Fourth Year Research Project Guidelines

The following assessment information can be found on this page:

• Ethics Registration form and dates
• Project Proposal
• Ethics Approval Procedures
• Ethical Treatment of Human Participants
• Mini Conference
• Thesis Abstract
• Guidelines for Writing Your Fourth Year Thesis

Research Project associated activities

Ethics Registration Form

Your ethics application must be registered at the Psychology General Office to expedite the ethics approval process.

Project Proposal

The aim of the project proposal is to enable evaluation of your proposed study, and to ensure that any difficulties are identified. The proposal should be discussed with your supervisor prior to submission.

The document should provide reviewers with an outline of your project, giving sufficient detail to enable reviewers to make constructive comments that may then be incorporated into the project design. Each project proposal would be reviewed by two academic staff members and students will receive written feedback from reviewers.

The proposal should include the following headings:

• Background: brief literature review
• Aims and hypotheses
• Methodology - participants, procedure, design
• Proposed statistical analyses
• Expected outcomes

Length: no more than 4 pages.

There is a cover sheet for the project proposal that needs to be included and is available from the Psychology Office. Copies of it will be distributed in your pigeon-holes closer to the date.

Ethics Approval Procedures

The Department's Ethics Officer can provide advice and assistance with ethics approval procedures. For further information check the Department Ethics webpages.

Human Research Ethics Committee

All research conducted by students and staff must conform to the codes of professional conduct established by the profession. Students should be familiar with the Code of Ethics of the Australian Psychological Society, the provisions of the Victorian Psychological Practices Act, and NHMRC guidelines. The APS Code of Professional Conduct is available from the Psychology Office for a nominal cost.

Before any research is conducted students must complete a Human Research Ethics Committee application form and receive approval for their project, as all research needs to be approved by the Committee on Human Research Ethics. All ethics requests must conform with NHMRC guidelines.

The Human Research Ethics Committee requires that all raw data from an approved project be retained for at least five years after its publication. As student theses are not official publications, this means that raw data have to be retained indefinitely after submission of the thesis until published formally, and for five years thereafter.

Additional information or amendments required by the HREC

If the University's Human Research Ethics Committee requires that you submit additional information or amendments to your application, you must also provide a copy to the Psychology Ethics Officer for your department file.

External ethics applications

If the research project is to be conducted in an external institution with a properly constituted ethics committee (such as a hospital), then ethical clearance is to be obtained within that institution. Once ethics approval has been obtained, two copies of the ethics application and approval correspondence from the external institution must be submitted to the Psychology Ethics Officer for DHEAG endorsement.  Once endorsed, the project can commence and a copy of the paperwork will be forwarded to the University's Ethics Committee for noting.  However, please note that if you are also intending to use University of Melbourne students or staff in your project (eg. control groups) you must also obtain ethics approval from this University.

Amendments to current projects

If amendments are required to your project after ethics approval has been granted, these must be submitted to the Department Ethics Officer in writing for DHEAG approval. Please refer to the Departmental amendment procedures.  A copy will then be forwarded to the University's Human Research Ethics Committee for final approval.

Ethical Treatment of Human Participants

Ethics Committee approval is obligatory to undertake a research project. It is given conditional on students conducting their research in a way that conforms to the principles governing the ethical treatment of human subjects. For populations of normal, adult participants, the student's two primary responsibilities are to obtain informed consent from the subjects before beginning to collect data and to provide appropriate debriefing when the data collection is completed.

"Informed consent" means that students explain to their participants fully the procedures that will be used in the research. For example, if students are administering a questionnaire, or requiring people to respond to material presented on a computer screen, or taking physiological recordings, they must inform participants of the details of these procedures. It does not, of course, require disclosure in advance of the particular hypotheses that are being tested in the study. With normal, adult participant populations the Ethics Committee normally requires that students obtain a signed Informed Consent form from each participant as proof that informed consent has been given. A standard consent form that may be used for this purpose is available from the Psychology Office. For special participant populations (e.g. children) these procedures may vary somewhat; details should be discussed with the student's supervisors.

"Debriefing" means that participants are provided with an account of why students were conducting the research, what hypotheses or theories they were testing and, ideally, what was found. How this information is provided may vary depending on the nature of the project. Students may provide each subject with a verbal debriefing immediately after their participation or they may provide a written information sheet when the project as a whole is complete. Note that appropriate debriefing is particularly important when using participants from the first year research participation scheme, because a condition of the operation of the scheme is that the experience provides educational benefit to the participants. This condition cannot be met if adequate debriefing information is not provided. Failure to give such debriefing is therefore regarded as a serious violation of research ethics.

All theses submitted for assessment to the School of Behavioural Science that have used human subjects must contain, at the beginning, a signed declaration stating that the participants were treated in an ethical manner. This declaration should be in the following form:

"I (full name) declare that the research reported in this thesis was conducted in accordance with the principles for the ethical treatment of human subjects as approved for this research by the University of Melbourne Human Research Ethics Committee. (Signature and date.)"

This declaration represents the student's guarantee that appropriate ethical guidelines were followed throughout the conduction of the research. Students should be aware that the University regards breaches of approved ethical guidelines as serious. The School of Behavioural Science may deem serious breaches to be grounds for refusal to accept a thesis for assessment.

Research Participants

In many cases it will not be possible to obtain data from as many participants as is normal in a typical study in the chosen field. This is no great problem. We are most interested in your ability to carry out and report research. However, the number of participants that should be tested is part of your design. A research participation program (RPP), using First Year Psychology students, will be available for fourth year projects. Access to the research participation program will occur via your supervisor. Before using the research participation scheme, however, you need to ensure these participants are appropriate to your study.

