Research Experience in Social Psychology

The overarching objective of this course is to offer students a hands-on experience in designing, conducting, and reporting a piece of psychological research in the area of human sexuality, with emphasis on gender differences in sexual desire / permissiveness ("sociosexuality"), attitudes towards (real or imagined) infidelity, and physical attraction.  This objective will be met principally through instructor-guided participation in group-research projects, class discussions related to these projects, and various exercises focusing on individual components of the research process.  The course's related objective is to offer an informal introduction to key concepts in research design, research ethics, and statistical methods.  This objective will be met primarily through class discussions, exercises, and some additional readings.  The main readings for the course will be in the form of original research reports as well as recent meta-analyses and literature reviews.  All of these readings will be made available electronically, via the course blackboard.  Depending on a project, statistical analyses will include: paired and independent t-tests, correlation, one- and two-way ANOVA, linear / logistic regression, the non-parametric equivalents of the above, and the chi-square goodness-of-fit.  SPSS and JMPin (good for non-parametric tests) may be used concurrently or interchangeably to organize and analyze the data in question.