Doing Collaborative Research in Psychology

A Team-Based Guide

Jerusha B. Detweiler-bedell, Brian Detweiler-Bedell

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781452289229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Doing Collaborative Research in Psychology offers an engaging journey through the process of conducting research in psychology. Using an innovative team-based approach, this hands-on guide will assist undergraduates with their research—in their courses and in collaboration with faculty or graduate student mentors. The focus on this team-based approach reflects the collaborative nature of research methods and experimental psychology. Students learn how to work as a team, generate creative research ideas, design and pilot studies, recruit participants, collect and analyze data, write up results in APA style, and prepare and give formal research presentations. Students also learn practical ways in which they can promote their research skills as they apply to jobs or graduate school. A unique feature to this book is the ability to read chapters of the text either sequentially or separately, which allows the instructor or research mentor the flexibility to assign those chapters most relevant to the current state of the research project.

CHAPTER 1

Teams

Seven Lessons (Plus or Minus Two)

My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals. This number assumes a variety of disguises, being sometimes a little larger and sometimes a little smaller than usual, but never changing so much as to be unrecognizable.

—George A. Miller (1955, p. 343)

Seven was the recurring number that inspired famed psychologist George Miller. His paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” is among the most widely cited articles in all of psychology (Kintsch & Cacioppo, 1994), and led many to believe that seven items of information, plus or minus two, is the definitive capacity of short-term memory. This conclusion is misleading, and Miller himself withheld judgment about the number seven. Nevertheless, each of our chapters naturally gravitated toward this number of key concepts, so we decided to recognize this with a nod to Miller by beginning each chapter with five to nine succinct “lessons.” These summaries are intended to jump-start discussion among members of your research team so that you can set goals related to your research project. They can also serve as a learning check for you and a discussion guide for your instructor or research mentor when the chapter is covered in class or in the lab.

1. Engage in undergraduate research! It will impart lifelong personal and academic skills.
2. Scaffold your experiences by relying on both your professors and your peers to learn something new about the research process.
3. Although research experiences take place in diverse settings (e.g., small colleges, large universities) and contexts (e.g., classrooms, laboratories), the underlying goals for the researcher remain the same: to acquire new knowledge, to share findings, and to become a better researcher in the process.
4. Successful team-based research is characterized by the development of a strong personal connection with the goals of the group (vision), the other people in the group (togetherness), and the contributions that you and others are making to the group’s success (ownership).
5. An immersive and well-structured research experience encourages collaboration, produces high-quality research, and enables you to apply your newly acquired skills to your life within and beyond the halls of academia.

Bringing together a diverse set of research skills by forming a team of scientists… can make your empirical contributions far more profound and influential than they would otherwise be.

—Shelley E. Taylor (2008, p. 51)

Congratulations! You are reading this book because you are about to engage in team-based, collaborative research. This should be a rewarding and productive endeavor, and it could be life changing. Doing science rather than simply reading about it can be transformative, and numerous studies have shown that undergraduates who engage in research develop a number of personal and academic skills that continue to benefit them long after graduation (Hunter, Laursen, & Seymour, 2007; Landrum & Nelsen, 2002). Time and time again, our own students report that their collaborative research experiences have been both gratifying and extremely practical, helping them to shape and succeed in their future pursuits. These students have gone on to careers as research practitioners, medical and public health professionals, statisticians, lawyers, and educators. Many of them have completed or are now pursuing advanced degrees in psychology at top graduate schools, and a few are now professors collaborating with their own undergraduates. So whatever path you take after completing your undergraduate degree, your research experiences and skills will serve you well.

Many students have the option or are required to complete an independent research project. However, the notion of independent research is misleading, and at the core of this book is a steadfast dedication to the benefits of team-based collaborations. Yes, there is an important role for individual efforts throughout the research process, but the very best work ultimately comes from collaborative endeavors. If you are new to psychological research, you will have to trust us when we say that team-based efforts add a level of depth and intensity to your experience that you cannot achieve on your own. If you are an experienced research assistant already, you may be seeing glimpses of the benefits of collaboration in your own work. Perhaps you have even considered enlisting your own collaborators (i.e., younger research assistants) to help you complete an “independent” project, or what we prefer to call a student-initiated project or thesis. If you have not considered building your own team, you should. Researchers, especially in psychology and other lab-based sciences, rarely work alone. They seek out collaborators whose efforts and abilities will contribute to their projects’ success. The benefits of working as a team go well beyond additional person-power. Effective teams are truly synergistic, bringing an unmatched level of energy, intellect, creativity, and commitment to any project. Because of this, teams of scientists typically produce the most compelling research. As an added bonus, working side by side with other researchers is great fun.

