Posted: December 1st, 2015

Personality and Facebook Research Report

Personality and Facebook Research Project & APA Style Research Report

Introduction: This handout will help you understand what my expectations are for this assignment. If you have any remaining questions about the assignment please ask questions via the phone, email, skype, or in my office hours. Each aspect of the assignment will have its own more detailed assignment instructions.

Overview: This assignment is designed to enable you to explore a specific personality psychology topic in greater depth by appreciating the application of research to understanding common and everyday social behavior. The project will also help you develop and improve your understanding of personality psychology research and theory. This also allows for developing and demonstrating skills in reading and critically evaluating research as well as reporting and interpreting research in APA style. For this assignment you will work independently to using the PsycInfo data base (https://libguides.consortiumlibrary.org/psychology) to find empirical research on a subset of the topics below, present an organized summary of that existing research along with logically derived predictions (hypotheses), Dr B. will supply a Personality and Facebook survey data set and conduct analyses for you, and you can apply your understanding and creativity to interpreting the results of the class data analyses, and finally present a clear and compelling synthesis of all these activities to me in the form of an APA style research report. This process may also aid you in understanding your own online behaviors and those of your friends and family.

Specified Topics:
● Required Topic to research:
o Big Five Personality Factors and Facebook behavior
● Selective Topics – choose one additional research topic from below:
o Shyness and Facebook behavior
o Self Esteem and Facebook behavior
o Adult Attachment Style and Facebook behavior
o Narcissism and Facebook behavior

You must focus your library research efforts on personality psychology research and theory that has been or could be applied to understanding the motivations for Facebook behavior and how Facebook behavior may impact a person (self esteem for example). Your paper must include research on the Required Topic, and one additional topic from the Selective Topics list.

Assignment Components: There are several parts to this assignment and they have different due dates. However they all fit together into the final product. Staying on task will result in a higher quality final paper.
The components are below and due dates are as noted in the syllabus:
● References List & Annotations
● CITI research Ethics Online Training & Certification
● Introduction of Research Report
● Final Research Report; including title page, abstract, Introduction, Method, Results (provided by Dr. B), Discussion, and References