.
  • If you are unable to locate a scale that you have seen cited, a final way to look for the scale is to visit the author’s academic web site. Psychologists sometimes have copies of their scales for public use on their own web sites. (For example, Dr. Geraldine Downey has posted her Rejection Sensitivity measures on her lab’s web site: https://socialrelationslab.psychology.columbia.edu/content/measures.)

• References:

Your paper must include a References section in APA format. Your References page must refer to at least seven original empirical journal articles that you cite in your paper. When I check to see whether you have met or exceeded this minimum, I will not count book chapters, review papers, etc.

Some notes on sources:

• Cite EVERY source. In other words, include citations not just in your Introduction but anywhere that you draw from material that is not your own. For example, when describing the published measures that you would use to assess validity, include a proper citation for each published scale and include these sources in your References section.
• Make sure that your citations and References match. In other words, every citation that appears in the text of your paper must be listed on your References page, and every source on your References page must be something that you refer to in the text of your paper.
• Minimize the use of web sites as sources. Your Reference list should consist primarily of scholarly publications (i.e., journal articles, book chapters). 
• Whenever possible, cite original sources. For example, if you want to incorporate information from a study by Smith that you read about in an article by Jones, do not cite the Jones article. Instead, find the original Smith article, read it, and cite it. Reading and citing original sources will ensure that you are describing original work properly, rather than relying on someone else’s interpretation of it.
• Avoid excessive use of direct quotations. Demonstrate your understanding by putting others’ work in your own words.

• Appendix:

The Appendix will contain your new scale (not the published scales that you select). Because you will have only one appendix, you will label it merely “Appendix,” rather than Appendix 1 or Appendix A. Be sure that your Appendix clearly demonstrates what your scale would look like to participants. For example, include any instructions for participants underneath the Appendix label, and make sure that the response options for each item are clear.

Formatting basics:

• typed

• double-spaced throughout (with no additional, unnecessary spacing)
• 12-point font
• 1-inch margins
• each page numbered
• Times New Roman font
• appropriate citations in APA style:
  • bad: Smith (1980) found that social skills increase with age. Jones (2000) also found that children’s social skills increase from middle school through high school.

• *better: Research suggests that social skills increase with age (Jones, 2000; Smith, 1980)
• *Note how the second example integrates previous research, rather than simply listing studies. In other words, the focus of the second example is on the research rather than the researchers. Note also the format of the citation: (Author(s), year). See the Manual for details on citations.

A brief version of the key points of the style of the American Psychological Association (APA) appears in a document on the Department’s website. The complete details of this style appear in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2010, 6^th ed.); multiple copies are available in the Reference Department of the University’s library.

Plagiarism and Cheating

You are responsible for understanding that plagiarism and cheating are serious violations of St. FX’s Policy on Academic Integrity. For this paper, avoiding plagiarism means citing and paraphrasing appropriately. Paraphrasing does not mean simply changing around a word or two. For this paper, avoiding cheating means writing your own paper. In other words, do not share your paper—or even parts of your paper—with a classmate. Please refer to your syllabus and the Academic Calendar for more specific information on plagiarism and cheating. You may also find this web site helpful:

http://www2.mystfx.ca/registrars-office/academic-integrity

If you have questions about plagiarism or cheating, please consult the Student Success Centre staff, a university librarian, or me.

Grading Criteria for Final Paper (Psychology of Personality: PSYC 353)

100 points possible

Creativity of scale topic

Adequacy of literature review

Presentation of hypothesis

Presentation of Method

Appropriateness of new scale items

x 2 = 20 points possible                                                                        

Rationale for suggested convergent validity measure

Rationale for suggested discriminant validity measure

Writing Quality

Adherence to APA Style