Psychology Passion Projects: The Complete Guide

As exciting as all these opportunities are, before getting started with psychology research, there are special considerations to have in mind to make your research as experimentally and ethically sound as possible.

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How to recruit participants for psychology research

At its core, psychology is the study of humans – how they think, feel, and behave. While it may seem obvious, it’s important to remember that everyone is different! This isn’t physics, where a two-pound sphere will act the same whether it’s in The United States or India. In psychology, people may respond in very different ways to the same experiment based on their cultural background, genetics, experiences, etc. - even within the same country or community.

Because of this variety, when you recruit participants in your research, you should only make claims about the specific population you studied. For example, many psychologists use college students as participants because it is a low-cost and convenient option. However, just because they know how college students at a particular university respond to the situation doesn’t mean that they know how Americans in general would respond!

You should aim to recruit diverse participants for your research. That way, you will learn about more types of people, which will make your research apply more broadly (psychologists call this concept “making your research more generalizable”). Psychologists often use platforms like Prolific and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to recruit participants for online studies. These types of platforms allow researchers to quickly recruit participants from around the country or the world. However, the downside is that these platforms are not free. If you don’t have the resources to pay participants, consider asking friends or family who will likely participate for free. While it reduces the generalizability of your research, it will allow you to conduct in-person experiments!

How to publish ethical research

Since psychologists almost always conduct research with humans, it is critical that they protect the rights of their participants. To publish research, psychologists must get approval to conduct their research from a committee called an Institutional Review Board (IRB). The key idea is that research should cause “minimal risk” to participants – no more than what they would experience in daily life. But more on that in a moment – let’s start by diving into why this process is necessary in the first place.

Back in the day, there were very few regulations on what types of research psychologists could conduct. Unfortunately, researchers such as Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo conducted infamous and highly ethically questionable research that drove the development of IRBs. Milgram asked participants to shock another participant to the point of death. (Don’t worry, there was no real person that was being shocked. It was just a recording.) Zimbardo forced his participants to live in a prison environment that he created. He had to end the experiment early because it got so out of hand.

So … you can’t do that type of research anymore, which is a good thing.

Another good thing is that it forces researchers to be more thoughtful and reflective when recruiting special, vulnerable populations as your research participants. These populations include minors, pregnant women/fetuses, and prisoners. It is still possible to do research with them, but you will have to jump through more (necessary and valid!) hoops to get permission.

As a middle or high school student, it can be tricky for you to get IRB approval. However, you have a few options:

• Get approval from your school’s IRB.

• Assemble your own IRB. You can find out how to do so here (you have to be logged in to have access). 

• Speak with Polygence’s projects team to get help assembling your own IRB.

• Work with your Polygence mentor to use their institution’s IRB.

• Pivot your passion project idea to one that does not involve IRB approval. You can take a look at passion project ideas here.  

In my experience as a mentor, students have either chosen option #2, #3 or #4. It can be difficult to assemble your own IRB, so make sure to start that process early if you want to do this type of research.

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How to design psychology studies

Alright, so you’ve identified your participants and have chosen from the options above. Now it’s time to conduct your research!

Psychology projects can vary greatly, but here are a few key concepts to keep in mind. For this example, let’s assume that you are testing whether participants remember more vocabulary from reading a textbook or watching a video.

• Since you are conducting an experiment, make sure that participants are randomly assigned to conditions!

  • In other words, do not let participants choose if they want to be in the textbook or video group; randomly pick which group they will be in. Random assignment is what allows psychologists to make claims such as “my experiment caused X to happen.” To make your experiment even better, make it “double blind” – both the participants and researchers don’t know which group the participants were assigned to.  

• As much as possible, try not to influence participants to behave in a certain way.

  • For example, do not ask leading questions. A leading question would be along the lines of: “Why do you think that reading the textbook was better than watching the video?” Participants don’t have the option to disagree with the proposed question.

• Emphasize that questions will be kept confidential to ensure that participants feel comfortable answering honestly to difficult questions.

  • For example, a survey form that has the question: “How much did you pay attention to the textbook/movie?” will likely get a different response if students do or do not have to write their name at the top of the form. 

When I am conducting online research, I also always test out my experiment several times before launching it. During these checks, I make sure that: 

•  The instructions and questions are clear.

• There are no typos. I like to read aloud the instructions to myself to slow down and see every word. (I did the same thing when editing this article!)

• The online platform is correctly storing information about which condition participants were randomly assigned to, which responses participants clicked on, etc. This information is essential for easy data analysis later! 

Don’t skip these checks! It can be boring, but you’ve already put in so much work – make sure that the final product is what you intended!

Conclusion

That concludes our guide to conducting psychology research! If you want to apply to be a part of our flagship mentorship program to conduct research under the guidance of a mentor, please apply here. You can also check out out our big guide to research opportunities.