Disgust: Good Internal Assessment Topic?

[Aether]

Hey there... I finished my psychology internal assessment like a week ago and I was completely thrilled with it!! The hypothesis of my original experiment was something like this: Is disgust the result of an evolutive process for detecting posible disease arousing situations, objects or people? My results were really similar to the ones in the original experiment, and I thought I had done a pretty good job. However, my teacher says that all the internal assessments she has graded so far are really, really bad ! This made me wonder if my topic was good enough for psychology or if maybe I should have sticked to a more conventional topic. What do you think??

[flsweetheart422]

That sounds like it was a solid topic, but the IAs are about much more than just results. I took the easy way out and duplicated Stroop's experiment (the one about reading the names of colors when they are typed in a different ink). My teacher stressed the analysis of your results over the results themselves especially in the Discussion. He actually said that if your results were different, and you were able to explain why, it could help you more. Here is where you get your marks for the IA.
* Criterion A - Introduction; 2 marks
* Criterion B - Method: design; 2 marks
* Criterion C - Method: participants; 2 marks
* Criterion D - Method: procedure; 2 marks
* Criterion E - Results; 4 marks
* Criterion F - Discussion; 6 marks
* Criterion G - Presentation; 2 marks

Hope that helps you out a bit.

[saya]

We have just done a simulation of an IA.
Like flsweetheart422+ said, it is not important whether you get results similar to the original one, but whether you are able to conduct the experiment properly, understand basically the nitty gritties and analyze the results.

[quote]The hypothesis of my original experiment was something like this: Is disgust the result of an evolutive process for detecting posible disease arousing situations, objects or people?[/quote]

[b]that is NOT a hypothesis. [/b]
the hypothesis would be that disgust is the result of an evolutive process for detecting posible deseases arousing situations, objects or people.
the null hypothesis would be that disgust is not the result of an evolutive process for [blah blah blah]

at the same time, i think your experiment is too difficult for an IA. this is a very useful link you should use ......
[url="http://cranepsych.com/Psych/Internal_Assessment.html"]http://cranepsych.com/Psych/Internal_Assessment.html[/url]
the man is the guru of ib psychology (as per my ib coordinator and psychology teacher). he has a list of experiments which you could replicate, and also explains each part of the IA (how it should be done) and has some samples which will help you.

hope you find it useful

EDIT: i just wanted to add,our teacher told us "[b]you can get a perfect 7 on a failed experiment,[/b] if you are able to explain what went wrong and give a proper analysis"

Edited November 4, 2008 by saya

[rue saint-denis]

Describe some of the procedures. It might not be ethically valid if you exposed the subjects purposely to infected people!

[Aether]

[quote name='rue saint-denis' post='27855' date='Nov 5 2008, 11:05 AM']Describe some of the procedures. It might not be ethically valid if you exposed the subjects purposely to infected people![/quote]

Hahahaha, sorry, you are right, I will describe the procedure because people are getting the wrong idea...hahahaha. My experiment consisted in showing the subjects a serie of photos that contained disease relevant (a scar, infected gums, lice, pimples) or non disease relevant images (a cat, a ball, a clean face). Subjects had to rate the images according to how disgusting they found them.. 1 being not disgusted and 5 being very disgusted.