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Final year dissertation
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
:eek: :nervous: ....ok havent got a clue what to do it on!im a third year psychology student and if there is anyone who could give me a few links of how to go about starting it or even ideas on what to do it on it would be much appreciated!
Post edited by JustV on
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Obviously you have a lot of different areas of psychology so pick ones that you feel you could do well writing about, and that are easily testable (eg. things within the area of cognition might be quite easy to test, whereas stuff to do with child or adult clinical psychology is likely to be more difficult).
As I said before, look at studies that you've read/about previously - you must have come across loads - and think about their weaknesses or how they could be improved, or studies that would be useful to do in relation to existing ones, and work from there. Might also be useful to think about what sort of design you would be interested in using - would you like to just distribute questionnaires, or have participants carry out a practical task, or both?
Perhaps consider some of the material in the modules you are doing this year, or talk to your lecturers about possible research.
Do you have to carry out the research alone? We had to work in pairs/threes. Perhaps if you've got friends who do psychology too it would be worth bouncing some ideas off each other.
thanks for your help...i was thinking that sports psychology would be an easy topic to do it on....and i would do practical tasks and measure perfromance on perhaps stress or positive thinking or something like that...as for doing research i think its all on our own as everyones topic is different....ill see how it goes this week and im sure there will be loads of ideas flying around....think it just all dawned on me that i have to actualy to a bit of work this year!.....one last thing do you think that it is important to do the dissertation on the area that you would like to persue....because even though i think sports psychology would be an easy topic to do it on...im not sure if its a career i would like to persue...
i could easily do it on myself but that would be too scary!:nervous:
Yeah that sounds like a good idea to me, you could perhaps test people that are involved in sports at your university and perhaps look at pre-competition arousal and its effect on performance, or visualisation and mental rehersal and their effect on performance or something?
It might be useful to do the dissertation in an area you want top pursue but then again some areas would be very difficult to research into given the time constraints and other limitations you have. From what I can tell what seems to be important in progressing into a career in psychology is experience of the area you want to go into (eg. working with children with special needs if you want to go into educational psychology) coupled with a good degree, I don't think your dissertation topic would have too much influence on that, it is more down to what you feel will be useful for you and what you'll do best in.