Correlation: Reaction time and tiredness

Correlation: Reaction time and tiredness

1. Research Method: Correlation

   • Strengths: They always tell us something new (whether there's any relationship between two co variables), 9t is a useful technique when either practical or ethical reasons mean that variables cannot be manipulated, good starting point for research to see if there’s a relationship and then potentially use an experiment to investigate further
   • Weaknesses: Doesn’t tell us anything about cause and effect, the inferential statistical tests don't always pick up on a relationship between two co-variables (e.g. classroom temp. And performance in a test)

2. Sampling Method = Opportunity

   • Strengths: Quick and easy - not biased on behalf of the participant
   • Weaknesses: there could be researcher bias, sample could be biased based on the time and place the Ps were recruited

3. Sample Details = 20 psychology students. 4 boys. 16 girls.

   • Strengths: both male and female students used - n=20 is an alright sample size
   • Weaknesses: A weakness of the sample is that it isn’t very generalisable to the whole population as it only looks at psychology students ranging from the ages 16-18. Gender imbalance

4. Co-variable A = reaction time

   • How was co-variable A operationalized and how was the data collected: was operationalised by using a reaction rest online and seeing how many milliseconds for clicking colour change averaged over 5 trials it took the participant to click the screen

5. Co-variable B = Tiredness

   • How was co-variable B operationalised and what method was used to collect it: Tiredness was operationalised by using the stanford sleepiness scale from 1-7 and the method used to collect it was self-report. 1 alert and 7 asleep

6. Data Type: Quantitative

   • Strengths: It gives quantitative results and so further research can be done as it's easy to compare and analyse.
   • Weaknesses: Don’t know why people rated themselves 1-7 on the Sleepiness scale & don’t know why people were reacting as they did to the computer task

7. Level of data = Ordinal

   • Strength: can rank the data
   • Weakness: Does not show the distance between the ranked positions, especially related to time

8. Descriptive data = scattergraph Inferential data is the Spearmans Rho

9. ways in which the investigation could have been improved

   • Larger sample. Carry out individually.