Undergraduate FYP..

PsychChick

Hi all,

I am a final year psychology student and I am currently beginning to plan and research my final year project. I am looking at the area of social support and how expectations may impact on it's effects, personal or cultural expectations.

I have spent the last couple of weeks going through the literature in the area of social support. I have found a number of tools measuring the frequency of social contacts, perceived social support and the quality of social support. As of yet though, I am unsure of what methodology I should use to help answer my research question.

Any comments or suggestions on where I should go from here would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!:)

Valmont

PsychChick wrote: »

I am looking at the area of social support and how expectations may impact on it's effects, personal or cultural expectations.

I don't get this part?

PsychChick wrote: »

Any comments or suggestions on where I should go from here would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!:)

Once you're sure of the area that you would like to research, you should work towards establishing a workable research question. This is very important as all subsequent work will be oriented toward answering it. You could invest in a final year psychology project help book. Whenever I hit a bump, it was great having a general outline that I could work from. Hodges Figgis have a few.

PsychChick

I am looking at the relationship between social support and well being which so far has been seen as a linear one. It has been suggested that our own personal expectations or cultural expectations may influence how social support benefits us.
I am trying to figure out how I am going to measure this!
Thanks though I might invest in one of those books!:)

hotspur

So you are interested in assessing whether personal or cultural expectations affect the impact of social support on positive outcome measures. What exactly are these personal and cultural expectations you are referring to, do you mean specifically expectations about the nature, role, or effect of social support?

You have found tools to measure social support and there are obviously innumerable tools to measure health outcomes. So you will have to operationalise expectations related to social support. So either you will find an existing validated tool in the literature or you will have to create a simple one. This may create a challenge.

Then you will be interested in doing a regression analysis. The dependent variable is the health outcomes and social support is one independent variable and expectations related to social support is another independent variable. This should enable you to investigate whether expectations have an effect on health outcomes when social support is controlled for.

There is a multicollinearity issue as expectations of effects are unlikely to be unrelated to experiences of social support. But if the additive of expectations explains more variance in outcomes than social support alone then you will have shown something.

In general keep it simple, try to keep it as methodologically close to existing research as possible, you are not expected to produce wonderful new research at undergraduate level. If operationalising the expectations proves to be too tricky then have a rethink. And don't forget to avail of your tutor.

Best of luck with it