An annotated collection of more than 5000 links to resources and ideas for the teaching of social psychology and related courses organized by topic

Methods

= new link as of January 1, 2022

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Activities and Exercises

Bad survey questions - Sue Frantz links to a repository of bad survey questions and offers some excellent classroom activities to use with them. 

Can you tell which study was replicated? - In the last issue I shared an article describing a recent review of replications of social science articles published in Nature and Science.  Included in that review was an investigation as to whether researchers could guess which studies were replicated and which were not.  Now someone has turned that question into a fun online game that you and your students can play!

“Using the movies to illustrate the principles of experimental design”

Open Stats Lab - This relatively new site provides access to articles, their data sets, and activities instructors can use with the first two.  Very cool.  Created by a social psychologist, of course.

Why teaching methods is so important

Looking at a retracted study - This looks like a good study for your students to review in considering a number of methodological concerns.

Review of independent and dependent variables - a very interesting example to use

 

Enhancing table interpretation skills - good Teaching of Psychology article describing how to improve these skills by having students construct their own tables [added 12/13/13]

Free and easy Internet resources for stats and research design - good article from Jessica Hartnett in a recent Teaching of Psychology issue [added 8/13/13]

"Analyzing data from studies depicted on video" - The link above is to an article describing an interesting take on data analysis in the most recent issue of Teaching of Psychology. Here is supplementary material including a handout that goes with the assignment and descriptions/links to many of the videos. [added 8/13/13]

"Beyond Milgram: Expanding research ethics education to participant responsibilities" - a set of activities and resources from the Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology [added 3/5/13]

Beyond the Purchase - Here's an intriguing website developed by a few psychologists: "At BeyondThePurchase.Org we have developed studies that allow professors to introduce consumer psychology, the psychology of money, and positive psychology to their students through our interactive and academic website. If you will be lecturing on: (1) the effects of money primes on attitudes and behavior, (2) the psychological benefits of experiential buying, or (3) measuring happiness, personality traits, or values you can introduce these topics by having your students first take some of our studies. After students complete any survey or study, they receive personalized feedback and learn more about the psychological construct measured or manipulated. For example, if you are discussing how the mere exposure to money effects your attitudes and behavior, we have a between-groups study which primes half of the participant's with phrases that make them think about money--then all participants complete the Fair Market Ideology scale. This study is modeled on work done by Eugene M. Caruso, Brittani Baxter, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Adam Waytz (2012). On the feedback page we teach students about how thought about money, as suggested by previous research, makes people more likely to support free-market systems and believe they are fair. If you will be lecturing about the psychological benefits of experiential consumption, we have a within-groups study where participants reflect on both a material and experiential purchase (counter-balanced to control for order-effects) and answer questions about how the purchase improved their lives. Click on this link to see the Spending Choices and Happiness study. On the feedback page we teach students that that spending money on experiences makes people happier and contributes more to overall life satisfaction. Finally, if you are discussing topics like survey construction and usability, construct validity, or external validity, you can have students take any survey from our happiness and well-being surveys and have a class discussion. On each of these feedback pages we teach students how to interpret their scores on Subjective Well-being surveys. Barbara Lehman (from Western Washington University) developed a handout that helps professors facilitate a discussion about these topics in the classroom. If you are interested in using BeyondThePurchase.Org in your classroom, please email me at rhowell (at) sfsu (dot) edu and we can discuss how we could make this easy for you and your students. Also, if you are interested, we can develop an individualized link for your students so we can segment the data and provide you with de-identified data set for your student to examine in the class." [added 6/11/12]

Probability handout - Chris Wetzel provides this good formative assessment using a particular probability question. As many of you know, formative assessments are means of checking our students' understanding along the way, as well as an opportunity to give them some more practice with the concept or skill. The large and well-designed set of possible answers in this handout allows the instructor to really probe the students' thinking. Answers provided. [added 12/4/10]

Developing critical thinking skills in Social Psychology - My colleague Heather Coon and I embarked on a project to more systematically develop scientific thinking skills in our students. Click on the link to read about how we used brief research articles to develop a variety of thinking skills. You are welcome to use any of the materials. Feedback is always welcome. [added 9/20/08]

