Help with research paper!

Instructions: This Fall, we are going to run a series of studies looking at how advertisements might “prime” participants in social media. We’ll do this by showing them a fake (and neutral) Facebook page that contains different versions of advertisements unrelated to the Facebook user: romantic ads, sexuality ads, or education ads. We will see if participants who see the sexuality-oriented ads rate the Facebook user in a more sexualized manner than participants who see either romance or educational advertisements.

1). For your first experimental study, you will play the role of researcher, and you will collect data from three different participants (though you will combine your data with other class members, so your final data set will have nearly 140 people!). There are two phases to this study. In the first phase, you will orally ask participants if they are willing to participate in a research study. In the second phase, participants will complete a six-part survey. In Part One, participants will read the “About” Facebook page for Riley Washington’s, getting some general information about this person In Part Two, they will rate their impressions of Riley. Note that the name Riley is gender-neutral. This way all participants can complete ratings about Riley regardless of their own gender or sexual orientation. In Part Three, participants will rate some of their own characteristics. In Part Four, they will complete demographic questions. Finally, in Part Five, they will tell us the general theme of the ads they saw at the bottom of Riley’s Facebook page. To run this study, use the following steps:

A). Your first task is to approach three different participants (not all at the same time!). They must be people that you do not know, and cannot be taking a psychology research methods class during the Fall or Summer semester, 2018. Please DO NOT complete this study yourself, and use only FIU students as participants (no family / friends – You will use them in a later replication study toward the end of the summer semester). There are 48 students in our class, so with each getting data from 3 people, our final sample will be around 140 participants total.

B). Phase I: Informed Consent

1). Informed Consent:

· Ask the potential participant if he or she is willing to participate in a study for your research methods class. You will get their informed consent verbally. Tell them:

“Hello, I am conducting a study for my research methods class. I was wondering if you would be willing to participate. The study takes about five to ten minutes. There are no risks to participating, and the main benefit is that I can complete my class assignment. Will you participate?”

· An oral Yes or No response is fine. If they say no, thank them and find a different participant. If they say yes, move to the next step (Phase II – Questionnaire).

C). Phase II: “Questionnaire”

1). General Instructions

· After getting participant’s oral informed consent, randomly give them ONE of the three “Research Study – Florida International University – Fall, 2018” documents. These documents contain our primary independent variable for the study. One third of our research participants will be in the “Sexuality” condition, one third will be in the “Romantic” condition, and one third will be in the “Education” condition.

· Ask participants to follow the instructions at the top of the questionnaire. Tell them to read EVERYTHING on the Facebook page, as they will answer questions about it later and will need to do so through memory. They can move through the five “Parts” in this survey at their own pace. Make sure they complete all questionnaire parts (though they can leave some demographic questions blank if they do not want to provide the details).

2). Questionnaire

· In Part I, we ask participants to look at the Facebook “About” page for a person named Riley Washington. The page contains a picture a generic Facebook profile picture (a sunset on the ocean), the “About” section (which contains information About Riley, which is similarly generic and neutral in nature). Note that EVERYTHING in Riley’s About profile is identical across all three conditions (but don’t tell participants that!). The only thing that differs is the advertisements at the bottom of Riley’s “About” page!

· In the Sexuality Priming Condition, there are Three advertisements at the bottom of the page, all “sexually suggestive” in nature. One advertises Axe body spray and shows a shirtless man (while suggesting a shirtless woman). The phrase “Click here for your Axe Moment” accompanies the ad to make it clear the image is an electronic advertisement. A second image advertising alcohol shows a woman in a sexually suggestive dress sharing a drink with a faceless man. The final advertisement, which focuses on perfume, shows a shirtless man wrapping his arms around a shirtless woman. All three ads suggest sexuality. The familiar “Ad choices” icon found on many internet websites is also present to give more authenticity to the ads (and denote that they are not a part of Riley’s profile).

· In the Romance Priming Condition, there are also three advertisements (they are the same size as the ads in the Sexuality Priming Condition and placed in the same location of Riley’s profile page). One advertises the Sandals resort, showing a romantic dinner between a man and woman. The phrase “Click here for your Sandals Moment” accompanies the ad to make it clear the image is an electronic advertisement. A second image advertising perfume shows a couple riding horses. The final advertisement, which focuses on dating through the online dating website E-Harmony, shows a smiling couple. Once again, the “Ad choices” icon is present

· In the Education Priming Condition, there are also three advertisements (again, the size of the ads are similar to the size of the ads in the other two conditions. It is very important to have stimulus materials that are as similar as possible to each other so that the only thing that differs is the content of the ad, not the overall size of the ads!). All ads are education related (One looks at success at the University of Florida, which is accompanied by the phrase “Click here for your UF Moment”; A second looks at success at Platt College, and the third features ABC Academy.

· A quick note for you (the researcher): If you look at the second page of the survey in the footer, you will see one of the following: “S”, “R”, or “E”, which relate to the three study conditions – That is, S is for “Sexuality”, R is for “Romance”, and E is for “Education”. It’s a nice shorthand so you can tell which survey the participant completed if something happens to the first page!

