Project Reflection for Psyc 302 Olivia Thompson 7/28/2015
I was very intimidated by this project in the beginning of the course because I didn't feel that I had absorbed enough of the information from psyc 301 and my statistics class. Because of the way that the deadlines were set it helped to ease a lot of the stress that doing a research project/writing a paper would normally bring me. It was still stressful because of having to condense so much work into such a short period of time, but the way we had to manage our time with the paper, because of the deadlines, it certainly helped. I really enjoyed doing this project and having to learn what was necessary to run the statistical analysis portion of the project. I am glad that the project helped to reinforce old concepts that I had forgotten about from 301. I also like how doing this project helped me to see how I would have to organize my thoughts to run experiments and do research in the future. Often times, I find myself being very theoretical but unable to figure out how I could apply these concepts to statistics and designs that would help to inquire into the theories that I'd like to test. For this project,because of my own abilities to use SPSS, I had to simplify my ideas because I really only knew how to run correlations and one way anovas and t-tests. Had I understood what multivariate anovas were, I probably would have stuck with more of my original thoughts. But I don't think I would have had time to learn that, and incorporate it into this project. It is still very useful information for the future. I like doing group projects, but this was challenging at the beginning because I felt like it was difficult for our group to really agree on a topic that all resonated with us. But I did like my group-members and their input. Having partners to work on the project with, helped me to not feel so overwhelmed working on the project alone. Had we had more time for the project, and a
sample that was not of convenience, I would have wanted to add more inventories to the survey to test for more things, and added more thorough analysis. Originally, I was interested in being able to see if "major life events" would contribute to the change in intrinsic personality traits. Eventually it turned around on itself and I tested if personality is correlated to the way we perceive stress. I was disappointed that I couldn't figure out a way to survey for my original idea. I think to look at something like what I had in mind, I would have to do a longitudinal study, and somehow be able to test people before and after major life events. It seems pretty unlikely that I would be able to do that though. My interest in the original idea stemmed from that fact that, I myself feel through my own experience, that 3 major life events have significantly changed my personality at the core. I have always been fascinated by the topic of personality and how some theorists believe personality is hardwired into us, while I have read others believe that personality is not so static. The topic that we chose still interests me, and although my results found no significant findings, I still think that if I were able to figure out new ways to test the hypothesis, then I would be able to find some sort of significance. I have been under a tremendous amount of stress over the course of this summer class, but largely because of outside factors and not because of the project itself. I enjoyed doing the project and now I feel a lot more comfortable going into the research labs class this fall because of this class, thank goodness!