Recreating Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) in class - Jennifer Tickle presented a very interesting class activity at the 2007 SPSP teaching pre-conference. Remember the Bargh et al. study in which students were primed for old age, and then walked more slowly down the hall? Jennifer describes how you can recreate that study in your class and then discuss relevant social psychological and methodological issues. [added 7/7/07]

• Update: Jennifer shared some of her stimulus materials and a copy of the assignment for the above activity.
• Marcel Yoder used this activity in class. He then had a few questions about the demo for Jennifer. If you have used this activity or might consider it, I thought you might find Jennifer's replies helpful:
  • 1. Do you have the scrambled sentences? I didn’t, so I just had students create 4-word sentences using the elderly and neutral words.

    2. Do you do 30 items? I did 15 sentences in each condition and that seemed long.

    3. What did you have your class do as the participants worked on the task outside the room? I had my class do each list at the same time that the participants did it (to give them something to do, but it also allowed me to talk about within versus between designs given the class did within and the participants did between).

    Answers:

    "I’m glad to hear that you used the activity, and thanks for sharing how it worked for you. In response to your questions about the stimuli, I did create my own scrambled sentences using some of the words given in Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996). I have enclosed the sentence task that I use with the caveat that it may not be perfect and it has not been tested for anything more than my own classroom use! The attached document includes all the materials I use for the demonstration, including the sentence tasks I use. As you will see, for time reasons I only use 12 statements.

    As for your other question, while the first “participant” completes the scrambled sentence task I usually put one or two sample sentences up on the board so that the student can see what the “participant” is doing. Then, I usually just chat with the students a bit (I use this on the first day of class, so I get to know them a bit better). While the second “participant” does the task, I discuss the mood items. It does lead to some dead time for the observers in class, but the remainder of class is much more engaging for everyone. I don’t discuss too much about design until everyone is back in the classroom so that the volunteers don’t miss anything. When I get to the point that I am discussing that the IV is in the scrambled sentence task, I don’t actually have the students do the task, but I give them a handout with both versions on it and ask them to find out what is different (in other words, find the two sets of words) and I write the pairs that differ on the board as they find them. Then, I ask them to speculate what I might be manipulating by using those words. Usually there are a couple of close guesses that we discuss, and usually someone comes up with age as an idea which takes me to the topic of priming and stereotype activation. [added 1/13/10]

    
    

Correlation or Causation? - updated - I have added quite a few more links to my collection of popular press articles that often include questionable headlines. I use the links on this page to teach about the language of correlations versus causal relationships, the type of research commonly associated with each, and how to evaluate the quality and quantity of evidence to support such claims. I also have added an assignments section that includes brief tasks that could be used as in-class activities or out-of-class assignments. I would love to hear of any activity/assignment ideas you have or create to accompany this resource. I will add them to the site. Thanks. [added 1/1/07]


Illusory correlations - Excellent PowerPoint demonstration adapted and developed by Marcel Yoder -- You can send students to this link and they can complete the activity, or you can use this as an in-class activity. As Marcel suggests and research has demonstrated, this illusory correlation between distinctive events can also be connected to stereotyping and prejudice. Scott Plous provides a good description of such a link in his overview of prejudice research at the Understanding Prejudice website. [added 1/8/06]

"Demonstrating the importance of question wording on surveys" - Laura Madson, in an issue of Teaching of Psychology, provides an interesting exercise, with questions, for illustrating how easily survey wording can affect responses. Students are also able to practice data analysis. [added 3/3/05]

Statistics and research methods tutorials - good set of online tutorials on a variety of topics with a little interactivity for students [added 3/3/05]

SurveyWiz - This simple-to-use tool by Michael Birnbaum allows you or your students to create surveys for use on the Web or elsewhere. [added 6/9/04]

Thinking critically about causality and ethics - a few exercises for students to distinguish between correlations and causal relationships, from Julie Wright's Social Psychology course [added 4/06/04]

