Assignment 3

Written Assignment

Psychological/Sociological Aspects of Sport

Spring 2001

For this paper, you will be designing an experiment, conducting the experiment and then writing about the paper according to how research is documented in the literature. The topic should be about something related to either sport psychology or sport sociology that has interested you and needs further examination. Your paper should be approximately 4-6 pages and should cover the following 5 sections (introduction, methods, results, discussion, references):

You do not need a summary or abstract for your paper, but start with introduction.

I. Introduction

A. Discuss why this topic is important to the field of sport psychology/sociology.

B. Describe a theory relevant to your area of interest.

C. Next, you should explain what is the problem and what has been researched in the past. You can get some of this information from our book, but you will also need to get three outside references for your paper. (Hint: go to the library and use Psychlit or sportdiscus, if you do not know how to use it, see the reference librarian)

This section should be at least 2 pages.

Note :Do not put AI feel@ or AI think@, instead write Athe research has indicated@

Note: This section should have some theoretical position, if possible.

C. What are your predictions (hypotheses)?

We hypothesized that.......

Note: Be specific: only state hypotheses to what you are measuring.

Hint#1 Work backwards from hypotheses. First determine what your hypotheses will be, then set up the introduction establishing why these are your hypotheses.

Hint#2 You are simply telling a story in this section. Except, you are telling a story in an academic framework.

Hint #3 All good writing has flow from one paragraph to next.

II. Methods

A. Who will be your subjects and why. What will be their ages? You need to only get two or three friends for this project. If you want to actually test many subjects, see me about writing a human subjects form.

B. What will be the tasks used? Describe in detail.

C. What is your procedure for testing? What groups are you using?

How long is your testing ? How many trials? What are you doing different for each group?

Most of the students will be doing a qualitative study(interview procedure). In this case, provide the questions used in the back of the paper (in the appendix)

Hint: write the methods so that someone could copy your study very easily.

III. Results.

A. Do not worry about how to correctly write the statistics. Just give some Mean values for each group. Can put them in table or graph for pretest and posttest measures.

If a qualitative study is done, develop higher order themes and general themes from the raw data as demonstrated in Jackson study given to you.

IV. Discussion.

A. What did you find? Did it support your hypotheses? If your findings did not confirm your hypotheses, you want to discuss why.

B. Describe how this information relates to the theory you described in the introduction

C. Describe how these findings have implications to coaching or teaching.

D. Give your recommendations for future research.

This section should be at least one-two pages.

V. References.

A. You need to reference all the material you cite in the paper. You need to have at least five references with three coming from outside the text.

B. Look at How I referenced materials for both journals and books.

Ex. Authors names first, year of publication. Title of article, Title of journal or book, page numbers of article.

C. Only cite the references you used in the paper.

Two due dates for this paper

March 20: outline of introduction (topic sentences for paragraphs only), hypotheses and methods (10 points)

April 3: Final paper completed (50 points)

Paper must be typewritten with no spelling errors. Use APA style throughout paper.

Grade will be based on both content and form.