Psy 210 Conference Poster on Sex Differences in Car Accidents 10 Marks

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1 Psy 210 Conference Poster on Sex Differences in Car Accidents 10 Marks Overview The purpose of this assignment is to compare the number of car accidents that men and women have. The goal is to determine if one sex has more accidents than the other, on average. You will use an independent samples t-test to compare the number of accidents. You will present your results in a poster that includes a summary of previous research on this topic. You will submit your entire assignment (including the electronic version of the poster) through WebCampus. The assignments contain the following sections: Part 1: Literature Review and Writing the Introduction section Part 2: Research Purpose Part 3: Statistical Analysis Part 4: Writing the Method section Part 5: Writing the Results section Part 6: Writing the Discussion section Part 7: Formatting your Poster This assignment is a lot of work. You should get started with the literature review immediately. Background The results of psychological research studies are shared with other researchers in three different ways. First, research is published in articles and books and can then be accessed on the Internet and in the library. Second, researchers in the same area as each other often know each other and may talk about their research in personal conversations or correspondence. Third, research results are shared at conferences. Annual conferences are sponsored by many different psychological associations. For example, there are conferences from national bodies, such as the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, regional and state bodies, such as the Western Psychological Association, the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, and the Nevada State Psychological Association, and associations devoted to particular topic areas (cognition, memory, developmental, social, emotion, reading research, etc.). In any one year, there are a large number of psychological conferences throughout the country. There are four types of conference presentations. First, there are one-speaker talks, usually from famous and wellspoken presenters. These talks are often the highlight of a conference and are held in large auditoriums. Most, but not all, conferences will include some one-speaker talks. Second, there are symposiums. Symposiums are panel discussions of some specific topic in psychology. Each presenter has approximately 20 minutes to discuss some aspect of the topic. Symposiums are presented in large rooms with many audience members. Not all conferences have symposiums, and if there are symposiums, there probably won t be a lot of them. Third, there are paper presentations. Each presenter has about 10 minutes to discuss their topic and another 5 minutes to answer questions. Four or five presentations will be held in a single session, grouped loosely together by topic area. Presentations are made to moderately large groups of people. Most conferences include some paper presentations. Finally, there are posters. Posters consist of several pieces of information that describe the research. These pieces are organized and printed on a large poster so that people can read the poster as they walk by. The presenter stands next to the poster during a 2 hour poster session, and many different people walk by, one at a time, and discuss the research with the presenter. A poster session will often include posters that are being presented all at once. Many conferences include multiple poster sessions so that hundreds of posters are presented during the conference. Posters represent the best way to actually meet with and talk with other people about research, and the vast majority of conference presentations are done in poster format. In most cases, only organization members are allowed to present their research at a conference. However, most psychological organizations allow new members to join quite easily: all you need is the signature from a current member. The purpose of this assignment is to have students prepare a mock conference poster. A poster has four sections: Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion. This is a lot of work, so this assignment is worth a lot of marks. I think that you will find it a valuable experience, however, if you choose to do it. Because the purpose of this assignment is to give students experience in preparing a complete conference poster, incomplete assignments will NOT be marked (i.e., you cannot just do the statistical analyses and plan to get partial marks for that). 1