· In Part II, participants will give their general impressions of Riley Washington (the Facebook user). There are ten questions about Riley that participants will complete, all of which use an interval scale of 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 6 (Strongly Agree). These questions ask about how educated participants thought Riley was, if the participant thinks Riley seems flirtatious, sensitive, seductive, etc. Although you can look at any (or all) of these questions (ALL are dependent variables), when you write Paper II (which focuses on the methods and results for this study), you will only look at a few of them in detail. Here, I am most interested in the questions about whether participants think Riley is flirtatious (item #2) and whether Riley seems sexy (item #10). For both, I think participants will rate Riley as more flirtatious and more sexy in the sexuality advertisement condition than in the other two conditions. Of course, we might also expect participants in the sexuality condition to see Riley as less sensitive (item #3) and less tender (item #6) than participants in the other conditions as well. If you are working on Paper II, just remember that EACH of these ten questions (ten dependent variables) will have its own hypothesis. The general prediction here is that exposure to the sexuality-based advertisements will prime participants to see Riley as more sexual than participants primes with romance or educational advertisements.

· In Part III, participants will rate several statements related to themselves. These include statements like, “I am assertive”, “I am sensitive”, “I am confident”, etc. To be honest, we probably won’t look at these questions in our analyses, but they do present a chance to explore some interesting secondary hypotheses. For example, research shows that gender-based advertisements cause people to self-reflect and more readily endorse gender-based attributes in themselves. For example, after having seen either sexuality or romance ads, men may better identify with typically masculine traits, rating themselves higher in terms of assertiveness, confidence, decisiveness, and fearless (social psychology calls these male stereotype traits “agency”). Women may better identify with the terms sensitive, emotional, romantic, understand, and warm-hearted (with social psychology calling these female stereotype words “communion”). We probably will not analyze these ten dependent variables in Part III, but I encourage you to do so when we discuss factorial ANOVAs later this semester

· In Part IV, participants will complete demographic questions. Most of these items are easy to complete without violating participant’s privacy, but they will know they can leave blank any question(s) they feel uncomfortable answering.

· In Part V, participants will tell us whether they think Riley Washington is male, female, or unknown. Since there are no gendered traits attributed to Riley in the Facebook profile, most participants should list unknown. However, it is possible that male participants may see Riley as male and females may see Riley as female.

· Finally, in Part VI, we ask participants to recall the general theme of the advertisements on the Facebook page, and we give them one of three options to choose from (making this a nominal scale variable): the theme involved romance, the theme focused on sexuality, or the theme involved education. They are asked to choose one. This is a manipulation check for the study, so we can make sure they paid attention to the advertisements

D). Once participants have completed the questionnaire, debrief them regarding the study. That is, tell them about Aggression Priming and your main hypothesis. Read them the following:

“Thank you for participating. The purpose of the study is to determine the extent to which individuals are impacted by advertisements they may find in social media. To test the impact of advertisements, all participants read the same Facebook page, which discussed the “About Me” information of Riley Washington. This fake profile involved very basic information about Riley, including Riley’s desire to make friends, to be funny, to socialize, etc. It is important to note that ALL participants saw the exact SAME profile for Riley. The profile page differed, however, in the advertisements participants saw at the bottom of the profile page. A third our participants saw sexual-oriented advertisements at the bottom of the Facebook page, including images of topless men and women that had a sexual element to them (but nothing too explicit). One third of our participants saw advertisements based more on romantic images. That is, although the images did not involve topless photos, they did show romantic interactions between men and women. Our final set of participants saw advertisements related to education. These relationship-neutral advertisements focused on educational resources for college and K-12 schools. In a later questionnaire, all participants rated their impressions of Riley Washington, the Facebook user, as well as themselves.

We have two primary predictions. First, we predict that participants who see sexualized advertisements accompanying a fake Facebook profile will view the Facebook user in a more sexualized manner (more flirtatious, seductive, sexy and provocative) than participants who see romance or educational advertisements. Second, we predict that participants who see romance advertisements accompanying the fake Facebook profile will view the Facebook user in a more romantic manner (more sensitive, kind, tender, and sentimental) than participants who see sexualized or educational advertisements.

We will test these hypotheses in our methods course this semester. Thank you for participating!

Methods Students: Note that the underlined paragraph above will be helpful when you write Paper I! In fact, you can use that underlined paragraph in your first paper if you like (just copy and paste it into your hypotheses). However, the predictions ARE NOT INCLUDED in your minimum page count. That is, you can copy/paste the predictions, but they do not count in the page minimum!

2). Hold onto the completed questionnaires, as you will use them in an upcoming lab. You will enter data into SPSS and analyze it during your lab. Important note: Each student researcher is responsible for collecting data from three participants (one participant for each study condition – S, R and E). However, we will combine survey data from ALL students in your lab section, so your final sample will include at least 140 or so participants. In your papers (especially Paper II), you will use this total set of research participants (at least 140), NOT just the three that you collected yourself. Don’t even discuss “Three participants”, as that is not correct. Discuss ALL participants in your papers

3). One last note: Pay close attention to these instructions! You can use them as the basis for Paper II later this semester when you discuss your methods section. That being said, these instructions are too long for a methods section, and includes information you will need to omit for Paper II. When writing that paper, make sure to only report the important aspects (what you actually did in the study). Write about what you actually did in the study!