Posted: September 13th, 2017

Practical Report

Paper, Order, or Assignment Requirements

This assignment is designed to give students a taste of what it is like to be a researcher/clinical health psychologist. Students will complete daily diaries (to be discussed in week 2), which require simple information regarding amount and quality of sleep, food and drink intake and exercise. This will be carried out for one week. Following this, students will form pairs and participate in a health psychology intervention based on behaviour modification principles. Specifically, in the tutorial (week 3), students will interview each other to identify a particular behaviour  that they would like to modify. This will be done using a standard interview guide. They will also identify antecedents and consequences of the behaviour.  Diaries will then be collected for a further week and any changes in behaviour will be quantified using a Single-Systems Design (to be discussed in the “Healthy Behaviours” Lecture).

After completion of the diaries, students will code, enter and explore the data from the diaries (e.g. making graphs). Only a basic, but thorough, level of data analysis is required. Use of multivariate statistics to support descriptions of results is not compulsory, but may be included if desired. Please note however, that complicated statistics are not a substitute for well-interpreted descriptive statistics (e.g. means, standard deviations etc). This will form the basis of the practical report. Students will have a choice on the specific aspects of data they present in their practical report.

Your assignment should be word-processed on A-4 size paper, font size 12, with a 3cm margin, and with 1.5 line spacing, and using only one side of each page. All pages must be numbered.