Evaluating scientific claims - Terry Humphreys presents his students with a nice, brief exercise on identifying common errors in evaluating scientific claims. Could be used as a brief paper assignment or an in-class activity, and, as Terry notes, it could be adapted for any psychology course including social. For the answer key, you can e-mail Terry at terryhumphreys@trentu.ca. [added 7/23/03]

Internal Validity Tutorial - "In Part 1 of this tutorial, you will be introduced to nine sources of threat to internal validity. First, some relevant terms are defined. Then, some background explanation for a hypothetical experiment is presented. Finally, each of the nine threats is described, followed by an example and a contrasting nonexample as applied to the hypothetical experiment. An explanation is included of why the example represents a threat to internal validity and why the nonexample is not a threat. "In Part 2 of this tutorial, you will be asked to classify 36 hypothetical experiments as internally valid or not. If not, you must select the threat to internal validity from one of the nine sources introduced in Part 1." [added 2/4/03]

Several activities - good activities or assignments on confounding variables, operational definitions, correlation coefficients and a few more

Participate in psychology experiments - at this site you can 1) have your students participate in lab experiments from which you can download (in an Excel spreadsheet) the class' data for in-class analysis, 2) have your students participate in ongoing, online studies, and 3) view demonstrations of experiments without participating

Challenging misconceptions - "An in-class demonstration that aids in combating belief in psychics and in a claim made by some philosophers of science"

Research Methods

Teaching about the different research methods - a collection of ideas and resources from the Teaching of Psych Idea Exchange [added 12/08/12]

Statistical Activities

Research readings and statistical exercises - This new resource from the Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology includes five collections of materials organized around five topics (including a social psych one). Each collection is introduced with a reading describing a research question, and then also includes Excel and SPSS data files as well as questions and answers for the research design. [added 6/10/12]

Teaching statistics and research methods - a nice collection of hands-on activities and demonstrations developed by Karen Holmes, Antonio Jemes, and Renita Stukes [3/29/09]

Data sets - The Center for the Teaching of Statistics makes 25 data sets available. [added 4/4/08]

"Web Interface for Statistics Education" (WISE) - links to tutorials, interactive exercises/demos, glossaries and more

Visualizing statistical concepts - a visual guide to learning probablility and statistics - created by Daniel Kunin

Causal and Statistical Reasoning - The folks at Carnegie-Mellon University have created an excellent instructional site on causal reasoning. (Note: I had difficulty making it work in Netscape Navigator, but I got most of it to work in Internet Explorer.) Click on "Guest Access" to enter and use the site. It includes extensive instructional modules with interactive demonstrations and exercises. You will need to check your "System Requirements" at the site to make sure you have the necessary downloads to make the modules and "Applets and Shockwave" lab to work. No extra software is needed to use the large number of case studies included which illustrate the media confusing causal relationships with correlations and other such phenomena. Very well done. [added 8/30/02]

Multimedia Resources (Video)

Audio

Debate between Stanley Milgram and Robert Orne (1:24:58) - fascinating discussion regarding demand characteristics and the ethics of experiments

"Can we trust psychological studies?" (10:14) - a podcast from Research Digest

 

Video

Writing good survey questions (5:27) - a good overview from the Pew Research Center

Research methods - The Pew Research Center is starting a video series on research methods, presumably mostly about survey methods.  See the first video here on sampling techniques.

How the media misrepresents scientific studies (19:27) - John Oliver on Last Week Tonight provides a very good and humorous take on this subject.

TED talks about statistics

Misrepresentation of statistics in the media - (4:14) an excellent example and discussion from Gerd Gigerenzer [added 12/13/13]

Deconstructing media polls - (5:30) Embedded in this blog entry is an excellent video clip from The Daily Show on why we should be skeptical of polls presented by TV news shows. [added 1/15/10]

Statistics video series - (5:26) a video instructional series containing 26 half-hour programs on statistics is now available on the Web. [added 12/27/06]

 

Class Assignments

Projects

Data sets - "A secondary purpose of the EAMMi2 was to generate a data set that instructors could use to teach statistics and research methods for years to come. Now that the data set is publicly available and the first round of manuscripts are working through the publication process, we wish to invite faculty and students to use our data for learning or future scientific pursuits."