Because of the severe practical constraints for fourth year projects, outside institutions are not normally available as a source of participants, unless the student's supervisor has special access to a specific institution. Where you have special access to appropriate participants, you should consult with your supervisor and obtain an introductory letter before approaching any institution. Unavailability of participants or data are not grounds for an extension , since proper planning should take participant availability into account.

The Department has set a limit of 80 hours of research participation time for fourth year students, which will normally be sufficient for fourth year projects. Students can apply for additional hours if the needs of a particular project warrant this.

Mini Conference

Fourth year students are required to present a status report on their Research Project at a student conference to be held in the Department early in semester two. This gives students an opportunity to present their work in a formal conference setting, and receive constructive feedback on the Project while it is still being drafted. Further details about the conference will be provided in semester 2.

The purpose of the Mini Conference is to give an opportunity:

• To reflect on your project, so that you can begin to think about how to write up your results in a thesis.
• To present your data to your colleagues and lecturers, so that you may obtain valuable feedback on your research.
• To have a taste of what it is like to participate in a scientific conference as a psychologist, that is, the experience of orally presenting your work, exchanging constructive criticisms of each other's work, and obtaining the most up-to-date information in psychological research.

Here is a guideline for preparing your presentation.

• A scientific conference is a collegial activity in which you not only participate in the exchange of ideas, but also express your support for your colleagues' research. Contribute to discussions and help your colleagues during their presentations as well as after them.
• It is a matter of professional courtesy to attend all sessions at a scientific conference. You are expected to attend one of the three parallel sessions on all dates.
• You will have 15 minutes for your presentation. This includes both your presentation itself and a short period (2-3 minutes) for some questions and answers. If you need more time for discussing some intricate aspects of your research, you can take some time after the session.
• No power point presentation is allowed. Overhead projectors are available for all sessions.
• Your presentation would typically have four sections: introduction, method, results and discussion.
• Try to spend most of your time presenting your results. If you do not have your results yet, expand your method section and discuss your research design, and also spend some time describing your plan for data analysis and expected results, and discussing these issues.
• The introduction section should give your audience enough information to understand why you are doing the study, and to describe research questions and /or hypotheses. Relevant literature may be reviewed briefly only to explain the reason for doing your study. Don't spend too much time talking about everything you have read for the thesis.
• The method section should give your audience enough information to follow your results, and would typically include a description of participants, research design, procedure, and materials used.
• You should present your results so that you can justify the conclusions you are drawing in your discussion section.
• Your discussion section should address your research questions and hypotheses, and often include some discussions about what the implications of your study are, limitations of your study might be, and what you might do differently if you were to do a similar study again.

Thesis Abstract

There will be two markers of your thesis, one will be an expert marker and the other, a generalist marker. In order to help with the selection of the most suitable expert marker you are required to send the following information in an electronic format to Marianela Delgado-Henriquez by Tuesday 17 October 2006:

1. your name
2. your supervisor
3. thesis title
4. an abstract of your thesis (200 words)

Once all this information is received, thesis title and your abstracts will be sent out to Faculty members, so that they can select theses that they feel comfortable about marking as an expert. In other words, potential markers will read your titles and abstracts to make their selections.

It is understandable that minor aspects of your title and abstracts may change after sending them to us, and that is acceptable. A good, informative title with a well done abstract will ensure that your marker will be making informed decisions.

Guidelines for Writing Your Fourth Year Thesis

Thesis Presentation

1. A thesis should be bound (e.g., spiral, thermal folder) with a plastic sheet covering the front of the thesis for protection.
2. Double spaced (1.5 spacing is acceptable).
3. Follow the APA style.
4. Submit three typed copies.
5. A thesis usually contains the following sections;

   Front Matter

   • Cover Page (Thesis title, name, supervisor's name, word count - see below)
   • Declaration (see below)
   • Acknowledgments
   • Table of contents
   • List of tables (if any)
   • List of appendices (if any)

   Main Body

   • Abstract
   • Introduction
   • Method
   • Results
   • Discussion

   End Matter

   • References
   • Appendices (if any)

The declaration (second page of the thesis) should read:

"I, (your name), declare that the thesis is my own work, except where acknowledged, and that the research reported in this thesis was conducted in accordance with the principles for the ethical treatment of human subjects as approved for this research by the University of Melbourne Human Research Ethics Committee."

The word limit is 10,000 words.

The number of words in a thesis should be counted excluding the front matter (e.g., title, acknowledgement, table of contents), abstract, tables, figures, references, and appendices, and students must state the number of words in the front page of their thesis.

Points will be deducted if the number of words exceeds the word limit.

The following rule will be used to compute the deduction. Round down to the nearest integer the quotient obtained by applying the formula: (total - 10,000)/1,000. So, if the number of words is 12,546, 2 points will be deducted from the mark the thesis is awarded.

Students must write their discussion sections independently without the direct assistance of their supervisors.

Although supervisors may discuss issues pertaining to the discussion section with their students, the students must write this section of the thesis on their own without specific input from their supervisors. In other words, the supervisors will not read or edit drafts of the discussion section. The purpose of this requirement is to give students an opportunity to develop their own independent ideas and to present what they are capable of doing as independent researchers. The spirit of the requirement dictates that the students should not receive any input from other people (including other staff members, graduate students, family, friends, and acquaintances) on their writing.

A discussion section of a thesis should contain at least (but not be limited to) the following points:

1. a concise summary of the results in relation to the initial research questions and hypotheses;
2. implications of the results within the context of the literature discussed in the introduction section;
3. weaknesses of the research reported in the thesis;
4. a brief description about what should be done next (e.g., a follow up study that rectifies the weakness of the current research); and
5. a summary and conclusion.