Dissertation

Any suggestions on how I could measure seeking professional advice from your GP or Professional advice in general?
Thank you

This is a massive health psychology topic that you will have to narrow down. You could sample x number of people who have experienced illness in period y and ask whether or not they sought help from healthcare providers. You would then try to quantify correlations between different biopsychosocial factors and people seeking help.

For example, you could consider: whether the severity of the illness made it more or less likely for someone to seek help, but this is difficult if you have no medical training; whether personal factors made it more or less likely for someone to seek help (e.g. age, sex, SES); or more contentious topics like availability of services and things to do with service providers themselves (e.g. lots of health professions are not very representative of wider society).

Ideally you need to pick a one or two factors and try to isolate them to see whether they are significant. For example, pensioners go to the GP quite often but is that because they are old, more ill or can access services more easily? On the contrary lots of young men never go to the GP. But is that because of their age, sex, or the economic and logistical disadvantages involved in them accessing GP services (i.e. they would have to take time off work to go to a GP or the GP might not be open after 'working hours'?

Hey, You give really good advice, could you help me with mine? My question is, do people from broken homes seek romantic relationships more than those who don't? My lecturer has told me to make it more specific as well as to pin point the variables but i'm unsure on what could i even do. Please help. thank you

not the person you asked but maybe I can help

you need to think what you want to measure, e.g. broken home, what does that mean? are you going to include things other than divorce e.g. death?
secondly, do you want this to be a very simple measure e.g. 'do you come from a broken home?' yes/no (obviously think of a more sensitive question) or do you want to examine any factors within it, e.g. is there a difference between those whose parents broke up when they were young/teens/adults? or whether they define the break up as amicable/difficult? both of these could be asked with a simple question with a couple of options. Sometimes having more than one thing in your measure can increase your likelihood of finding a correlation.

then how do you want to measure relationships? obviously if you just ask someone how many relationships they've had you're ignoring length of relationship, what different people count as a relationship, one night stands/flings. Options could be general questions about whether the person wants to be in a relationship, feels it's important, feels happier when not single, immediately seeks a new partner etc... or you could ask how many people the person has had x type of relationships... or how many months of the past 5 years the person has been in a relationship? or a combination of a couple of things - EDIT: if you asked some general questions to produce a measure of the person's perceived relationship seeking behaviours (i.e. the things I mentioned above) you could correlate it with their actual time spent in relationships? Obviously this is flawed by their desirability etc but it could give you an additional thing to discuss, e.g. if they correlate then your measure in theory is valid.

have a google for pre-existing measures for relationships as well as if you use someone else's you can discuss research on it's validity etc

Hey, You give really good advice, could you help me with mine? My question is, do people from broken homes seek romantic relationships more than those who don't? My lecturer has told me to make it more specific as well as to pin point the variables but i'm unsure on what could i even do. Please help. thank you

doodle_333 made a number of good points.

The hardest bit about your topic is the rationale and theory behind it. Your measures are not too difficult. For example you could ask people to complete a questionnaire where you asked them whether they were brought up in a single-parent family and what were the circumstances behind this. You would then ask them about their sexual history (e.g. what is their sexuality, when did they lose their virginity, how many sexual partners, how many one-night stands, how many [long-term] relationships have they been in and why did they end [if applicable], have they ever had any negative sexual experiences). Each variable will tell you slightly different things and might interact with one another in odd ways. For example you might find a general trend that people from single-parent families lose their virginity earlier and have more sexual partners than controls. But you might also find that being from a single-parent family puts you at higher risk for sexual abuse, and if this did happen then the person registers low interest in sexual activity (in contrast to the general trend). I do not actually know what kind of results a questionnaire like this would generate so it is very interesting!

The problem is the theory behind it. Presumably you are postulating that there is some sort of attachment issue behind 'romantic seeking behaviour'. If this sort of theory exists (I honestly do not know as it is not my area of expertise) then it would be a simple case of seeing whether your data matches the theory and discussing the implications. The theory would likely drive your definition of romantic seeking behaviour and what questions you asked. Given the personal nature of the questions asked you might have to restrict how many questions you ask or think about how you ask them to get ethical clearance. Perhaps get a few people to complete a draft questionnaire and suggest improvements; this will improve your methodology.

Thank you for your help. Could i ask one more question.. Do you think any of these questions are better ? and if so, what would you suggest for simplifying and the variables?

Could i ask your opinion on whether you think any of these questions would be better to do?

Q2. Is anxiety developed as we get older due to pressures of society and responsibility? Q3, The dislike button on facebook, a negative or positive suggestion? Q4. If charity advertisements were made more comical, would it have more success with donations?

Hi, thank you for your advice. How about if i was to change my question to "Is anxiety developed as we get older due to pressures of society and responsibility?" would you have any advice towards the variables and any other advice in this case? after reading your comment i think it is clear it would be unethical to ask such personal questions, x

I have answered your question in a separate post.

I do not think it would be unethical as such. It is actually a very interesting idea which has intuitive appeal to the layman. You just need to think about how you word and order questions to get people to be as honest as possible (and pass ethics). You would then need to think about the rationale behind why you want to know this sort of thing. I think one good rationale is whether coming from a single-parent family or care background is a risk factor for sexual disease etc.. You are basically trying to find out if their background drives them to engage in more risk-taking behaviour than their peers and whether this results in increased negative sexual experiences or disease (e.g. more one-night stands). There is a very strong public health rationale behind this.

Q2. Is anxiety developed as we get older due to pressures of society and responsibility? Q3, The dislike button on facebook, a negative or positive suggestion? Q4. If charity advertisements were made more comical, would it have more success with donations?

Hi, thank you for your advice. How about if i was to change my question to "Is anxiety developed as we get older due to pressures of society and responsibility?" would you have any advice towards the variables and any other advice in this case? after reading your comment i think it is clear it would be unethical to ask such personal questions, x

Research shows that mental health issues tend to manifest themselves in adolescence for various developmental reasons which I will not go into. Part of this involves societal issues but really this sounds more of a discussion piece/literature review in terms of causation (e.g. what are the risk factors contributing the most influence and why). I am not sure you could do this as an experiment as you would ideally need access to subjects with confirmed mental health problems which is very unlikely unless you are working on a pre-established project run by clinical psychologists.

I do not think questions three or four are any better. Question three is very narrow and not really that interesting unless part of some wider movement (e.g. TSR removed the negative post). Question four has so many variables that you could only realistically do a case study or run a very abstract experiment involving financial decisions. You would have to include some sort of questionnaire to try and control for people who would not likely donate to any charity irrespective of advertising to avoid biasing your results.

Q2 anxiety would be really easy to measure, there'd be loads of pre existing scales that are well regarded... age is easy to measure but proving more than a correlation would be very difficult. My impression was anxiety is worse when people are younger in general. If you did this question it would lend itself to either a very large sample (so you have people of all sorts of ages) or a longitudinal study (which you don't have scope for). You could possibly do it as a qualitative thing with interviews but that is more difficult.

Q3 You'd probably find limited literature on social media. What do you mean by a good thing? you're not doing market research, you need to have some sort of impact on a person, do you mean people feel happier? I think this would be very hard to assess and even harder to write a report about.

Q4. There's loads of literature on what encourages charity donations (I did a whole project on it at uni). I'd imagine this question may have been asked. Again, this would be difficult to measure in any meaningful way, people like to say they'd donate to charity, I bet not many actually would and you wouldn't be able to actually take donations.