Our goal, then, is to help you develop into a collaborator that your peers and mentors will find indispensable: one who brings vigor, insight, and considerable talent to every project. Whether you are a student new to research methods, a seasoned research assistant, or an individual who is preparing to complete a research-based thesis, this book’s collaborative approach will encourage you to progress to the next level of inquiry and intellectual challenge. At the same time, a well-structured research experience can be extraordinarily rewarding. Your research team will be pursuing a common intellectual goal, and this shared pursuit will create a vibrant atmosphere of collaboration among you, your fellow undergraduates, and your research mentor or professor. Many undergraduate researchers find that team-based collaborations foster a strong sense of community, a supportive “academic home,” and a base of activity that uniquely prepares them for their future pursuits.

We look forward to guiding you through the process of conducting collaborative research, helping you develop the perspective and skills that will make the most of your research experiences. The chapters of this book are organized around the crucial tasks that span a research project: generating creative research ideas, searching for relevant literature, designing a study, considering ethical issues, writing a research proposal, piloting methods and materials, recruiting participants, collecting and analyzing data, writing up the results, and giving formal presentations of your team’s research findings. Each chapter is explicitly designed so that novice and more advanced students alike will have something important to learn. If you are new to research methodology or want a systematic review of the process, you can follow the order of the book. Alternatively, you may find it just as informative to read the chapters out of order once you have finished this introductory chapter. Research on effective teaching suggests that people learn best while engaged in an activity. So if you are starting from scratch, begin with the chapter about ideas. If you are about to run participants, start instead with our chapter on piloting or the one on conducting a study. If your project is in the data analysis phase, read the statistics chapter first. Applying what you are reading about in these pages will be essential if the work you are doing is to take shape and thrive.

THE UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

The day-in, day-out experience of “doing” research as an undergraduate varies depending on the setting, but it often includes many hours running participants through experimental procedures. It seems fitting that in this introductory chapter we introduce you to the first laboratory-based research experience that one of us had as an undergraduate student. To frame this experience, imagine that you are a participant in the study. At the appointed time, you take an elevator to the third floor of the psychology department, where you are greeted by a research assistant. She walks you to a small laboratory, where you encounter an array of tasty junk food spread out on the table in front of you. It is midafternoon, you feel hungry, and the heaping plates of Doritos, M&Ms, and chocolate-chip cookies look, quite simply, irresistible.

The experimenter asks you to take a seat in front of the food, and then she explains that this is a study of the effect of emotion on memory. She tells you that other researchers use stimuli such as pleasant music to induce moods, but for this study the researchers are using delicious snacks. She says that you should feel free to eat as little or as much of the snacks as you would like, although you should eat at least some. Your main “job” during the study is to watch and memorize a series of slides of famous paintings. Later, you will be tested on your memory of the slides. Finally, as a measure of your attention to the memorization task, you will hear a beeping noise every 30 seconds or so. As soon as you hear the noise, you should quickly press a button on the floor with your foot. With these instructions in mind, you hunker down, grab some food, and begin the process of juggling snacks, slides, and beeps for the next 10 minutes.

When the slide show is over, the experimenter sits down and explains that the project is not exploring mood and memory at all, so there will be no test on the slides. Instead, the research question involves the effects of cognitive load (i.e., how much attention you were paying to a distracting task) on eating behavior. You were in the “high” cognitive load condition, requiring you to respond to a series of beeps as you tried to memorize the art slides. Moreover, in your Psychology 101 class a few months earlier, you and your peers filled out a questionnaire about eating habits, enabling the researchers to identify the extent to which you generally restrain your eating (i.e., stick to a diet). The researchers hypothesize that nondieters will eat less when their attentional resources are being taxed. That is, they will be too busy to eat. In contrast, people who typically restrict their diets will eat more under the same conditions. That is, they will be too busy to control their eating. Before you leave the study, you are reassured that all participants tend to eat a wide range and amount of snacks during the study and that the study’s data will be analyzed as a group, thus assuring the anonymity of your individual behavior.

