PSYC2001 ASSIGNMENT
This assignment is worth 20% of your final mark and is to be submitted electronically via the
Turnitin link on Moodle by Midnight on Friday April 22 (Week 10). Please see the School of
Psychology Student Guide for information on School policies regarding assessment, late
penalties, and submission of work. It is available at: http://www.psy.unsw.edu.au/current-
students/student-guide
This assignment is designed to give you the experience of carrying out both planned and
exploratory analyses and then reporting them. It is deliberately open-ended and involves
judgment on your part, just as real research does. It draws on material from both the first and
the second half of the course, and in particular on the Week 7 lecture on replication and the
online module on Writing a Results Section.
The assignment is based on a fictitious study on wellbeing in two different cultures, one that
emphasizes competition and individual achievement (“individualistic”) and one that
emphasizes cooperation and a sense of community (“communal”). The researcher is
interested in variables that predict wellbeing across the sample as a whole, as well as variables
that distinguish between the two cultures. She administers a survey to 50 adult participants
from each culture, and collects the following data:
Variable jamovi name Categorical variables
Culture culture 1 = individualistic, 2 = communal
Gender gender 1 = female, 2 = male
Relationship relationship 1 = single, 2 = in relationship
Employment employment 1 = unemployed, 2 = in job
Continuous variables
Age age years
Exercise exercise 1 = little to 7 = regular strenuous exercise
Number of close friends friends count
Illness illness 1 = healthy to 10 = serious illness
Social media use socialmedia 0 = none to 7 = more than 4 hours/day
Trust in government trustgov 1 = very little to 5 = high
Total assets assets thousands of dollars
Total debt debt thousands of dollars
Daily commute time commute minutes
Subjective wellbeing wellbeing 1 (low) to 9 (high)


You can download the data file from the Assignment section on Moodle. The data are
available in two formats:
1) a ‘csv’ file, which is easily editable in Excel,
2) an ‘omv’ file, the format that jamovi expects. Note that this file is NOT edited with the
appropriate variable types. You will need to edit the variables.

Your assignment has three parts.
Part 1: Hypotheses [half a page double spaced] 5 marks
Imagine yourself in the position of the researcher after designing the study but before
collecting the data. Based only on the design outlined on the previous page, plan one analysis
to address the researcher’s interest in predicting wellbeing, and one analysis to compare the
two cultures.
Prediction: choose up to four variables that you hypothesise will be good predictors of
wellbeing, and indicate how you would combine them together to form a single predictor
variable using the jamovi computed variable function. Explain why you have selected this
combination of variables.
Group comparison: choose one variable that you hypothesise will best differentiate between
the two cultures. Explain why you have chosen this variable.
In writing this section you need to state the prediction analysis you plan to do and explain
why, as well as state the culture comparison analysis you wish to do and why. You should
also include the hypothesized outcome of these analyses. You do not need to cite any papers
or do additional research to provide support for your reasoning. For this assignment, it is fine
for your reasoning to be based on your intuitions.
Please do not look at the data or perform any calculations before writing this part of the
assignment. This will defeat the purpose of the exercise. We want you to have the
experience of forming hypotheses on theoretical grounds, and then in the next step find out
whether your hypotheses are supported by the data or not. This is how real research is carried
out. Your answers in this section will not be marked on how well your hypotheses match the
actual data, but on your rationale for forming them in the first place.
Part 2: Analyses [half a page double spaced, plus output] 7 marks
First, carry out the analyses you planned in Part 1 and show the jamovi output. In one
sentence, describe how you felt when you saw these results.
Second, explore the data set, using whatever descriptive statistics you consider appropriate
(there is no need to show these analyses). On the basis of this exploration, come up with one
analysis to capture what the data tell us about prediction of wellbeing, and one comparison
that best illustrates the difference between the two cultures. These analyses will be of the
same type as the ones you planned, but this time they will be based on what you see in the
data, not on what you expected to see. Show the jamovi output for these two analyses. For
each analysis, explain why you chose this analysis specifically.
Comment on the differences between your planned and exploratory analyses, and on how
likely each analysis would be to replicate if the study was repeated.
Part 3: Report your results [1 page, double spaced] 8 marks
Write a brief report of the results of your analyses in the form of a typical Results section in a
journal. For a guide on how to write up a Results section, please see the “How to Write a
Results Section” module on Moodle (under Week 7). For example, you may want to report
descriptive statistics, the results of null hypothesis significance tests or confidence intervals,
and a visual depiction of your results. You should finish with a brief conclusion, based on
your analyses.