2 Part 1: Literature Review and Writing the Introduction section The first part of your poster is the literature review and introduction. 1. Locate at least four sources that discuss car accidents. Try to find at least one source that talks about sex differences in car accidents. To locate sources, you could use either the UNLV Library website or Google Scholar. Save pdf versions of each source and them to all team members. You will submit them with your final project. 2. Read your sources. Write one or two paragraphs, summarizing what you learned about car accidents. Be sure to use your own words. If you use someone else s exact words and do not put it in quotation marks, this is plagiarism. If you use someone else s exact words and you do put it in quotes, this is not plagiarism; however, the purpose of the introduction is to summarize what you found in your own words, and so you will not receive any credit for quoting other people. This section should be no less than 200 words and no more than 500 words. 3. Save your document. I recommend the file name Psy 210 Assignment 11 document.docx Part 2: Research Purpose 1. State that the purpose of your research is to examine sex differences in car accidents. This is the last sentence of your introduction. Be sure to use your own words, though; you need to rephrase my words or else you are plagiarizing. Part 3: Statistical Analysis Open the Data File 1. Go to Dr. Barchard's website and open the Recoded Research Data. Preparing the Dataset SPSS is doing something strange. When you download the Recoded Research Data from Dr. Barchard s website, SPSS changes the format of one of the variables. We don t know why it does this. However, it is easy to fix. 1. Click on Variable View. 2. The first variable in the data set is sex. The width of this variable should be 6. If it is not 6, change it to Save the data file somewhere handy, such as your X folder, so that you won t have to do this step again if you reopen the data set later. Selecting Participants The purpose of this project is to compare the number of car accidents that men and women have. There is one participant who did not tell us their sex. They need to be eliminated from the database. There are several ways to do this. We will use Select Cases because it leaves a record in the syntax file. a. Tell SPSS that you want to select the cases if (Sex = 'Male') or (Sex = 'Female') Type this exactly as shown. b. On the Select Cases dialog box, in the Output section, select the option to delete unselected cases. c. Paste your syntax. Then run it. Be sure to paste your syntax commands for all your SPSS work. d. To check that you successfully eliminated that one subject, scroll through your data. There should be only 499 cases. If you typed your selection command wrong, you might have deleted all your cases. If so, open the data file again and try again. Descriptive Statistics In order to describe the people who completed this study, you will need to calculate descriptive statistics. The results of these analyses will be used to write the part of your Method section that describes your Participants. 1. Calculate the number of men and the number of women. Check that your Valid n is 499. If not, you are using the wrong data set or you have not done your selection properly. 2. Calculate the mean, standard deviation, minimum and maximum age of the participants. Note: One participant did not report their age, Thus, when you are looking at the results for age, your Valid n will be 498. That s okay. 3. Add Titles to your syntax and output files, including your names, the course number and assignment name, and the date. 4. Add headings in your syntax file, explaining what your syntax commands are doing. Be sure to put a * at the beginning of every comment line in your syntax file and a period at the end of each comment line. 5. Save your syntax and output files as Psy 210 Assignment 11 Syntax.sps and Psy 210 Assignment 11 Output.spv, respectively.

3 3 Sex Differences in Car Accidents The results of the following analyses will be used to answer your research questions and will be presented in the Results section of your poster. 1. Calculate the mean and standard deviation for the number of car accidents for men only. 2. Calculate the mean and standard deviation for the number of car accidents for women only. 3. Compare the number of car accidents for men and women by (a) conducting an Independent Sample t-test and (b) calculating a 95% confidence interval for the difference of the means. 4. Calculate the percentage of men who have been in a car accident. Use Analyze, Descriptives, Frequencies to get the number of men who have had each possible number of accidents, and then count the number of men who have had one or more accidents. Finally, divide by the total number of men to get the percentage of men who have been in a car accident. Then insert a comment into your syntax file (right after the syntax commands requesting the frequencies table for men) showing your calculation of the percentage of men who have been in a car accident. 5. Calculate the percentage of women who have been in a car accident. Insert a comment into your syntax file (right after the syntax commands requesting the frequency table) showing your calculation of the percentage of women who have been in a car accident. Graph In order to illustrate your results, you will draw a graph of your results that compares the car accidents men and women have. To do this: 1. Open a new SPSS data file. Use File, New, Data. 2. Go to Variable View. Name the three variables you will use in this data file. They are: Sex, Accidents, Percentage. 3. For the variable Sex, change the Type to String. (Type is right next to Name, on the Variable View Screen). 4. For each sex, enter the percentage of people who had each possible number of accidents (you calculated these in SPSS above). You will end up with 16 cases, where each case tells you the percentage of people of that sex who had that many accidents. For example, the first case might be male, 0 accidents, 10 percent. Your data will end up looking something like this (but with the correct percentages that you calculated above): Sex Accidents Percent male 0 10 male 1 25 male 2 30 male 3 5 male 4 10 male 5 10 male 6 5 male 7 5 female 0 20 female 1 10 female 2 20 female 3 15 female 4 20 female 5 5 female 6 5 female 7 5 Note: In your output, you may find that some numbers of accidents seem to be skipped in the table. If a number is not reported for a specific number of accidents, that means that 0 participants reported that number of accidents. 5. We are now ready to draw a clustered bar graph of this data. Use Graph, Legacy Dialogues, Bar, Clustered, Summaries for Groups of Cases, Define. For Bars Represent, choose Other Statistic (e.g., mean), and select the variable on the left called Percentage; click on the right arrow to move this variable into the box for Other Statistic. For Category Axis, use Accidents. For Define Clusters By, use Sex. Click the titles button near the top (right above options) and add an appropriate title to the graph. Paste and run your syntax. 6. Edit your graph to make it clear. If necessary, fix the labels for the X- and Y-axes, fix the numbers on the X- and Y-axes, fix the labels for the legend, and make sure it has a good title. Be sure to include Figure 1 in the title. 7. Save your syntax and output files again.

