LA9, PART 2: APPLYING THE RESULTS OF A CORRELATION ANALYSIS Brett Fields Your objective: Apply the results of psychological

research to a real-world domain. Learning outcome: This assignment will provide experience in explaining data analysis results in a meaningful way. It is important to be able to not only convey the results of research to our academic colleagues in a scientific outlet (manuscript, poster), but also to disseminate this information to individuals unfamiliar with the details of data collection and analysis. The goal of this assignment is to help you develop the ability to use scientific research to provide recommendations to individuals outside of the scientific community. What to submit: Your consultation report, submitted as a Word document via BB. Grading criteria: You will be graded on three characteristics (1) the accuracy of the information you provide; (2) the coherence of your section, flowing in an integrated, well-organized and reasoned manner, and (3) the overall quality of your presentation of this information (style, effectiveness, clarity, grammar/syntax, etc.). It is common for psychologists to perform targeted research services for organizations seeking professional consultation: psychologists can use their extensive experience and expertise to perform research and provide consultation to clients. For example, a school district may hire a psychologist to address a particular question or concern about the educational progress of students, the effectiveness of varying teaching methods, etc. Suppose that Cincinnati Public Schools has hired you as a consultant on bullying. The CPS Board of Education has done some cursory internet searching, and has identified several risk factors that may lead to a student bullying others (for example, a student who has been the victim of bullying is at a higher risk of becoming a bully than a student who has never been bullied; a student who has difficulty following rules is at a higher risk of becoming a bully than a student who has no difficulty following rules; etc). One variable they found while searching that is indirectly related to bullying but could potentially be a risk factor was chronic absenteeism: that is, number of absences influences self-esteem levels (evidenced by your analysis results from Part 1 of this assignment), and self-esteem levels influence bullying behaviors (evidenced by the analysis results below).
Variable 1: Self-esteem level measured via Self-Perception Profile for Children (SPPC) score (same scale used in part 1 of assignment) Variable 2: Bullying behaviors measured via Childrens Social Behavior Self-Report Scale (CSBSRS) score (scores range from 15-75 with high scores indicating higher frequency of aggressive bullying behaviors)

Your contact at CPS is struggling to understand the relationship between absenteeism, self-esteem, and bullying. Use the results of your analysis done for Part 1 of this assignment, as well as the results of the analysis above, to write up a report (a few paragraphs, no less than 200 words) answering the following questions from your CPS contact, in a way that is understandable to someone unfamiliar with this research and the analysis methods used.

I understand there is a relationship between these three variables, but can you explain how they are related? One of our (potential) bullying prevention programs would encourage those students at risk for becoming bullies to stay home from school whenever they believe they might want to bully another student: does this seem like it will be an effective strategy in preventing bullying? Why/why not?

16 14 Number of Absences 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 12 17 22 27 32 37 42 47 SPPC Score R = 0.0645

As evidenced by the part 1 correlation analysis, students with higher absences give lower ratings of selfesteem. The correlation between these two variables (SPPC score and # of absences) has a coefficient of -0.2539. This means that as SPPC score increases, # of absences decreases. Therefore, the more a child misses school, the lower his or her self-esteem tends to be. The correlation analysis run by the Cincinnati Public School psychologist shows a similar negative correlation between SPPC score and bullying behaviors. The tendency to bully is measured by the CSBSRS score. The correlation analysis shows that as SPPC score increases, CSBSRS score decreases. This means that children with lower self-esteem are more likely to bully. Therefore, effective anti-bullying strategies would raise self-esteem to lower CSBSRS scores. Encouraging potential bully students to stay home would directly increase the number of absences the student has. Since we know from our part 1 analysis that increased absences lead to decreased self-esteem scores, encouraging students to stay home would decrease their overall self-esteem. Using the analysis run by the school psychologist, we know that lower self-esteem is correlated with higher bullying behaviors. Therefore, encouraging potential bullies to stay home from school would be an ineffective strategy to prevent bullying.