Summary of Research Assignment

Your assignment is to prepare a written summary of one empirical study that is related to the topic your group wishes to study research.  

Summary Format: Each summary must be typewritten (double-spaced, 12 point font).  You should begin with a complete citation for the study, followed by a summary of the research (not to exceed 3 pages). This summary must not be a re-wording of the study's abstract!  You are to read the study and summarize it's main points. To help you avoid the tendency to copy the abstract, you must turn in a Xerox copy of the study abstract (not the entire study) with each summary. 

Your summary should include the following points: 1)  the brief background for the study (context for the study--1 point); 2) the conceptual  hypothesis tested (2 points); 3) who the participants in the study were (1 point) ; 4) the conceptual independent variables and the  experimental/measured independent variable(s) (2 points); 5) the conceptual and experimental dependent variable(s) measured (2 points); 6) whether the study was an observational, correlational, or experimental study (1 point); 7) a summary of the results (2 points); 7) how the authors interpreted their findings (1 point); 8) any comments you have about the article (1 point). If there is more than one study reported in the article you select, pick the study that best demonstrates the topic the authors are testing. 

You will be graded not only on the content of your summary, but also on punctuation, spelling, grammer, style, and writing clarity (2 points).  So pay attention to these as well.

Example summary of research article

Janet Swim

Aronson, E. & Mills, J. (1959).  The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group.  Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59, 177-181.

            Aronson and Mills conducted a study to test the veracity of the common observation that people like things that they worked harder for.  Further, if this observation was true, they wished to examine whether cognitive dissonance could explain this phenomenon, over, for instance, the alternative hypothesis that motivation to work hard for something explained people liking things they worked hard for.  Their conceptual hypothesizes was that the more severe an initiation procedure a person underwent to become a member of a group, the greater the likelihood that a person would like the group.

            Participants were undergraduate women who volunteered to participate in a study on the psychology of sex.   The study testing their hypotheses was an experiment.  The conceptual independent variable was the degree of severity of initiation into a group discussion.  Participants were either in a severe initiation condition where they had to read 12 obscene words to an experimenter, a mild initiation condition where they read five words related to sex but were not obscene, or a control condition where no initiation was required. 

            After undergoing either the severe, mild, or no initiation, participants listened to a discussion by the group that they anticipated that they would be joining.   After listening to the group the dependent variable of liking for the group was assessed.  The experimental dependent variable was their rating of the discussion group and their rating of the participants in the group on 14 different evaluative scales (e.g., dull-interesting, intelligent-unintelligent, etc.) on scales ranging from 0 to 15.

            The results for the study indicated a general pattern such that people in the severe condition liked the group and participants more than those in either the mild initiation and no initiation condition.  Further, the mild and no initiation conditions did not differ from each other. These findings was slightly stronger for ratings of the discussion than ratings of the participants. 

The authors interpret these findings as supporting their idea that the theory of cognitive dissonance can explain why people prefer groups that they work hard to get into.  They argue that the mild initiation condition did not produce enough dissonance to increase people's liking for the groups.  They suggest that the stronger effects for ratings of the discussion than ratings of the participants could be a result of the greater difficulty people might have in saying negative things about people than their discussion or because dissonance was in response to the discussion rather than the participants so distortion of liking would be greater for liking of the discussion than liking of the participants.

While the present study provides support for the theory of cognitive dissonance, the study doesn't actually measure dissonance nor does it measure whether liking for the group relieves dissonance.   Instead, the study most strongly rules out the alternative hypotheses that working harder for a group leads to liking for that group because those who work harder have stronger initial motivation to like the group.   Other alternative explanations tha were not rulled out include:  a) people might perceive that they must like the group because they did something embarrassing for it rather than they felt a need to resolve the dissonance; b) they may have felt that they had invested greater psychological resources for the study and, because of sunk costs, they should like the group better; or c) they felt social pressure to explain their willingness to go through an embarrassing procedure to the experimenter.