Inferential Research and Statistics Project

Part 1

Select one of the following scenarios based on your particular field of interest in psychology:

• Industrial/Organizational Psychology:

o A few months ago, the upper management at a large corporation decided they wanted to make major changes in the organization. Leadership is concerned that employees may be resistant to the change, and they want to find out if there is a change management method that would help employees accept change more effectively and keep employee satisfaction high. Two methods they have considered are the ADKAR Framework and the Prosci Change Management Methodology. The company wants to implement a small change in two departments before they make any major organization changes and would like to test the methods. The corporation uses the Devine Company to measure employee satisfaction with an anonymous survey.

• Applied Psychology:

o A large medical facility is experiencing too many missed appointments in its primary and specialty care clinics. The facility has noticed that not all patients respond well to reminder calls regarding follow-up appointments. Some patients do not answer calls and do not seem to respond to voice mail requesting they call the facility. The result is that many follow up appointments are missed. Management has read articles that people respond very well to text messages and would like to see which method provides the least amount of missed appointments. Missed appointments are tracked in the facility database on a monthly basis.

• General Psychology:

o Clinicians at a small clinic have been introduced to a new method to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in their clients for veterans. Research indicates that virtual reality (VR) is a highly effective treatment option for patients with PTSD. Currently, the clinic uses only cognitive processing therapy (CPT) with their patients suffering from PTSD. The clinicians would like to find out whether VR therapy has different results from CPT therapy. The measure used by the clinic to measure PTSD symptoms is the Combat Exposure Scale. Both therapies need to be applied for a minimum of 12 weeks to be effective.

Write a 525- to 750-word paper that addresses the following for your chosen scenario:

• Clearly define the problem or issue you are addressing. Provide a brief background of any research you have found that might affect your research hypothesis.

• Create a research hypothesis based on the information provided in each scenario. You will be given a data set with two sets of interval data (just the numbers, as you must decide what they represent, such as method A results or method B results). This means you are going to test one thing against another, such as which method works best (step 1 of the steps to hypothesis testing). State the null and research hypotheses. Explain whether these hypotheses require a one-tailed test or two-tailed test, and explain your rationale.

• Describe the sample you will use. Sample size will be 30 for each group, which will be provided in your data set. Explain what type of sampling you selected. You may create your own data set if you want, as it is only hypothetical-you do not need to collect any data.

• Do you think you would also collect some descriptive data, such as gender, age, or shift? Why do you think it makes sense to collect descriptive data?

Format your paper according to APA guidelines.

Example

You have a hypothesis that two drugs have different effects on lowering anxiety. You would have anxiety scores for drug A and anxiety scores for drug B (all after 4 weeks of treatment) to run inferential analysis after 4 weeks.

• Null hypothesis is H0: drug A = drug B
• Research hypothesis is H1: drug A ≠ drug B
• Dependent variable: Anxiety score changed after treatment.
• Independent variable: drug treatment

Because you did not state a direction in your hypotheses (better than or worse than), this will be a two-tailed test. You are looking for differences in either direction. You would set your alpha level of .05 and have a sample for each group of 30 people that were volunteers for the study.

Part 2

Analyze the data from Part 1 using Microsoft® Excel® software.
Write a 700- to 875-word paper that includes the following information:

• Describe what method you are using to compare groups.

• Copy and paste the output into a Microsoft Word document, and also answer the following questions:

o What is the significance level of the comparison?

o What was the alpha level you identified in Week 3?

o What was the means and variance for each variable?

o What was the test statistic?

o What was the critical value for both the one- and two-tailed test?

o Was your test one-tailed or two-tailed?

o Were you able to reject the null hypothesis? In other words, did you prove there was a difference?

• Talk about what these results mean in everyday language and in context to your chosen scenario.

• Make a recommendation based on the findings.

Format your paper according to APA guidelines.

Example of Output You Would Use to Answer These Questions

Part 3

Create a 12- to 15-slide presentation using the information you gathered and submitted in Weeks 3 & 4. Include the following:

• Describe the problem, and provide some brief background about the situation.

• Explain the research hypothesis.

• Describe your sample and your sampling method.

• Explain the four steps of the research process you followed, and define the critical value and the test statistic your analysis provided.

• Provide the main finding of the study. What did you prove or fail to prove?

• Provide recommendations based on your findings.

Format any citations in your presentation according to APA guidelines.