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MSc Research Methods 1 Course Information

9 Week 2

9.1 Lab overview

By the start of week 2, you will be in your lab groups for the semester. In the lab this week, we will be covering two topics to help support your group work and start on the research project: finding and reading research, and starting the group work agreement.

In the first part, your lab lead will take you through strategies for finding, reading, and organising research. This applies to your group and individual report in RM1, but it is also a vital skill for every course you will complete. You will see tips such as identifying key words to use in search engines, stringing together multiple key words or phrases, and the kind of data bases that may be useful. The pre-lab reading task this week outlines this in more detail, but your lab lead will be highlighting key features.

Your lab lead will then introduce you to the general structure of the empirical psychology journal article. Reading an article sounds like an easy task, but research (e.g., Kershaw et al., 2018) consistently shows students struggle at first. Your pre-lab task is to read through a tutorial we created on the QALMRI method (Brosowsky et al., 2020) for questions to ask and information to identify as you work through articles. This might seem slow and formulaic at first, but you will get quicker as you get used to reading articles and identifying the key information.

In the second part for your group discussion, you will start on the group work agreement. You will be working with other students on the programme you probably have never worked with before, so you will work on building a shared understanding for how you and your group will work together, how you will communicate, and how you will share out the tasks that form your group stage one report. You will not finish this in the lab, it will just be a starting point for you to start working with your group.

9.2 Tasks to complete prior to your lab

  1. Read the Finding, Reading, and Organising Journal Articles chapter of the RM1 course book. This will explain strategies for finding research for your literature reviews and help you to identify key information in empirical articles using the QALMRI method. Note this is quite a long resource, so we do not expect you to work through the activities prior to the lab.

9.3 Tasks to complete after attending your lab

  1. Continue your discussions and work on the group work agreement.

  2. Create a group chat on Teams and add each member of your group. Groups may change until the start of week 3 when people can join or leave labs, so check back to make sure your group is up-to-date.

9.4 Next week

Now you are in your groups and you know how to find journal articles, you will start the ground work for your group stage one report.

Over the next few weeks, we will break down each section of an empirical journal article to dissect what information it contains. This will help you understand research you read, but also show you what you will need to do for your group and individual report.

In week 3, we will break down the introduction which outlines what research has been done on the topic before, why it is important to study that topic, and what the rationale is for conducting the specific study. We will break down the general structure of the introduction and outline different types of rationale you might see authors use to justify the aims of their research.

For the tasks to complete prior to your lab, you will complete an activity on identifying the rationale in articles. You will also try and identify one article that could fit in your group's introduction using the literature searching tips from week 2.