Practical Report – Designing Your Study
For the purposes of this practical, we are interested in people’s attitudes and their behaviour. We want to find out if there is a correlation between people’s attitudes and their behaviour. Working in groups of 2 to 5, you need to choose a particular behaviour to research. The example used here is ‘exercise’ but you must think of a different attitude/behaviour to research.
In addition, you need to choose an additional predictor variable (for example, perceived norm or perceived behavioural control).
First, you need to generate five questions to measure attitudes towards, for example, the behaviour of exercising. These must ask specifically about exercise, and the person’s attitudes about exercising (whether they are positively or negatively disposed towards it). The questions should take the form of a semantic differential scale (Osgood, 1952) or likert scale, whereby participants are asked to describe an attitude through scales bounded by pairs of antonyms. You will decide upon the pairs of antonyms that you use.
Your questions should then take the following format:
I think that exercise is…
Good:__.__.__.__.__.__.__:Bad
Harmful:__.__.__.__.__.__.__:Beneficial
Boring:__.__.__.__.__.__.__:Fun
Pleasant:__.__.__.__.__.__.__:Unpleasant
Foolish:__.__.__.__.__.__.__:Wise
You will notice that some of the scales start with the positive word, and some start with the negative word. Try to vary the order of positive/negative negative/positive pairs of antonyms, as this will reduce demand characteristics.
Your questionnaire should also contain a measure of the behaviour of interest. Try to think of an imaginative and accurate way to measure the behaviour. The behavioural measure should not take the form of a single question, so will require some thought, e.g., you could ask participants to list the different types of exercise they have engaged in each day over the last week. You would then need to work out a way of converting this information into a single score for the behaviour.
When measuring your third variable (e.g., perceived norm or perceived behavioural control), you can adopt either of the above strategies (or a new approach) to generating a measure.
In designing your questionnaire, you will need to think about possible order effects. To do this, you should counterbalance the order of the three variables in the design. You will also need to include some instructions on your questionnaire about how to fill in the items. Try to keep these simple and straightforward. You should also include an example of how to complete the questions. The example should be about an attitude different to the one that you are measuring. This helps to avoid influencing the participants’ responses.
Consult this document for further ideas:
http://people.umass.edu/~aizen/pdf/tpb.measurement.pdf
This is taken from Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (2010). Predicting and changing behavior: The reasoned action approach. New York: Psychology Press.
Remember that you are conducting a small-scale project for your assessment and that you do not need to be as rigorous as these authors suggest (so no need for factor analysis or pilot studies!).
In your ethics submission, you’ll need to detail the questions for each of your three measures (the two predictors and the dependent variable) as well as the details of brief and debrief. Please see the below section for further details regarding the ethics submission…
The group decided to do the study on Does Sports reduce stress?
Sample/participants:
The target participants are individuals from the age of 25-45.
40 participants will be given questionnaires and will be individuals who have had a desk job for not less than two years and not more than five years.
Our DV needs to be a measurable behaviour and your questionnaire must be on a Likert or semantic differences scale.
We have produce this:
DV Measure of sport (yoga?)
How often in a fortnight do you normally do yoga?
List how many times in last fortnight you have done yoga.
IV Option 1 = attitude to sport as stress reducer
Yoga makes me feel:
Relaxed _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Tense
Bored _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Stimulated
Calm _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Restless
Focused _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Distracted
Happy _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Low
Energized_ _ _ _ _ _ _ Lethargic
OR
When I feel stressed yoga is:
Helpful _ _ _ _ _ _ _Unhelpful
Bad _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Good
Fun _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Boring
Harmful _ _ _ _ _ _ _Beneficial
Relazing _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Agitating
Stressful _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Comforting
OR
IV Option 2 = attitude to stress
If we choose IV = attitude to stress, we could use some questions from the Perceived Stress Scale. (attached) Kay – are we allowed to use a measure like this if we acknowledge it in the write up?
IV 2 (predictor variable) = motivation
Using the scale below, please indicate to what extent you agree or disagree with the following statements.
Strongly disagree Disagree No opinion or uncertain Agree Strongly agree
When I do yoga I feel more relaxed
I do yoga because I feel it is important to my health
I don’t see the point in yoga
I do yoga because it is enjoyable
I do yoga because my doctor advised me to
Yoga helps me unwind
I do yoga because I feel I have to exercise
I get tense if I have not done yoga in a few weeks
Yoga gives me space to clear my head
I feel guilty if I do not regularly do yoga
Doing yoga on regular basis helps my concentration level
I would recommend to others to do yoga
(I have put more than 5 to give us options)
What do you think? This is just a very rough draft. I struggled to find a way to measure motivation (IV2) because the scale I came up with could also be used as a scale to measure attitude to yoga as stress reducer. I found it hard to make it look different to the attitudes scale.
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