In Milestone 2 - you'll specify the design and operationalizations in more detail and add specific expectations. Because we need to converge on one specific design, you'll need to base your work for Milestone 2 on the collective general hypothesis and design that you can access after completing Milestone 1 so before you start check out what hypothesis and design you'll need to work from. Ok, so we have a hypothesis and general design. What we need to do now is to flesh out this design. We need to specify the operationalizations in more detail and be specific about our expectations. Here are some questions to answer about the design and operationalizations. If we're manipulating the independent variable how will we do so? With a written instruction or images or video? How many words? How many images, or how many minutes will the video last? What will the content be? Are we going to use a questionnaire or test to measure the dependent variable? How many items? What kind of response categories? Now the idea is to come up with a more specific description of all the relevant variables, without actually creating the manipulation or the measurement materials just yet. Besides the operationalization of the manipulation and measurement instrument you should describe your intended sample and sampling method and other relevant procedures. For example the method of assignment to conditions. Suppose our hypothesis is: "Exposure to violent imagery will increase aggressive behavior. It will do so more strongly for adolescents compared to people of other ages, and also for males compared to females." Okay, based on this hypothesis a more elaborate research design, describing the operationalizations and procedures in more detail would be this: "The study will be conducted using an online questionnaire distributed amongst a convenient sample of high school and college students in Amsterdam. The study will be presented as a study on the emotional impact of types of images used in newspaper articles. Exposure to violent imagery will be manipulated by randomly assigning participants to a condition where they're shown either 10 violent images of buildings destroyed by terrorist attacks - the experimental condition. Or 10 nonviolent images of similar, undamaged buildings - this is the control condition. All images will be from recent newspaper articles. Aggressive behavior will be assessed using the sum score on a questionnaire consisting of 10 items - each rated on a five-point Likert scale, that are indicative of aggressive tendencies. Participants will be asked their gender and age, where students younger than 19 are considered adolescents and all others are considered adults. Participants will be debriefed about the real purpose of the study after completing the questionnaire." Ok, keep in mind that we should be able to implement the design using an online test or questionnaire.Also make sure that the manipulation and measurement instruments are not offensive or hurtful. For example you can't use graphic pictures of victims suffering horrible injuries, or a story about a child being subjected to severe abuse. Manipulations that give participants false or overly negative feedback are also out of the question. Once you've described the detailed research design you can formulate your expectations. In our example the expectations would be: "Participants in the experimental condition, who see ten violent images, are expected to have a significantly higher mean aggressiveness score than participants in the control condition, who see ten non-violent images. This effect of an increased mean aggressiveness score - due to exposure to violent imagery, is expected to be significantly larger for adolescents compared to adult participants, and is also expected to be significantly larger for males compared to females." Okay, do you see what I did there? I reformulated the general hypothesis in terms of the much more specific operationalizations that I came up with in my detailed research design. Okay, with this information you should be able to complete milestone 2. Remember, make sure that you base your work on the collective general hypothesis and design. Take that general design and flesh it out by specifying the operationalizations and procedures in more detail. Take care that the material is not offensive or hurtful, and finally, don't forget to describe your expectations. Formulate these in terms of the operationalization. Okay good luck!