Make your own IAT - FreeIAT lets you or your students create your Implicit Association Tests. [added 4/01/13]

Paper Assignments

Writing research proposals - Leigh Ann Vaughn graciously shares these PowerPoint slides and writing exercises from a workshop she gave on writing undergraduate research proposals in psychology.  Thanks.

Research Analysis Assignment - [added 12/12/12]

Developing critical thinking skills in Social Psychology - My colleague Heather Coon and I embarked on a project to more systematically develop scientific thinking skills in our students. Click on the link to read about how we used brief research articles to develop a variety of thinking skills. You are welcome to use any of the materials. Feedback is always welcome. [added 9/20/08]

Correlation or Causation? - updated - I have added quite a few more links to my collection of popular press articles that often include questionable headlines. I use the links on this page to teach about the language of correlations versus causal relationships, the type of research commonly associated with each, and how to evaluate the quality and quantity of evidence to support such claims. I also have added an assignments section that includes brief tasks that could be used as in-class activities or out-of-class assignments. I would love to hear of any activity/assignment ideas you have or create to accompany this resource. I will add them to the site. Thanks. [added 1/1/07]

How can Psychologists Obtain Accurate Measurements? - This is an assignment from Karen Gasper's Self and Social Judgment course in which she asks students to visit the IAT site, another measurement site, read a linked article and answer a few questions in response. [added 7/23/03]

Confounded variables assignment - several scenarios are presented for which students are to identify the independent, dependent and confounding variables, and describe how to "unconfound" the experiment - good in-class activity also

Operational definitions assignment - students practice operationally defining terms and distinguishing between correlational and experimental questions - possible in-class activity

Correlation coefficients assignment - students practice verbally and graphically describing different coefficients - possible in-class activity

Examples

Topic Resources

Correlation and causation in parenting - I don't think Sam Sommers would expect me to put this blog entry under Methods, but that is where I am going to use it in my teaching. His column provides an excellent example of while correlation does not imply causation, the lack of correlation can suggest the lack of causation. [added 12/24/12]

WEIRD subjects in psychology studies - Below is an article about how students at the end of the semester may be different from those at the beginning as participants and those online may be different than face-to-face participants. This article warns about our reliance on WEIRD participants: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratized. [added 5/31/11]

Time of semester, online or not, affects type of participant - Students who sign up for studies online and earlier in the semester are a little bit different. [added 12/28/10]

What are online research participants really doing? - Blog entry describes research on a new tool (a piece of computer code called UAT -- UserActionTracer) that permits online researchers to track the actions of the participants. [added 10/30/10]

An online research methods textbook - [added 1/19/10]

Correlation does not imply causation - Great cartoon! However, as was pointed out to me, since it is only a single instance it really isn't a correlation either. [added 4/25/09]

"Exotic culture that never was" - I cannot vouch for the complete accuracy of these blog posts, but they describe some fascinating tales of scientific mischief and misinterpretation. Second entry; third entry. [added 6/7/08]

Free resources for methods in program evaluation and social research - a sociological methods site with a large number of links to resources on topics such as surveys and qualitative research [added 7/24/06]

"Correlation still isn't causation" - Good series of back-and-forth letters to the APS Observer on this issue that could be good for your students to review and discuss [added 7/6/06]

"Do rats show a Mozart effect?" - interesting analysis of how research results can be misinterpreted and misrepresented using an effect that has received wide-spread media attention [added 4/5/04]

"Fallacies and pitfalls in psychology" - Kenneth Pope provides an excellent list of 18 logical fallacies and psychology-related examples of them. [added 3/30/04]

"Tutorials" on several topics - David Kenny provides some clearly written explanations of a variety of methodological and interpersonal perception topics. [added 7/16/03]

Another online research methods text [added 7/10/02]

Research methods tutorial - some good info and quiz questions at the end of each section [added 3/21/02]

"Research in the Psychological Laboratory: Truth or Triviality?" - Anderson, C.A., Lindsay, J.J., & Bushman, B.J. (1999). Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8, 3-9. Scroll down page to link to view entire article

Replication Efforts

Predicting whether a replication will succeed or fail - Very interesting study in which they asked experts to predict prior to a replication whether a replication would fail or not.  Turns out the experts were quite good at predicting which would fail.  Here is another large replication project of 21 social science studies published in either Nature or Science.