That is the study in a nutshell from the point of view of the participant (for additional details, see Ward & Mann, 2000). But what was happening behind the scenes? Much of the allure of conducting research is the process of becoming a partner in the drama that unfolds during the collection of data. Whether you are administering a survey, conducting an interview, or carrying out an experimental manipulation in the research lab (as in this example), you are becoming a partner in staging a smooth and efficient “performance.” For this study, research participants completed a survey assessing their level of dietary restraint even before they came into the lab. Through random assignment, half of the restrained eaters (i.e., dieters) were assigned to the high cognitive load condition, and half were assigned to the low cognitive load condition. Similarly, the nonrestrained eaters were randomly assigned to one of these two experimental conditions. However, the research assistant running the study was blind to the participant’s level of dietary restraint, meaning that she did not know whether the participant in a given session was a dieter or not.

The nitty-gritty of setting up this study is worth mentioning as well because the logistics were not trivial. First, the research assistant had to set up the computer that would deliver the beeps and the slide projector that would display the artwork. Then she counted the number of cookies she put on the plate and used a scale to measure the weight of the bowl of M&Ms and plate of Doritos. All of this information was carefully recorded. After each participant completed the study, this same process of counting, weighing, and recording had to be repeated, and this had to be done with precision because the amount of food consumed by the participant was the study’s primary outcome measure, or dependent variable. Weighing snacks meticulously over and over again was a tedious chore. The research assistant also was responsible for discarding the leftover cookies and chips at the end of each day. At least initially, this meant devouring the delicious leftovers and was a nice benefit, but after a few weeks of running the study she found the mere thought of these snacks thoroughly unappealing.

One of the most challenging aspects of running this study was the debriefing. Telling a (potential) dieter that the researchers were scrutinizing how much she had just eaten felt like an unfair violation of trust. What if she felt devastated because she broke her diet and ate a large amount of snacks during this experiment? What if she went home after the study and tried to make herself vomit? What if she never trusted the motives of psychology researchers again? The importance of being sensitive while explaining a study to participants, especially when deception has taken place, is covered in detail later in the book. For now, rest assured that with time and practice, the research assistants for this experiment learned to explain the study in a caring manner and in a way that emphasized the study’s important scientific questions.

TEAM-BASED LEARNING AND TEACHING

From the experiment we just described, you might get the impression that being a research assistant is a relatively solitary experience. Yes, you interact regularly with participants, but the act of conducting a study often falls on just one research assistant during any experimental session. Many undergraduate research assistants spend much of their time alone, gathering journal articles, setting up experiments, and collecting and entering data. But this is a limited picture of psychological science. When we were undergraduates, we were part of a much more immersive, team-based research environment. We each started out working under the supervision of a graduate student mentor, who in turn worked in collaboration with other graduate students and a faculty adviser. Later, we collaborated more directly with a faculty adviser and worked on projects in parallel with graduate students.

Throughout all of this, our strongest connections were always with other undergraduates. Some were older than us and helped show us the ropes, some were younger than us and learned the ropes as our own research assistants, and some had roughly the same amount of research experience as we did. This cohort of students learned a great deal from one another, shared ideas, and socialized. These were the people we talked to in the hallways between running participants, on the roof of the psychology department while studying for statistics exams, and in the campus coffeehouse as we contemplated graduate school. (This pretty much covers how the two of us got to know each other, by the way.) Between our interactions with our research mentors and these peers, we were part of a rather ideal community of researchers. We were not alone at all.

Within that community, what solidified our appreciation for collaborative research was the experience of sitting in the offices of our professors, side by side with other students, learning about the history and future of psychology and engaging in expansive conversations about intriguing hypotheses and compelling experimental designs. We were trained not only in the procedures of a research project but also in the process of playing with ideas. Our professors lit the spark of our imaginations, and our peers’ contagious enthusiasm kept the ideas flowing long after we left those meetings. Even as we worked in the relative isolation of the lab or library, we were able to connect our moment-to-moment tasks back to those big-picture conversations. As a result, the conversations were always ongoing. This shaped our passion for psychological research and gav...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Engaging Students’ Curiosity as Research Creators
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• 1 Teams
• 2 The Idea
• 3 Theories, Predictions, and the Literature
• 4 Ethics
• 5 Experimental Design
• 6 Statistics and Data
• 7 Piloting a Study
• 8 Conducting a Study
• 9 Presentations
• 10 Research Write-Ups
• 11 Student-Initiated Research
• 12 The New You
• Appendix: Researcher's Toolbox
• Index