Stimulus Materials and Researcher Instructions –– Fall, 2017 – Belief in a Just World (BJW)
Student Instructions:
1). For your first experimental study, you will play the role of researcher, and you will collect data from three different participants. There are two phases to this study. In the first phase, you will orally ask participants if they are willing to participate in a research study. In the second phase, participants will complete a Three Part survey. They will: 1). Complete a demographics question, 2). Write a short description of a time they rejected someone / accepted someone / thought someone got what he or she deserved (our manipulation in this study), and 3). Read a short bullying scenario and then answer 17 questions about that bullying scenario and their general attitudes. To run this study, use the following steps:
A). Your first task is to approach three different participants (not all at the same time!). They must be people that you do not know, and cannot be taking a psychology research methods class during the Fall semester, 2017. Please DO NOT complete this study yourself, and use only FIU students as participants (no family / friends).
B). Phase I: Informed Consent
1). Informed Consent:
• Ask the potential participant if he or she is willing to participate in a study for your research methods class. You will get their informed consent verbally. Tell them:
“Hello, I am conducting a study for my research methods class. I was wondering if you would be willing to participate. The study takes about five to ten minutes. There are no risks to participating, and the main benefit is that I can complete my class assignment. Will you participate?”
• An oral Yes or No response is fine. If they say no, thank them and find a different participant. If they say yes, move to the next step (Phase II – Questionnaire).
C). Phase II: “Questionnaire”
1). General Instructions
• After getting participant’s oral informed consent, randomly give them ONE of the three “Research Study – Florida International University – Fall, 2017” documents. These documents contain our primary independent variable for the study. One third of our research participants will be in the “Rejection” condition (R), one third will be in the “Accepted” condition (A), and one third will be in the “Deserved” condition (D).
• Ask participants to follow the instructions at the top of the questionnaire. They will move through three “Parts” in this survey.
2). Questionnaire
• In Part I, we ask participants for their demographic information. Most of these items are easy to complete without violating participant’s privacy, but they will know that they are free to leave blank any question(s) they do not wish to answer in this section.
• In Part II, participants fill out an open ended question. This is the MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THE SURVEY, since it introduces our independent variable (he “Writing Condition”). This will vary among your three participants, so make sure one of them gets the Rejected Condition survey, one gets the Accepted Condition survey, and one gets the Deserved Condition survey.
o In the Rejected condition (denoted by the letter R at the bottom of the survey page), participants are asked to respond to the following open-ended question:
Below, please describe IN AS MUCH DETAIL AS POSSIBLE a situation where you rejected another person. This may involve a dating situation, a job situation, a school situation, or any other situation where you rejected someone else.
o In the Accepted condition (denoted by the letter A at the bottom of the survey page), participants respond to the following open-ended question:
Below, please describe IN AS MUCH DETAIL AS POSSIBLE a situation where you accepted another person. This may involve a dating situation, a job situation, a school situation, or any other situation where you accepted someone else.
o In the Deserved condition (denoted by the letter D at the bottom of the survey page), participants respond to the following open-ended question:
Below, please describe IN AS MUCH DETAIL AS POSSIBLE a situation where you thought someone got what he or she deserved. This may involve a dating situation, a job situation, a school situation, or any other situation where you think someone got what he or she deserved.
o Part II ends with two questions asking participants about how the situation makes them feel (good or bad, with 1 = strongly disagree to 6 = strongly agree). This is a manipulation check for us – we want to see if our manipulation worked! Since they ask the same basic question in opposite directions, we should see a strong negative correlation between the two (as one increases, the other decreases)
• In Part III, participants read a short paragraph about Anna, a high school student who is bullied. They then complete 14 questions about this scenario. Note that all questions use the same scale (1 = strongly disagree to 6 = strongly agree). Questions #1 through #6 are the most important, as they focus on whether Anna got what she deserved (a Just World notion). You’ll notice that these questions overlap a lot, which is by design. We can correlate these questions to see if participants respond to similar questions in a similar way! Questions #7 through #10 ask participants about how they would respond if they were in present (would they side with the bully or victim). Questions #11 through #16 are actually part of the formal Belief in a Just World scale (see Dalbert, 1999, if you want to see the validation of this scale!).We probably won’t analyze this in our research labs, but it will let us see the extent to which people in general feel the world is just (an “individual personality factor”). Finally, question #17 asks them to recall what they wrote about on page one. This is another manipulation check.
D). Once participants have completed the questionnaire, debrief them regarding the study. That is, tell them about the Belief in a Just World concept and your main hypothesis. Read them the following:
“Our study looks at the Belief in a Just World concept. This is based on the assumption that people have a strong desire or need to believe that the world is an orderly, predictable, and just place, where people get what they deserve. In other words, if something good happens to someone, they must have done something good to deserve it. Likewise, if something bad happens, they must have done something bad to deserve it as well. This belief system plays an important function in our lives. In order to plan our lives or achieve our goals, we need to assume that our actions have predictable consequences. When we encounter evidence suggesting that the world is not just, we quickly act to restore that justice by either helping the victim or persuading ourselves that no injustice has occurred. That is, either we lend assistance or we decide that the rape victim must have asked for it, the homeless person is simply lazy, the disgraced celebrity must be an adulterer, etc.
Our study explores the just world bias. We think that participants who recall a time when they rejected someone will know that victims do not always deserve to be victimized. They might feel a little guilty as well, since they rejected someone. Thus, for some participants, we asked them to write about a situation where they rejected someone. We think they will feel more compassion for a female victim in the bully scenario, and they won’t perceive her bullying as a just world phenomenon. We asked other participants to write about a situation where they either a) accepted someone else or b) thought someone got what he or she deserved. Since these participants are not rejecting another person, we think they might fall back on the just world bias, thinking that the victim might have done something that led to her bullying. Our study will attempt to see if this is the case.
We predict that participants in our rejection condition (who write about a time they rejected another person) will not engage in the just world bias to the same extent as those in the accepted or deserved conditions (where they write about a time they either accepted or thought someone got what they deserved). That is, participants in the accepted and deserved conditions will agree that a bullying victim’s personality, character, and behavior led to her bullying while participants in the rejection condition will disagree that her personality, character, and behavior led to her bullying.
Methods Students: Note that these three paragraphs are helpful when you write Paper I! In fact, you can use all three paragraphs in your first paper if you like. However, these paragraphs ARE NOT INCLUDED in your minimum page count. That is, you can copy/paste them, but they do not count!
2). Hold onto the completed questionnaires, as you will use them in an upcoming lab. You will enter data into SPSS and analyze it during your lab. Important note: Each student researcher is responsible for collecting data from three participants (one participant for each study condition – R, A and B). However, we will combine survey data from ALL students in your lab section, so your final sample will include at least 72 participants. In your papers (especially Paper II), you will use this total set of research participants (at least 72), NOT just the three that you collected yourself.