Re-replication of the facial feedback phenomenon - This story provides a great example of how science is tentative and how our understanding of the world is always evolving.

Ten famous psych studies that have been difficult to replicate - We have to rethink some of our classroom demonstrations.  The link is to the article on the 10 studies.  Also, here is an essay from Dana Carney, first author one of the famous studies on how "power poses" can create neuroendocrine changes and promote increased risk tolerance, responding to recent reviews and a meta-analysis finding no such effect.  Her response has been hailed as a very positive and appropriate acknowledgment of the role of replication in science.

"Do psychology findings replicate outside the lab?" - This blog entry discusses a comparison of lab and field results. Overall, the lab findings fared well out in the real world. However, social psychology was one of the weaker areas. [added 7/8/12]

Specific Methods

Observational research of norms

The SAGE model - Several psychologists propose that a model of research that integrates field and lab study, quantitative and qualitative methods, can better address some complexities of human behavior in real world settings.

Using the Internet for research - APS Observer article describes some of the newer tools possible. [added 8/13/13]

Day Reconstruction Method example (Are you enjoying yourself? How do we know?) - One method of measuring your level of happiness or enjoyment is through Kahneman's Day Reconstruction Method in which participants "divide the last day up into discrete episodes and rate their feelings during each one." However, as this blog entry describes, that method led to some "bizarre" results such as "people seem to spend an inordinate amount of time doing things they claim not to enjoy, like spending time with their children, and commuting." (I just realized, I've been commuting to work with my children the last couple years. Yikes!) A new approach suggests asking people not only how they feel during these activities but also how worthwhile or meaningful (i.e., rewarding) they are. Adding such questions to the method changes what people report as enjoyable. Spending time with children is still a common activity, but now it is described as more pleasurable. Commuting .... not so much. [added 1/19/10]

Structural equation modeling - links to relevant resources [added 4/5/04]

"The Two Disciplines of Scientific Psychology" - Cronbach's presidential address to the APA (1957) in which he describes the two "streams" of research (experimental and correlational)

"New Poll Shows Correlation is Causation" - humorous, mock article reporting what everyone always knew!

Surveys

"Using Pew Research Center Race and Ethnicity data" - Some interesting examples and suggestions

Sampling bias - Here's a good example.

“Pew Research compares forced-choice versus check-all response options” - In Pew’s report they found that “Response options matter, such that more participants agreed with statements when they were in the forced-choice format.” Links on this page take you to the short and long versions of the report.

Nick Jonas takes the “which Jonas Brother are you" quiz (1:56)

Sampling bias in the 2016 U.S. presidential election - an analysis of one reason the polls were off in the election

How NOT to report survey data - some survey advice/humor linked to at Jessica Hartnett's blog Not awful and boring examples for teaching statistics [added 8/13/13]

"A brief guide to questionnaire development" - [added 12/24/12]

How many gays and lesbians are there? - This blog entry reviews a Gallup poll of Americans on this question. However, I would suggest there is an anchoring effect. The scale is skewed so much towards the higher responses that it is not surprising that participants apparently overestimated the number. [added 8/20/11]

Surveys: The importance of interviewer-respondent interaction - "This study uses data collected from 90 never-married young adults in rural Malawi to compare reports on first sexual encounters between a standard survey and an in-depth interview. A significant fraction of young women who claimed in the survey to have never been sexually active affirmed sexual experience during the in-depth interview, fielded shortly thereafter." [added 7/17/10]

"What is a survey?" - a book online about creating good surveys by Fritz Scheuren [added 3/23/08]

A blog on analyzing polling data - "Political arithmetik: Where numbers and politics meet" is a blog from Charles Franklin, a professor of political science, in which he explains political bias in polls, the statistical analysis of them, and more. Lots of good examples and very detailed analysis. [added 7/6/06]

CensusScope - provides access to Census 2000 data and trends back to 1990 and 1980 with reports on topics such as segregation - presented by the Social Science Data Analysis Network at the University of Michigan [added 3/23/04]

