Bonus Article for Chapter 7 of Researchdesign explained
You may want to assign the firstfour pages of the following article:
Schmitt, D.P., & Shackelford, T. K. (2003). Nifty ways to leave your lover: Thetactics people use to entice and disguise the process of mate poaching. Personalityand Social Psychology Bulletin,
The authors use a survey design tostudy an interesting topic: the strategies people who are in relationships useto invite another person to try to have a relationship with them. In addition,the article is easy for your students to obtain (students who buy the book canget it by using the Infotrac® subscription that comes with Researchdesign explained), and the section of thearticle that we recommend assigning (pages 1018-1021) is short and relativelyeasy for students to read (to make it even easier to read, give students Table1).
| Table 1 Helping Students Understand the Article | |
| Section | Tips, Comments, and Problem Areas |
| Abstract | temporal context: comparing short term relationships versus long term relationships nexus: center, hub, place where things connect |
| Introduction | extradyadic: involving more than two people attuned: sensitive to, aware of, tuned into qualitative context … : type of relationship |
| Study 1: The psychology of mate poaching enticement | sex and temporal context … : whether the genders are different in their strategies and whether the strategies are different if the goal is a short term relationship versus a long term relationship. act nomination procedure: People are asked to write down (nominate) examples of behaviors (act) that might be performed in a particular situation (in this case, trying to form a new relationship) |
| Preliminary Study Results and discussion: | culled: gathered together after sifting out the less desirable items culled from: selected from |
| Table 1 | Cronbach’s a; Cronbach’s alpha: an index (that can range from 0 to 1) of the degree to which there is consistency between how participants answer one question on the measure with how the participant will answer other questions on the measure (see page 104). A high alpha (above .80) indicates that the subtest is internally consistent: people agreeing with one item on a subtest item tend to agree with other items on that same subtest. |