The Two Captains Research Report

Introduction

The introduction describes what you are studying, why you are studying it, and what you expect to find. Your introduction should convey why it is important to study the topic that you are studying. In the case of this report, why is it important to study the accuracy of personality impressions (or least why is it interesting) and what the important issues are in such a study. The chapter from Funder (2013), that is available on the learnonline website, provides some good background material about the accuracy of personality impressions that will help you out with this section. Your introduction should also contain a clear conceptual definition of your trait. It could also be beneficial for you to find one or two articles examining the same trait as a reference for you to refer with regard to your work and findings. Additional references might include topics such as difficulties associated with getting good inter-rater (inter-observer) reliability. In the final part of your introduction, clearly state your hypothesis.

Note: Even though you were given the topic of this research report, for the sake of this exercise, pretend that you are an independent researcher.

Method

This section describes the method of your observational study and needs to concisely convey enough detail that someone could reasonably replicate your study. Ensure that you state both the conceptual and operational definitions of your personality trait. This section is essentially a summary of everything you did in tutorials 4 and 5. You will need to include concepts such as: independent ratings, number, and length of videos, observer adjectives during each video, development of operational definitions, etc. Do not refer to the tutor or tutorial; rather make statements such as “the group first watched…. Next the group constructed….” The method should be presented in the following sections:

Participants

Describe the participants in the study (i.e., group members, not the two captains). Act as though you are researchers, not students.

Materials

Describes the tools needed to replicate the study (i.e., conceptual and operational definitions, the video information).

Procedure

Describe what was done in a chronological order. There should be enough information to be able to replicate the study. At the end of this section students should confirm what range they are using for their inter-rater reliability calculating (e.g., +/- 1).

Reflection

Discuss the interactions of the group. How did you work together as a group to come up with the conceptual and operational definitions? Bring in concepts of group work theory as appropriate, referencing your reflection of interpersonal skills used. It is also important to connect this to personality when describing the dynamics of the group, so refer to trait theory where possible (e.g., what were the assumed trait characteristics of the group members, exhibited during the group work phase of the study). Please note. You should only be focusing on the Big 5 for this section (e.g., group member 1 appeared to be higher on extraversion, as they lead the discussion often). This section should not be any longer than 250 words.

Results

The results section describes the findings from your study. This is where you present the relevant statistics (individual scores for each person in your group, overall group scores, means, standard deviations, and inter-observer reliability).

Hypothesis Testing

Did the data confirm your hypothesis? For each of the behaviours that you measured, present your results and state whether the hypothesis was supported. Present the results separately for the individual ratings of the two captains and your group’s ratings of the two captains in a table (i.e., Individual data as well as means and standard deviations for each captain in, likely, two tables – see the example table below).

As long as you have both individual group raw data, and the means, SD and Inter-rater reliability scores (explained below) in a table, you would have done this correctly. Be sure that you have a table for each captain. Describe and explain your results in plain language and relate them back to the variable in question. Do not simply report numbers and leave it up the reader to work out what they mean (i.e., state which captain scored higher on each behavior, or all three behaviors if they are all in the same direction – to stay concise).

Inter-observer Reliability

Inter-observer reliability refers to the extent to which different people observing the same thing agree with each other about what they saw. For each of the specific behaviours that you coded, compare your score with that of the other people in your group. What percentage of the other people in your group scored within 1 point of your score? For example (see Table 1 below), your score for “Make it so” may have been 12 and the others in your group may have scored 10, 11, 13, and 15. This would result in an inter-observer reliability of .50 (2/4 or 50% of yourgroup’s observations feel +/- 1 point of yours)2. You should present six inter-rater reliabilities in your results (three for each captain).

Table 1: A table of results example containing the means, standard deviations, and inter-rater reliability for the behavior ratings for Captain Kirk’s personality.

Discussion

The discussion section consists of a theoretical analysis of the results. Start with a brief reminder about whether the hypothesis was supported or not and then straight into a discussion of the inter-observer reliability data. Was there good agreement among the different raters? For all behaviours? If not, why? Address any qualifications or reservations that you have about your results. It may be useful to discuss your results in terms of the larger issues that affect the accuracy of personality impressions. The discussion ends with a concise and clear summary of what you found and what your findings may imply. Relate your findings back to the literature that you have cited in your introduction.

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