Monash University Handbook 2010 Postgraduate - Unit

Synopsis

This unit will equip students with the necessary skills to undertake research. Nonetheless, the primary motivation for this course concerns future employment. Research design and analysis are critical components of both academic and professional psychology.

Objectives

This unit equips students with the necessary skills they need to design research and analyse data for their thesis, placements, and employment. After completing this unit successfully, students should be able to undertake a comprehensive program evaluation as well as a single subject design, and complete their thesis, confidently, competently, and independently.

Specifically, students should be able to:

• Understand and design the main phases of the key research approaches, including program evaluations, single subject designs, experiments, quasi-experiments, and qualitative projects;
• Accommodate the considerations and complications of these approaches, such as sampling biases, spurious variables, common method variance, suppressors, non-recursive relationships, confounds, consequential validity, asymmetric transfer, mediators, moderators, stakeholder needs, economic evaluation, family wise errors, power, autocorrelation, and nonlinear dynamics;
• Apply multivariate statistics techniques to address some of these complications, such as ANCOVA, discriminant function analysis, logistic regression analysis, multiple regression analysis, canonical correlation, and factor analysis;
• Recognize the fundamental principles of more advanced concepts, which can then be explored through additional reading, including HLM, grounded theory, survival analyses, meta-analyses, catastrophe theory, signal detection theory, ARIMA, interim designs, Bayesian theory, and structural equation modelling;
• Develop creative and insightful methods to maximise the utility of research; and
• Justify and report the procedures and techniques that were utilised.

Assessment

The assessment will comprise two components: a journal (60%) and a multiple-choice examination (40%).

Statistics journal
During weeks 2 to 9, students will work in groups to apply statistical technique to some hypothetical data. The technique will be implemented to resolve a specific methodological issue. They should then maintain a journal, approximately one page each week, that:

+ Specifies the variables that were analysed as well as the methodological issue this technique was intended to redress;
+ Reports the results, in the style of a scientific journal; and
+ Discusses the conclusions and limitations of this procedure.

Multiple choice examination
Students will complete one multiple-choice examination. This examination will comprise 50 questions. A mock examination will be provided several weeks earlier to facilitate students. None of the questions will demand knowledge of the topics that are designated as advanced.

Chief examiner(s)

Dr Simon Moss