These answers can be based off of the bell curve you completed about excessive homework on a students stress or mental health:

• Think of something you like about psychology or want to know about, and generate a scenario that you briefly explain to your peers. This can be the same topic as the last discussion and you can build onto it, OR you can select a new topic. Just make sure it’s something YOU “really” want to know about and pretend that you are a researcher about to study it and you want to consult your peers for feedback.
• After noting your topic and question, note what decisions you would make regarding your hypothesis. Are you going to predict using a directional hypothesis because you are sure it will go that way and you just want to see if it will go that way significantly? Or do you want to be cautious and state it as a non-directional because you are not sure. For example, if I have a weight loss program, of course I’d want to say the program will help people significantly lose weight, thus it being a directional (one tail) hypothesis. However, what if my program made individuals significantly gain wait? Wouldn’t I need to know that too so I can fix things? If so, maybe I want to do a non-directional (two-tail) hypothesis? So state your choice for your prediction with a brief justification.
• Lastly, since we can select our “alpha level”, meaning, if we want to obtain a p-value less than .05 or a p-value of .01 (for example), which one would you choose and why? This will be important for you to think about since in a later chapter we will go over something called “Type I Error” and “Type II Error”. Technically, both are a risk all the time, and you’ll learn how to distinguish what happens with each and how it helps the researcher make a choice on which error risk is “more okay”.