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After reading through the study, there were two notable strengths:
1. The data analysis–including Y-intercept–are present, with the SPSS
formatting of APA done well.
2. The author did a good job identifying limitations of the study that could have
been impactful.
l l l l l l l l l l The relevance of the articles discussed was clear, but causal language was used in
the last paragraph when the author mentions that spirituality improves mental health; if
he was referring to a study there was no clear reference. A few issues that could be
improved upon are as follows:
1. In the running head, there is singular language (woman’s) and plural language
(their). While the American Psychological Association (2020) encourages
singular “they” when gender is in question (Section 4.18), here it does not
appear to be, so the correction would be to change “a woman’s” to “women’s”.
2. While the author does a great job formatting SPSS data in APA format, that
application to the word processor could use some improvement, with large
chunks of white space. It seems shrinking the tables slightly may be enough to
get them on the same page as their headings; title case should also be used
for table titles as per Section 7.9 (American Psychological Association, 2020).
3. The author expresses the understanding that the results are non-significant,
but in the Results section, says that the null hypothesis is not.
• After going through your study on the correlation between spirituality and
loneliness, the result and discussion sections are well written and checked many
of the assignment requirement boxes. You start by stating the hypothesis of the
study, which gives the reader a good idea of the purpose of the study. You
commenced the result section by stating the attributes of the sample population
while presenting the frequency statistics without including the tables as per the
instructions. You rightly noted the missing demographic characteristics in the
data, which pointed to weakness in the data.
l l l l l l l l l l l The simple linear regression model in the hypothesis testing section was
used, which is prefer to correlation analysis. The linear regression model provides
more information than the correlation. I also appreciate that you correctly
formatted the table using the APA guidelines and named them appropriately. Your
use of a scatter plot gave an excellent visual analysis of the relationship between
the variables in the research.
l l l l l l l l l l Your interpretation of regression output was also correct, which indicated
that spirituality was an insignificant predictor of loneliness with a p-value of 0.423.
I also agree with your R2 interpretation, where you indicate that spirituality
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accounted for a 3.16% percentage in the variability of loneliness. However, I think
your interpretation of the relationship between the variables might be misplaced.
For instance, you state, “The correlation between lower levels of loneliness and
higher levels of spirituality is 0.190.” I this this is misleading since there is a
positive correlation between loneliness and spirituality. Therefore, higher levels of
spirituality predicted higher levels of loneliness.
l l l l l l l l l l l In the result section, you correctly mentioned the aim of the study and its
findings which gave the reader a summary of the study. You further revisited the
weakness in the data, noting that convenience sampling resulted in a biased and
non-representative sample. You also cited three previous studies on the study
topic, noting that they contradicted your research findings. You finally highlighted
the importance of studying the relationship between the study variables when
recommending a similar study that surpassed the weaknesses of your study. I
appreciate the fact that your research was well conducted and explained.
References
American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American
Psychological Association 2020: The official guide to APA style (7th ed.). American
Psychological Association.
