Your goal with this assignment is to assess the amount of information about research design that is presented in news reports of psychological research.

Below you will see a list of fairly recent media accounts of psychological research. Select one (1). Read both the news report account and the original study. Sometimes the mass media article will provide a link, but in some cases you will have to use PsycINFO to locate the original article.

Your report should address the following topics. You should identify the genre of the mass media account (e.g. newspaper story, science magazine story, blog post, etc.). The focus of your report is a discussion of the elements of research design that the news report did include and the elements of design not addressed. Topics you may want to cover include:

-the type of design (see especially Chapter 3);

-the kinds of variables examined;

- the sample studied;

-the robustness of the findings (causality, confounds);

- issues of reliability and validity. 


Your assignment is NOT to evaluate the validity of the original study. Instead, you should conclude with an overall assessment of the accuracy and completeness of the media accounts coverage of the original studys methodology.

Your report should be between 500 and 750 words.

Assignments should be uploaded to moodle by midnight Sunday, November 17, 2019.

The reference list should include the media article and the original study cited in proper APA format (see Appendix A of Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology).