6 page psychology paper with stat analysis

Lab in Psychopathology Paper

Woodworth, M. & Porter, S. (2002). In cold Blood: Characteristics of Criminal homicides As a Function of Psychopathy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111, 436-445.

Brief Summary

· The sample consisted of prisoners who were convicted for murder.

· The researchers sought to examine if there were differences in homicide pattern (specifically, type of violence) between prisoners who were diagnosed as psychopathic and prisoners not diagnosed as psychopathic.

· They focused on two types of violence: instrumental and reactive.

· Instrumental violence occurs when the injury of an individual is secondary to the acquisition of some external goal (or is the goal in itself).

· Reactive violence encompasses impulsive, immediate, and emotion-driven acts in response to a perceived threat, danger or insult.

· Based on intake data from prison documentation, prisoners were categorized as psychopathic or non-psychopathic using the Psychopathic Checklist – Revised (Hare, 1991).

· Murders were categorized as instrumental or reactive using coding criteria derived from the literature on violence.

· The gender of the murder victim was also recorded.

Assignment

You are asked to write a report of the study based on the data you are given .

Your research questions are:

1) Is there a significant relationship between psychopathy and murder type?

2) Is there a significant relationship between psychopathy and murder victim gender?

You should write it as if you are on the team of researchers who ran the study. You are writing it to communicate your findings – as if you would be submitting it to a journal for publication. As such, you must format it in APA style .

You can work in groups to analyze the data, and you can write the methods and results section as a group, but the introduction and discussion sections should be written individually. The introduction should be at least two pages long and the discussion should be at least three pages long. The introduction should review enough literature to set up your research questions and hypotheses. The discussion should adequately discuss possible explanations for the findings, as well as implications. You should include as many references as necessary (they can be references included in the original paper). The whole paper should be at least seven pages long (not including the title page, abstract, tables, and references).

When you read the original paper, try not to get bogged down by all the extraneous information. You should not be re-writing the same paper as the original. Obviously, there will be some similarities (in the methods section in particular), but you should tailor the paper to the data you were given, which is very limited.

Hypotheses

The original study appears to be exploratory in that the authors do not state clear hypotheses about the relationships between variables. This is common in early stages of research in a new area. For the purpose of this assignment however, you should state clear hypotheses (you can state them in either direction).

SPSS Info:

Variable Name Label Values

Subid Subject ID None

Psychopathy Psychopathy 0 = Nonpsychopath, 1 = Psychopath

Murtype Murder Type 1 = Reactive, 2 = Instrumental

Vicgen Victim Gender 1 = Male, 2 = Female

Data Analysis

Since you only have categorical data, you will have to use a chi-square analysis. Your independent variable is psychopathy, and your dependent variables are murder type and victim gender.

1. Analyze ( Descriptive Statistics ( Crosstabs

2. Put ‘Psychopathy’ in Columns and ‘Murder Type’ and ‘Victim Gender’ in Rows

3. Cells ( check ‘Columns’ under Percentages ( Continue

4. Statistics ( check Chi-square ( Continue

5. Ok

A chi-square analysis evaluates both the expected proportions and the actual proportions of your variables and determines whether the differences between the two are significant or not. If the presence of psychopathy has no impact whatsoever on murder type or victim gender, we would expect the distributions to be proportionate for each group. In other words, if there is no relationship between psychopathy and murder type, we should see the same proportions of instrumental and reactive murders in each subject subgroup. In turn, if there is no relationship between psychopathy and victim gender, we should see the same proportions of male and female victims in each subject subgroup. Conversely, if there is a significant relationship, we should see a different pattern of proportions.

Start by entering your data and running your analyses. Save your data output in a word document (File( Export( select Word format and a location to save your file( click Export) and download it on a USB key to take with you (unfortunately, the computers in the classroom are not connected to the internet). If you do not have a USB key with you today, save your Word document in your file folder on the desktop and bring a USB key to download it next class. Next class will be a ‘group-work day’, meaning you can work in your groups on the collaborative parts of the paper (methods and results). Please download and read the original paper before next class (you can find it on our Classes website or through PsychInfo).

References

Please be sure to include at least 10 references. Five of them must be from within the last five years. The more material you read and master, the easier it will be to write the paper.