DPSY5103 - Research methods in professional psychology - 2017

0 points, SCA Band 1, 0.000 EFTSL

Postgraduate - Unit

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Faculty

Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences

Organisational Unit

School of Psychological Sciences

Coordinator(s)

Dr Katrina Simpson

Unit guides

Offered

Clayton

  • First semester 2017 (Day)

Notes

HDR 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.

Outcomes

  1. 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

Research Workbook (1500 words) (15%)

Research Proposal (4000 words) (45%)

Exam (40%)

Chief examiner(s)

This unit applies to the following area(s) of study

Co-requisites

Must be enrolled in Doctor of Psychology in Clinical Psychology or Doctor of Psychology in Clinical Neuropsychology