BEHV3004 Advanced Research Methods

Assignment 3: Report

Team/Individual task: Individual

Word/time limit: 1500 words (+/- 10% )

Weighting: 35%

Due date: 5pm AEST Sunday 3 August 2025 (Week 11)

After you have read this information, go to the Assignment 3 Q&A discussion board to ask any questions and see what your peers are saying about this assignment.

Assignment overview

This assignment is a mandatory submission, which means that in order to pass this subject of study, you must submit this assignment.

For this assignment, you will complete a partial psychology research report. You will be provided with a research scenario and a dataset for this scenario. You are required to write up this study as a research report in APA format. The report will include a brief rationale, a statement of aims and hypotheses, a method section, results and a brief discussion.

This assignment supports Subject Learning Outcomes 3 and 4

Assignment details

Read through the following steps to understand and meet the requirements of this assignment:

Step 1: Read the following research scenario:

You and your research team are interested in developing a community-based exercise program for older adults. The aim is to increase older adults' self-efficacy for exercise through their participation in either a 3-week Walking or Yoga program. The programs are designed for older adults who are living independently and have no reported mobility issues of concern. You have decided to include two separate age groups of older adults: a group of 65- year-olds, and a group of 75-year-olds.

Your research will have real-world implications as your local area health service would like to know whether one program is more effective at increasing older adults' self-efficacy for exercise scores than the other, so they can include it in their wider 'active ageing' health campaign in 2025.

Step 2: After reading this research scenario, you need to understand the research design. Use the following to summarise and make notes about the design of this study.

Describe the design:

identify the independent varible/s (IV's), factors and level/s. identify the dependent variable (DV)

Is the design between subjects, within-subjects, or mixed? What analysis would you run?

How would you allocate participants to groups?

Step 3: You will need to be familiar with the Self-Efficacy for Exercise Scale (PDF 79 KB). This scale was developed by Resnick and Jenkins (2000):

Testing the Reliability and Validity of the Self-Efficacy for Exercise Scale (Resnick & Jenkins, 2000).

This is the scale used to generate the dataset for this research design. Read the information in the document describing the scale before moving on to Step 4.

Step 4: Download the following dataset. This is given in both SPSS and Excel format. You require the SPSS file to run your analysis. Instructions on how to access and install SPSS is given in the Syllabus.

BEHV3004 Report dataset SPSS (SAV 2 KB)

BEHV3004 Report dataset Excel (XLSX 19 KB)

Note: You will need to open the SPSS dataset file in SPSS. Please ensure you have SPSS installed on your device before opening the file. The Excel version will be helpful for creating figures/tables for your report.