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Psychology IA Tips


Hexa

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So I thought I was all set up and ready, and did my IA recently. Let's just say it didn't go as well as it could. Several things went wrong. So I'm going to post them here so anyone else doing the IA can learn from my mistakes.

1. When you are recruiting people to be a part of your study, make sure you give them something physical with your information and officially take down their names and contact numbers. Make sure it seems like something that can't just be skipped if they feel like it, because apparently going to a Psychology study doesn't automatically rank as something important in peoples minds. I didn't do this and my partner ended up running around school recruiting random people to get the required number of people.

2. When you're telling people how long it'll take, overestimate by a decent margin. I told people 15 minutes, but since I ended up running around the school looking for people, it took almost an hour. Everyone, including I, were annoyed at the end of the experiment. Also, set up something to do while waiting. I had promised people cookies if they came to my study, and while I was planning on giving them out at the end, when it looked like everyone was getting bored and annoyed while waiting, I gave them out right there. So be prepared for something like that.

3. Make sure the room you're doing your study in has a working air conditioner or heater. 'nuff said.

4. Do the study a good amount of time before it's due. I'm going to have to redo a good portion of mine, and considering all other IB stuff, spending even more time will be a killer. Plus that means less time to do the writeup.

5. Don't panic. Stuff might go wrong, but don't get snappy or annoyed. And if you do make sure to go back and apologize.

6. If you're study has questions to fill out, make sure you make it clear how you want them to be answered. For example, if you're doing Loftus and Palmer, make sure you put a (mph) next to the question. I would also recommend doing a test run with a few people as those without knowledge of the study will think differently then those that do (meaning you, the researcher).

Good luck to everyone that ever does a Psych IA and I hope your experiment goes better then mine did. ^^

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For my Psych IA, my Psychology teacher always got other teachers to let us experiment on their students lol. My Psych IA teacher assigned everyone a specific time and classroom to go to. Each classroom had about 30 people, so that may or may not be enough for everyone. (it was for me though. :))

Everyone was in assigned partner groups of 3 people, so the amount of work was fairly distributed for actually doing the study.

I remember that I was responsible for the response sheets, all 6 of them. :)

They were all fill in the blank, but sorting through them all was a pain.

Lol, I went to the local office supply store to print them since I ended up printing about 150 sheets lol.

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