"Best practices for survey and public opinion research" - advice and ethical guidelines from the American Association for Public Opinion Research [added 7/10/02]

"In defense of self-reports" - APS Observer article by Rebecca Norwick, Y. Susan Choi, and Tal Ben-Shachar [added 3/21/02]

Evaluation Research

Evaluation resources - a lot of information about different data collection tools and processes involved in evaluation, from the Innovation Network [added 3/21/02]

Free resources for methods in program evaluation and social research - Extensive set of quality links to survey methods and other research topics [added 3/21/02]

Critical Thinking in Psychology

"How to be a wise consumer of psychological research" - from APA

Media misrepresents study...again - What I like about this blog entry describing research that finds that overhearing cell phone calls is more annoying than distracting is that the entry provides links to media articles that completely misrepresent what was found. Good examples for your students. [added 8/13/13]

The perils of confusing correlation and causation - [added 5/31/11]

Do girls prefer pink? - a good description of how the media often overblows research findings [added 11/18/07]

"Diet of fish 'can prevent' teen violence" - interesting example of how media can distort research findings [added 11/20/03]

Critical thinking about evidence - "the six rules of evidential reasoning" from James Lett

Ethical Considerations

APA Ethics Code

Statistical Stuff

Descriptive data from the Crisis Text Hotline - some interesting suggestions about how you might use this data

Using elections to teach about effect sizes

“For the Love of Teaching Undergraduate Statistics” - A new, freely available online textbook

Does the Implicit Association Test (IAT) have construct validity? - Not according to this review

Funny stats tweets - No, that’s not an oxymoron.

Two websites that provide datasets for teaching

“Web pages that perform statistical calculations!”

New tools for increasing the power of studies - from psychological scientists Samantha F. Anderson, Ken Kelley, and Scott E. Maxwell

Cohen's d effect size visualization

Open Stats Lab - This new site provides a wealth of resources for the teaching of statistics through a variety of data sets.

The limits of null-hypothesis testing - excellent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Bayes for Beginners - APS President C. Randy Gallistel introduces readers to Bayesian statistical analysis in these two columns.

Spurious correlations - Here's a great collection. [added 6/15/15]

New statistics blog - Jessica Hartnett has started a new blog: "Not awful and boring examples for teaching statistics." Lots of good examples and ideas. [added 8/13/13]

Dataset generator - Richard Landers has developed a program which will create datasets for you. [added 8/13/13]

SPSS tutorials and movies - The link is from UCLA Academic Technology Services. This link takes you to more video tutorials for SPSS. To view them click on the PASW (SPSS) selection on the right. This link is to another good tutorial from Amherst College. [added 1/29/12]

Statistics resources - CAUSEweb presents lots of good instructional resources for undergraduate statistics including lesson modules, computer and hands-on activities, datasets, analysis tools, and multimedia. [added 1/29/12]

"I'll bet you don't understand error bars" - a nice little quiz (and explanation) for you and your students [added 7/14/07]

Use and misuse of statistics and data - This link takes you to STATS, a site which presents and analyzes lots of good examples of uses and misuses of statistics. [added 12/31/06]

Tutorial for R - a tutorial for the statistical program R [added 1/15/06]

Statistics workshops - a collection of tutorials from Thomson Learning [added 1/9/06]

Methods: Baseball Salaries Database - Want some data for your students to analyze? I see some relative deprivation here! [added 11/11/03]

Statistical computing resources [added 11/11/03]

An introduction to sampling "Web Interface for Statistics Education" (WISE) - links to tutorials, interactive exercises/demos, glossaries and more

Statistical Assessment Service - "a nonprofit nonpartisan organization, examines the way that scientific, quantitative, and social research is presented by the media, and works with journalists to help them convey this material more accurately and effectively" - contains lots of good examples of how statistics are used and misused in the media

Statistical and research methods concepts - good review of concepts effectively using graphics and text

Hyperstats - well-designed, online stats "text"

Simulations and demonstrations - excellent set of java simulations on many stats concepts

Gallery of Data Visualization - "The best and worst of statistical graphics" - good examples of how graphs can be used effectively and used to "lie"