INSTRUCTIONS TO STUDENTS:

1. This End-of-Course Assessment paper comprises 5 pages (including the cover page).

2. You are to include the following particulars in your submission: Course Code, Title of the ECA, SUSS PI No., Your Name, and Submission Date.

3. Ensure that you submit your End-of-Course Assessment by the deadline. After the 12- hour grace period, 10% of the total End-of-Course Assessment mark will be deducted for each 24-hour block or part thereof by which your submission is late. Submissions with more than 50 marks deducted will be awarded 0 marks.

4. You are allowed multiple submissions to Turnitin before the deadline. After the deadline, only one submission is allowed, and only if you have not already made a prior submission.

5. If you fail to submit your End-of-Course Assessment, you will be deemed to have withdrawn from the course.

ECA Submission Guidelines:

Submission

You are to submit the end-of-course assignment (ECA) in exactly the same manner as your tutor-marked assignments (TMA), i.e. using Canvas. Submission in any other manner such as hardcopy or any other means will not be accepted. Ensure that you submit your ECA by the deadline. After the 12-hour grace period, 10% of the total ECA mark will be deducted for every 24-hour block or part thereof by which your submission is late. Submissions with
more than 50 marks deducted will be awarded 0 marks. You are allowed multiple submissions to Turnitin before the deadline, after which only one submission is allowed, and only if you have not already previously submitted. If you fail to submit your ECA, you will be deemed to have withdrawn from the course.

You are reminded that electronic transmission is not always immediate. It is possible that network traffic may be particularly heavy on the cut-off date, and connections to the system cannot be guaranteed. Hence, you are advised to submit your work no later than the day before the cut-off date in order to make sure that the submission is accepted and in good time.

Once you have submitted your ECA, the status is displayed on the computer screen. You will receive a digital acknowledgement message. Please note that it is the digital time-stamp— and not the acknowledgement message—that indicates that you have submitted your ECA. To ensure a timely submission and to have your ECAs marked, you should therefore not jeopardise your course result by submitting your ECA at the last minute.

Do ensure that you have the correct files for submission. Any submission, extra files, missing appendices or corrections received separately after the submission of the ECA will not be considered in the grading of your ECA assignment.

Plagiarism and Collusion

The University takes a very serious view of plagiarism (passing off someone else’s ideas as your own, or recycling of contents from your own earlier marked TMA from the same course or another course) and collusion (submitting an assignment which is the same or very similar to another student’s). Both are forms of cheating, and neither is acceptable in any form in a student’s work, including this ECA assignment.

Avoid plagiarism by giving yourself sufficient time to research and understand the material so that you can write up your assignment in your own words, and ensure that you provide appropriate references when necessary. You can avoid collusion by ensuring that your submission is based on your own individual effort.

Penalties for plagiarism and collusion are severe. Serious cases will normally result in the student being referred to SUSS’s Student Disciplinary Group. For other cases, significant marking penalties or expulsion from the course may be imposed. For more information about the University’s policies on plagiarism and collusion, refer to the Student Handbook (Section 5.2, paragraph 1.3).

Question 1

Overview
In this assignment, you will apply the knowledge and skills that you learnt in this subject to a) develop research questions, b) analyse an existing data set using jamovi to answer those research questions, and c) interpret the results of your analyses. To that end, you will submit a 2,000-word report. The word count includes tables but excludes the references and appendix sections. Reports within +10% of the word limit are accepted but words in excess of this allowance will not be graded. For example, the marker will read a 2,500- word report until 2,200 words and disregard the last 300 words. No penalty is imposed if you submit a report fewer than 2,000 words.

Details about this assignment are described below.

Description of the Study

A group of Japanese researchers conducted a longitudinal study spanning two years to investigate the psychosocial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. There were three phases to this online study. Phase 1 was conducted during the first state of emergency declaration period (May 11-12, 2020), Phase 2 during the third emergency declaration period (June 14-20, 2021), and Phase 3 when there was no state of emergency declaration but many
COVID-19 positive cases (May 13-30, 2022). During each phase, sociodemographic (e.g., employment status, marital status) and psychological (e.g., psychological distress) information was collected from the participants.

Data Set

The data from the study are presented in HBC203 ECA Dataset.csv. (For Mac users: Please use a web browser other than Safari to download the .csv file from Canvas. Otherwise, you may be unable to open the downloaded file.) The variables collected in the study and the response options for each question are in HBC203 ECA Codebook.xlsx. Report

Structure your report as follows.

1. Introduction

• Briefly explain why it is important to examine the psychosocial impact of the COVID19 pandemic.