4 Part 4: Writing the Method section The second part of your poster is the Method section. The Method section has three subsections. 1. Participants: Write a SHORT paragraph to describe your participants using the Descriptive statistics you calculated in Part Procedures: Write a SHORT paragraph to describe how the data was collected in this study. To describe the procedures, paraphrase the following information: Data were collected during a single 15 minute testing session. Participants completed the measures on the computer in a computer lab at UNLV. They were unsupervised. Participants received course credit in return for their participation. 3. Measures: Write a SHORT paragraph to give the precise wording of the question about car accidents. The wording is given in SPSS under the label for the variable. Part 5: Writing the Results section 1. Write one or two sentences (no more!) to describe your findings regarding the car accidents for men (mean, standard deviation, and percentage). When writing up your results, a. Remember to write a sentence that can be understood by anyone (including people who have never taken a statistics course) b. Put the mean and standard deviation in parentheses. Use the abbreviation M for mean and SD for standard deviation. For example, Cats often have more than 4 kittens (M = 4.08, SD = 1.38). 2. Write one or two sentences (no more!) to describe your findings regarding the car accidents for women (mean, standard deviation, and percentage). 3. Write one sentence comparing the number of car accidents for men and women, based upon the Independent Sample t-test. Put your results in parentheses. 4. Write one sentence explaining the results of the 95% confidence interval for the difference of the means. 5. Make sure you have rounded your numbers appropriately. 6. Include a reference to Figure 1 somewhere in this paragraph. Part 6: Writing the Discussion section 1. Write a short paragraph (no more than 100 words!) summarizing your findings and stating your overall conclusions about the research. Your summary should not include any of the numbers given in your results section; instead, it should include your interpretation of those numbers. Part 7: Formatting your Poster 1. Copy the content of your Word document into PowerPoint and format it as a poster. Here are the minimum requirements for the poster: The poster must be given on ONE slide in PowerPoint. The PowerPoint slide must be at least 36 x 24 inches. The font must be at least 24 point, so that it can be read from five feet away. The poster must include a title, which gives the name of your poster and the names of all authors. Note, the authors are the Psy 210 students who worked on this poster. The poster must include ALL of the text from your Word document, including the section titles (Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion). The poster must include your figure. 2. If you are not sure how to create a PowerPoint poster, here are detailed instructions on how to create one: a. Open PowerPoint. b. Click Design, Page Setup. Increase the width and height. Start with a width of 36 inches and a height of 24 inches. If you need to increase this later, you can. c. On the Home tab, click the New Slide drop down button. Select a Blank slide. d. You now have two slides. Delete the first slide by Right-Clicking on it and selecting Delete Slide. e. Insert a textbox for your title. To do this, click the Insert tab, and select Text Box. Make your textbox almost as wide as the poster. f. Type a title for your poster, including the name of the poster and the names of all authors. g. Increase the font size of your title and center the text within the box. h. Save your PowerPoint file as Psy 210 Assignment 11 Poster.pptx. i. Create four textboxes, where you will put the text from the four sections of your paper. j. In your Word document, make sure all text is the same size and font. Single space all text. k. Copy and paste all text from the Word document to the PowerPoint document. Put each section in a different textbox. l. Change the font size to AT LEAST 24 point, so that your poster can be read from five feet away.

5 m. Copy your figure into your poster. To do this, open your SPSS output file. Right click on the graph. Click Copy. Change to your PowerPoint file. Right click. Under Paste Options, select the icon that shows a mountain. This is important because it will ensure that your graph is pasted as an image. If you paste your graph in another way, you may have issues with the graph showing up on your poster later. Please note that this graph is the ONLY part of your SPSS Output that should show up on your final poster. All of the rest of your results were summarized in sentences in your method and results sections. n. Move things around and resize them as necessary to create an attractive layout. If necessary, increase the size of your poster to make it all fit. o. Dress up your poster using colors and additional appropriate pictures. p. Save your PowerPoint poster again. 3. You will NOT print your poster. If you were going to take this poster to a conference, you would of course have to print your poster. But for this course assignment, you will NOT print your poster. You will simply hand in the PowerPoint file. 5 Title and Authors Introduction Method Participants Procedures Measures Results Discussion Figure 1 Your final poster should have the following sections: You will be primarily graded on the inclusion of these sections on the poster and the formatting of your poster. However, you must turn in all 8 files listed below or you will lose points. WHAT YOU SHOULD HAND IN Create pdf versions of your syntax and output files. the following 10 files to all team members: the original SPSS files syntax and output files and the pdf versions of these files the four sources you found that talk about car accidents the Word document where you drafted your poster content the PowerPoint poster Through WebCampus, each team member must hand in 8 files: the pdf version of your SPSS output file the pdf version of your SPSS syntax file the pdf versions of the four sources you found that talk about car accidents the Word document where you drafted your poster content the PowerPoint poster