Subject Code : HPS104
Country : Australia
Assignment Task

INSTRUCTIONS
The worksheet. This worksheet contains the instructions for the assignment along with the questions you need to answer. Use this worksheet to record your ideas, working out/rationale, and answers to each of the questions and tasks. You can complete the worksheet in your own time and/or in the relevant Seminar.  
The weblink. After you complete your worksheet please then transcribe your responses to the weblink provided in the Assignments folder in Resources (Cloud). Uploading your responses will allow me to process your answers and provide you with feedback more quickly, allowing you to resubmit later that same week if you achieve less than a credit grade for it. 

CONCEPTS TO MASTER
You will need to understand and apply the following concepts in order to complete this assessment. You might like to return to this page and ‘tick off’ each concept as you master it.
Operationalising variables
Differential and correlational approaches
Cross-sectional designs
Case-control designs
Longitudinal designs
Cross-sequential designs
Mediation
Hypotheses

THE RESEARCH ISSUE AND YOUR TASK
Is appearance-motivated dieting in adolescence associated with disordered eating in adulthood?

There is empirical and anecdotal evidence that dieting – any modification to food consumption that is intended to reduce body weight, adiposity, and/or body size – during adolescence can develop into disordered eating by adulthood. But the reason for this association, and whether it is in fact a causal effect and, if so, a direct causal effect, has not been fully elucidated.
Is it the dieting behaviour that leads to disordered eating regardless of the motivation? Does dieting lead to hunger and then lead to occasional uncontrolled lapses in dieting in the form of binge eating? Does long-term dietary restraint lead to fasting which can develop into extreme starvation? The implication is that all dietary restraint is potentially problematic regardless of the type of type and the reason for dieting.
Or is it the motivation to diet that leads to disordered eating? Does a preoccupation with appearance, particularly thinness, manifest in adolescence as occasional dieting and then, as the person’s dieting efforts are thwarted (e.g., as their body naturally gets heavier as they mature and age), does this preoccupation intensify and manifest as ever-more desperate attempts to lose weight? The implication of this is that dieting itself might not be the problem at all if the person is motivated by health rather than appearance. 
Let’s find out!
Experiments are obviously out of the question because we can’t, for ethical and practical reasons, manipulate variables such as dieting in adolescence, motivations for dieting, and disordered eating. So we will address our research issue using observational designs or non-experiments.

PLANNING YOUR STUDY AND OPERATIONALISING YOUR VARIABLES
The good news is that you have access to adults with a diagnosed eating disorder through your connections with the Healthy Eating Clinic, and you also have access to adolescents through your connections with the Catholic Education Board. This opens up all sorts of research design possibilities!

In terms of operationalising our variables, to measure appearance-motivated weight-loss dieting we can administer the Motivations for Weight Loss Questionnaire. We can use this measure toquantify the extent to which adolescents diet for appearance reasons (rather than, say, for health reasons). Their scores on this measure can be treated as a continuous variable in which the higher a person scores the higher their appearance-motivated dieting. Or we can treat their scores on this measure as a discreet variable, in which we group participants in terms of whether they are above average or below average in terms of their appearance-motivated weight-loss dieting. 

For disordered eating we can administer the Eating Disorder Examination. Again,we can treat scores on this measure as a continuous variable in which the higher a person scores the higher their level of disordered eating symptomatology, or we can treat scores on this measure as a discreet variable in which a person’s score can be used to assign them into a disordered eating versus non-disordered eating group. A third option, if we are recruiting participants from the Healthy Eating Clinic, is simply to use the clinic’s diagnosis of an eating disorder to decide whether participants belong in the disordered versus non-disordered groups.

And, of course, both measures – the motivations for weight loss questionnaire and the eating disorder examination – can be used to obtain current levels of appearance-motivated dieting and current levels of disordered eating, or they can be used retrospectively in which case responses indicate past levels of appearance-motivated dieting.
IDENTIFYING YOUR DESIGN OPTIONS
Yourresearch question is:Is appearance-motivated dieting in adolescence associated with disordered eating in adulthood? Notice how we are avoiding causal terms in describing our research question – we are, after all, using observational not experimental designs here. And among the observational designs there are several options available to us. Let’s go through some of these and see if you can name the design based on a description of it.
QUESTION 1
[all answers need to be correct in order to earn TWO marks for this question]
For each design description investigating the relationship betweenappearance-motivated dietingin adolescence and disordered eating in adulthood, indicate the following: 
• Type of comparison being proposed (Differential (D) or Correlational (C)).
• The type of design (Not a design (N), Cross-sectional differential (XD), Cross-sectional correlational (XC), Case-control (CC), or Cross-sequential (XL)).

