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PSYC105 RESEARCH REPORT TEMPLATE In the context of investigating attitudes towards vaccinations, can the confirmation bias be overcome? (experimental study) INTRODUCTION First paragraph gives the reader an idea of the importance of the problem and the purpose of your study Review the relevant litera...

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PSYC105 RESEARCH REPORT TEMPLATE In the context of investigating attitudes towards vaccinations, can the confirmation bias be overcome? (experimental study) INTRODUCTION - First paragraph gives the reader an idea of the importance of the problem and the purpose of your study Review the relevant literature including theory Hypotheses 1: the effect of disfluency Hernandez and Preston paper Hypotheses 2: the effect of anecdotally - presented information Shelby and Ernst paper Hypotheses 3: is disfluency more effective than anecdotes Theory/argument

- Review the relevant literature including theory - Establish: - The topic: what is the problem / why does it need to be studied? - What has already been studied? - What’s the gap in the literature (i.e what hasn’t been studied?) - What is the current study going to do to address that gap? - Gap in all of the literature is identified and explain that your study is going to fill this gap - Conclude with the specific hypotheses being tested - I hypothesised disfluent vaccination safety information will result in more positive vaccination attitude change than standard vaccination safety information. I also hypothesised anecdotal vaccination safety information will result in more positive vaccination attitude change than standard vaccination safety information. Finally I hypothesised disfluent vaccination safety information will result in more positive vaccination attitude change than anecdotal vaccination safety information.

METHOD (350) Participants: All study participants were recruited by PSYC105 students who invited them to complete an online survey via via online survey platform Qualtrics, this type of study is called a convenience sample. There were 1370 initial respondents to the survey, however in eliminating the incomplete responses, only 1069 responses remained. Of these responses, participants were 67% female with ages ranging from 14-81, and a mean (age of 30. The highest level of education completed by the majority if participants was high school certificate. Measures: Vaccination attitude difference score (or ‘vdiff’) was measured using the Vaccination attitude scale (Busse et al., 2002); an 11-item measure of questions on the topic of vaccinations with only two response options (agree and disagree). The scores are summed where a high score indicates a more positive attitude towards vaccination and a low demonstrates a less positive attitude. Within the survey the unpublished materials consist of the disfluent and fluent paragraphs, where both present the same information. This shows the effect that disfluency and fluency has on the participants’ vaccination attitudes. Procedure:

PSYC105 RESEARCH REPORT TEMPLATE This study was an in-between participants study where each participant was randomly allocated into one of three conditioned groups. Before the survey began, participants were asked to give consent with full knowledge of what they were agreeing to. The first section of the survey gathered all necessary demographic information on the participant including age, gender and education. The dependent variable was then measured through a series of questions regarding attitudes towards vaccination through a simple agree or disagree response, providing a pre-test score on the vaccination scale (Busse et al., 2002). Each participant was then randomly allocated into one of the three test conditions; disfluency vignette (factual information about vaccine safety presented in Comic Sans italicises font), fluency (factual information about vaccine safety presented in Arial normal font) and anecdotal (positive vaccine information presented in an anecdotal manner). After reading the information they were given, the dependent variable was measured again post-test, asking participants the exact same questions as post-test so that comparisons could be made.

RESULTS (250) Descriptive statistics: - Any demographic data that’s not in the participant section - Summarising the data collected Hypothesis testing: - 3x independent sample t-tests: one for each hypothesis

Hypothesis 1: disfluency condition vs fluency condition Fluency: - People: 353 participants - M = -0.12 (2 decimal places) - Standard deviation (SD) = 1.20 Disfluency: - t (689) = -14.04, p-value = < 0.001 (is statistically simnifically because it is less that 0.05) - Also look at degrees for freedom Hypothesis 2: anecdotal condition vs fluency condition (standard vaccination information) Hypothesis 3: disfluency vs anecdotal condition

*two sentences for each hypotheses results in the same paragraph* ALL THREE HYPOTHESES ARE STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT

- Present statistical results:

PSYC105 RESEARCH REPORT TEMPLATE

DISCUSSION REFERENCES - Busse (2002) Attitudes toward vaccination: a survey of Canadian chiropractic students

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