• Identify FOUR research questions that you want to answer with this data set.

o Note. The data set must contain the variables that you wish to study (or variables that you can create based on the existing ones). If it does not, then, for the purposes of this assignment, choose a different research question.

2. For EACH research question,

• Explain why it is important to investigate the research question/the variables.

• Write a short literature review about the variables you are investigating. Use academic sources (e.g., journal articles, book chapters) and cite all sources in APA format. Aim for a minimum of 2 journal articles per research question.

o Note. Although the given data set comprises data from Japanese respondents, you may use research conducted in any country in your literature review.

• Based on the literature review, state explicitly your predictions (i.e., what you expect to see in your results). Explain clearly how existing research leads you to predict the way you did.

• Identify the most appropriate analysis to answer the research question and explain why that is the most appropriate analysis to use. Then, using jamovi, conduct the analysis. Show the jamovi output by copying and pasting all the output necessary to interpret the results in your answer. To copy the output, take a screenshot of the output. Then, report the results in APA format.

o Note 1. To show your ability to analyse different kinds of data, please use at
least two different analyses. In other words, you should not use the same
analysis (e.g., correlation) to answer all four research questions.

o Note 2. Please limit your analyses to those taught in this course. A penalty will be imposed on conducting analyses not taught in this course. (See the Penalties section below.)

o Note 3. You are free to combine different variables and come up with new
variables to answer your research questions. You may also change the scale of
measurement of the variables (e.g., from continuous to categorical) for specific type of analyses. You are further allowed to use a subset of the participants if you feel that better answers your research question. However, please remember to include a justification for why you are doing so in your report. Finally, you may assume that all subjective ratings are measured with at least an interval scale.

o Note 4. Ensure your screenshots are clear and readable at Word document Zoom setting of 100%. You may be penalised if the marker is unable to clearly see the numbers in your screenshots.

• Discuss, based on the results of your analysis, what you have learnt. Do your findings support your predictions? How similar or different are your findings from what is presented in the literature? Why might there be differences? What are the practical and/or theoretical implications of your findings? For example, what might you be able to tell governments about the psychosocial impact of emergency declarations? Are there limitations of this study that prevent us from making strong conclusions? If so, what are those limitations? What kind of information would you collect if you were to conduct this study? Why would that kind of information be useful in addressing the limitations?

3. Conclusion

• A brief conclusion summarising the key findings and implications of the findings would be sufficient.

4. Word count

• State the total word count from the Introduction section to the Conclusion section (including all headings, citations, and tables but excluding the jamovi output).

5. References

• Provide the reference list for all the sources cited in your report.

Note. Your report must adhere to APA standards of formatting and reference. It should also be clear, concise, and coherent. Please refer to this website for the latest APA style guide (7th edition): https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines.

Criteria

The ECA will be graded holistically. Here is what we will be looking out for:

• Quality of introduction and literature review (e.g., research questions proposed are clearly relevant, academic sources used are highly reliable, theories and evidence clearly support hypotheses and predictions)

• Quality of analysis (e.g., both descriptive and inferential statistics results reported, correct statistical tests justified and conducted, necessary follow-up analyses performed, no unrelated analyses conducted, analyses correctly interpreted)

• Quality of discussion and conclusion (e.g., clear summary of main findings, findings linked with those in the current literature, inconsistencies between findings and current literature explained, recommendations for changes based on the findings suggested, limitations of the study discussed, future directions proposed)

• Quality of structure and organization of information (e.g., clear and coherent writing throughout, excellent flow between paragraphs and sections)

• Adherence to APA formatting (e.g., citations, results, references)

Penalties

Please note the following penalties:

• Up to 10 marks will be deducted for any jamovi output that is missing.

• Up to 5 marks may be deducted for conducting analyses not taught in this course.

• Up to 5 marks may be deducted for incorrect and/or inadequate citations and references.

• Up to 5 marks may be deducted for using dubious, non-academic sources (e.g., blogs, Wikipedia).

• Up to 5 marks may be deducted for poor language proficiency (including grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors)

• Up to 10% of your grade may be deducted for exceeding the allowance on the word limit (i.e., 2,000 + 10% words), excluding the reference list and appendix.

Note that plagiarism will be severely dealt with at SUSS. To avoid plagiarism, please remember to use your own words in the report.

Content that is generated by AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) without citation/declaration is not allowed. If you include any AI-generated content in your assignments, please cite it according to SUSS guidelines on the use of AI. For example, direct quotes must be placed within quotation marks and their sources must be indicated. Do note that the use of AI-generated content is subject to similar plagiarism rules as the use of published sources. As in the case with published sources, AI should never take over or drown out your voice as the author of the essay, but should only serve as a source of ideas and arguments, examples, or illustrations, etc. to help you present your position on an issue.