Methods & Planned Analysis FOR Schizophrenia and Gender

Methods & Planned Data Analysis The Methods section should include precisely the steps necessary for you to carry out your study. It should contain a comprehensive list of procedures, as well as a copy of the survey instrument should one be utilized. A sample Methods section is included. Following this should be a Planned Data Analysis section that includes a description of your dependent variables as well as the analyses you will use to complete your project. This should be at minimum 1 page. You will receive feedback on this draft, and you should use that feedback on organization, references, and editing to make revisions to the final paper that is a combination of the literature review, methods, results and discussion. Sample Methods Section: Method Participants Forty-nine undergraduate students recruited from the University of South Carolina Psychology Department’s participant pool participated in this experiment for course credit. All participants provided informed consent in accordance with the university’s IRB. All participants were native speakers of American English. Apparatus Participants’ eye movements were recorded using a stationary chin rest ASL 6000 which sampled eye position at 240 Hz. Visual stimuli were presented on a 19” Dell CRT monitor positioned 62 cm directly in front of participants. The experiment was controlled by a Dell computer running the E-prime software (Schneider, Eschman, & Zuccolotto, 2002). Materials As shown in Figure 1 and Table 1, each item consisted of a pictorial display showing four objects arranged in the corners of a 3 x 3 grid, and a corresponding three sentence discourse. The pictorial displays were taken from Yee and Sedivy (2006) and included 24 experimental, 48 2 filler, and four practice displays. Experimental displays showed two semantically related objects (e.g., cat and mouse), and two objects whose names matched the names of the semantically related objects for word frequency (see Yee & Sedivy, 2006 for a complete description of these pictures). The three sentence discourses described the location of the objects in the grid, and were presented one by one after the display was shown for 2 seconds. Participants were given these 2 seconds in order to familiarize themselves with the objects and their location in the grid before hearing the auditory description, which they had to verify. Because participants had ample opportunity to view the display before the auditory description started and because we were primarily interested in the eye movements during the third sentence in the auditory description, it is not likely that idiosyncratic visual properties of the depicted objects affected our critical data. Sentence 1 began by describing the location of the target referent (one of the semantically related objects) in relation to an unrelated object using definite references. Sentence 2 always referred to the target using a pronoun, and described the absolute position of the target in the grid without referring to any other object. Sentence 3 varied by condition as described earlier, and was the critical sentence used for analysis. Verbal stimuli were recorded by a native female speaker of American English (S.A.P.) and were edited using sound editing software. All the experimental items included the same recorded version of Sentences 1 and 2. Sentence 3 was recorded separately for each condition. Items were presented in a random order that was different for each participant. Each participant was presented with each experimental item once such that s/he responded to 8 items in each condition. Across all participants, each item appeared in each condition a similar number of times. Experimental items were always true, and 12 of the 48 fillers were also true, such that 3 overall the verbal descriptions in exactly half of the trials were true. Procedure The experiment began with 4 practice trials, before which the experimenter calibrated the eye tracker using a 9-calibration point procedure. Calibration was repeated every four trials during the experiment. Four participants for whom accuracy was below 80% were not included in the analyses. Participants were told that they would be looking at pictorial displays and hearing short discourses. Participants were instructed to listen to the discourses and decide whether they accurately described the pictorial displays. At the end of the recorded discourse, the pictorial display was replaced with a screen instructing participants to indicate their response by clicking on the words “True” or “False”. Participants were informed that even one false statement in the discourse made the entire discourse false. When participants clicked on the true or false button, they were given immediate feedback on their accuracy. Response accuracy was recorded to ensure that participants were performing the task. The data from 3 participants whose accuracy was lower than 3 standard deviations below the median accuracy of all participants were removed from the analysis. In addition, 3 participants were also removed because proper calibration was not maintained throughout the course of the experiment. The data from the remaining forty-two participants are reported below. Planned Data Analysis Your planned data analysis should include a description of the statistical tests you plan on using. For example, if you will be utilizing ANOVA, please describe the test and why you chose it. Other common analyses you may consider depending on your groups and hypotheses, include ttests, correlations, descriptive statistics (such as histograms, polygons), and Chi-Square analyses. 4 In order to help with the analyses, when you have finished collecting your data and have transferred it to a spreadsheet, you need to set up a second meeting. This does not need to be accomplished before you turn in the Methods and Planned Data Analysis section.