Instruction
here is an example
GRATITUDE AND TYPE A PERSONALITY
A Research-Thought Exercise Example
1. Idea to Investigate
Gratitude is an important concept in psychology that seems to influence people in many good ways including helping people feel more positively about themselves. Type A personality, on the other hand, is described in the text as a person who is driven, often impulsive and impatient, and sometimes hostile. Since gratitude seems to help people feel more positively about themselves, it seems that it might have an effect on a type-A personality by reducing impatience and hostility.
Both impatience and hostility are related to negative reactions to what other people do. The expression of gratitude, however, is related to positive reactions to what other people do. Thus, having a person be aware of their positive reactions would seemingly counteract their awareness of negative reactions. If this possible counteraction is true, and if the positives are frequent and strong enough, it would seem likely that hostility and impatience might be reduced.
2. Hypothesis
Type-A-personality people who express one gratitude a day every day for one month to another person will report being less hostile or impatient than they would be if that gratitude were not expressed.
3. Method
Data will be collected from 30 people using a modified survey method. A modified survey method was chosen because this is an exploratory study to see it personality and gratitude are related to each other. An experiment does not seem feasible at this time.
Each person will be given a personality test to identify those having a type A personality. Included in the test will be subscores that measure degrees of impatience and hostility (i.e., prescore). The impatience and hostility parts of the test will be taken again (i.e., postscore) once each person in the study has completed 30 days during which, every day, they either tape-record or write a gratitude they expressed to another person. The results of the impatience and hostility measures before and after the 30 days will then be compared to see if the hostility and/or impatience scores have decreased. Thus, the hypothesis will be verified if the average hostility and/or impatience postscores are significantly less than the average prescore.
Reference
Bernstein, D. A. (2019). Essentials of Psychology. 7th ed. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.