The research question then is simply this:
“Is there a relationship between prayer and anxiety? Does pray seem to be associated with people who show low levels of anxiety?”
The first variable, the independent variable, is the frequency of prayer. Do we want to measure daily prayer, weekly prayer, monthly prayer, etc. to determine the frequency of prayer? It is really up to us so for this project let’s ask people how frequently they pray in a week. Therefore, our independent variable of “Frequency of prayer” is operationalized to mean how frequently people pray on a weekly basis, and we will leave the idea of prayer up to them. We won’t define it but we will let them do so. If you wanted to be more precise you can select the type of prayer, but in this case, we will stay fairly general.
The dependent variable is harder to operationalize. How do we measure a level of anxiety? Luckily, that has been done for us in the world of psychology through numerous instruments. In our case, we are going to use the Beck Anxiety Inventory which you were asked to look over in the study section. So, the level of anxiety for us is operationalized to be the score one achieves on the Beck Anxiety Inventory. We can now say our hypothesis is the following:
When people pray frequently, they exhibit less anxiety.
Ladies and gentlemen, For now, though, let’s use a correlational approach to see if there is a relationship between prayer and anxiety. Here is how you are going to execute your experiment:
**ALL RESULTS AND DATA ARE ATTACHED IN THE RESULTS DOCUMENTALL RESULTS AND DATA ARE ATTACHED IN THE RESULTS DOCUMENTALL RESULTS AND DATA ARE ATTACHED IN THE RESULTS DOCUMENT**
First, download the Beck Anxiety Inventory
Secondly, recruit 10 volunteers (friends, family, roommates, etc) to participate in your experiment
Ask each person how often they pray from Monday through Sunday
Record their answer as the X variable
Administer the Beck Anxiety Inventory to them (again, this can be done verbally by phone, skype, etc given current COVID-19 precautions)
Score the Instrument and record that score as their Y variable
Plug these numbers into the correlation calculator
You will get a result that looks like this:
The value of R is -0.7138.
This is a moderate negative correlation, which means there is a tendency for high X variable scores to go with low Y variable scores (and vice versa).
If you remember anything about correlations you will recall that the closer the value of R is to 1.0 the stronger the relationship is between the two variables. If the value of R is negative it means the more one goes up the more the other goes down. Likewise, in the case where the value of R is positive, then they rise and fall together.
Once you have your data and results, you need to write up a results and discussion section. Model that after what you have seen in the articles you have been reviewing and the articles and literature you studied this week.