PSY1011 Introduction to Psychology

Task:

The article matrix assignment is your first major written task for the unit (worth 15% of your final grade). By completing this assignment, you will have the opportunity to get invaluable feedback from teaching staff on your 1) literature search strategies, 2) ability to summarise and critique past research, and 3) APA formatting style. This feedback will help enormously with developing core skills you will need to employ when you complete the larger Literature Review due later in the semester.

Step 1 : 

Topic 2: Developmental Psychology

How does parenting style during infancy OR childhood affect the ability to build and maintain relationships in adolescence OR adulthood? 

In this context relationships can include family, friends, intimate partners as well as factors (e.g. aggression, intimate partner violence and social isolation etc.) that influence the ability to build and maintain relationships in adolescence OR adulthood

Step 2 : Conduct a literature search

After you have selected a topic you are interested in, you will need to: 1) locate three additional good-quality journal articles and 2) summarise the information you have found in a scientific way. You can use the library data base to locate additional articles on your chosen topic.

Please note: You cannot use journal articles that include animal research and case studies. You should preferably use articles that include primary research. You should not use thesis and dissertations for this assignment. You can also use meta-analysis. 

Step 3: Scientific description of evidence

With any form of scientific writing, one of the biggest challenges is learning how to present evidence in a credible and informative way. To achieve this, you need to understand that your reader will be a critical thinker. They will not accept a theory or interpretation without seeing and evaluating, for themselves, the evidence in support of these ideas. In other words, when summarising past research, you need to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’. For this part of the assignment pick THREE of the research articles you found in Step 2 and summarise them in terms of the following seven points:

1. What was the reason/rationale for the research?

2. What were the aims and hypotheses?

3. Who were the participants?

4. What task were they presented with?

5. What were the key results?

6. What did the researcher conclude from the results?

7. According to the authors are there any limitations in the methodology or things that could be done differently next time?