Ethics and Experimental Design

This course aims to equip students with the skills required to build a robust experimental design in psycholinguistics. We will first be looking at the steps required to build an experiment, to formulating a hypothesis and a research question, to determining factors impacting on an experiment (from internal to external factors). We will look then briefly at some examples of experiments in both production, perception and comprehension before thinking about the population to be tested, and the items to use in an experiment. We will consider some issues related to building and running an experiment. We will then build various types of experiments using PsychoPy and other platforms. Ethical considerations will be covered at various stages guiding students towards submitting their ethics application, if required, for their research design. Notions of statistics will be discussed with supporting documents provided.         

On successful completion of this course, students should be able to:             

• Understanding of how to design a psycholinguistic experiment
• Understanding the impact of choices made in experimental designs on outputs
• Understanding role of reproducibility and transparency in research and having an ethical study
• Understanding of key issues related to building and running an experiment
• Application of psycholinguistic methods in designing various types of experiments using PsychoPy and other platforms
• Understanding the type of statistical techniques adapted to their data
• Understanding ethical considerations to apply to their own research activity

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