MULTIVARIABLE RESEARCH
Unfortunately, we can observe the association between appearance-motivated dieting in adolescence and disordered eating in adulthood all we like but doing so will never reveal why these two variables are related. Fortunately, psychologists are in the business of finding out how and why psychological phenomena are related to each other. So that’s what we’ll do.

Maladaptive perfectionism refers to astrong drive to achieve unrealistic goals. This kind of perfectionism can be damaging psychosocially, and both you and a colleague suspect that it may also be relevant to the relationship between appearance-motivated dieting and disordered eating. But you differ in your explanation of why…

Your colleague thinks of maladaptive perfectionism as a stable trait, something that predisposes some dieters to develop unrealistic body-change goals that can set them on the path to an eating disorder.

YOUR COLLEAGUE.

So your friend conducts a study to test the following research question: Is the positive relationship between appearance-motivated dieting in adolescence and disordered eating in adulthood dependent on a person’s level of maladaptive perfectionism?

But you aren’t convinced. You think of maladaptive perfectionism as state like, as something that can develop and grow worse over time. You suspect that appearance-motivated dieting can lead to the development of weight-loss goals that keep shifting towards ever-more unrealistic levels. For example, a person aims to lose 5 kg by summer and achieves their goal. Encouraged by their initial success they decide to aim for another 5 kg, et cetera. Pretty soon they have developed a fully-fledged eating disorder!

YOU.So you conduct a study to test the following research question: 
Is the positive relationship between appearance-motivated dieting in adolescence and disordered eating in adulthood due to the effects of dieting on maladaptive perfectionism?

QUESTION 4
Demonstrate that you understand how you and your colleague’s explanations differ by correctly identifying the different role that each variable plays in your studies. Please only select a single role for each variable listed (i.e., select only one option in each row), once in the context of your colleague’s study, and once in the context of your study.
QUESTION 5
[correctly match each statement to each term in order to earn THREE marks for this question]
Your task is to match each statement below with a term or concept from this unit. Each statement has a single best match. How to indicate which statement matches with which term? For the worksheet, you might want to draw a line connecting them. For the weblink, you’ll use dropdown menus. 
STATEMENT
STATEMENT #1. I am concerned that because body image and dieting are highly gendered constructs, that the relationship between appearance-motivated dieting and disordered eating may be different for girls and boys. If true, because my study did not record the gender of participants, this may limit the generalisability of my findings.
STATEMENT #2.At the outset of this study, even in relation to the wording of the research question, we declared that we could not use strong ‘causal’ language because we could not use an experimental design. But what if we used a longitudinal design or incorporated a longitudinal component in our study (e.g., across sequential design)? Wouldn’t that give us time-order information and thus good internal validity?You respond: Although we would certainly have this time-order information (which is good!), the problem is that our two groups – appearance-motivated dieters and non-appearance-motivated dieters – probably differ in numerous ways from each other. And some of these differences might actually be the real cause of their different rates of disordered eating later in life. If so, these differences would be a…
STATEMENT #3. I suspect that appearance-motivated dieting leads to anxiety, and that this anxiety leads to increased disordered eating symptomatology.
STATEMENT #4. In my implementation of the study, I opted to track two groups of adolescents – those who engage in appearance-motivated dieting and those who do not – into adulthood to see whether the former group is more likely to develop disordered eating. Because the appearance-motivated dieting group is of far more interest to me, I assigned my best-trained research assistants to monitor this group, and assigned my inexperienced research assistants to monitor the non-appearance-motivated dieting group. My differential treatment of the two groups might be a…
STATEMENT #5.I suspect that appearance-motivated dieting leads to disordered eating in girls but not boys.
STATEMENT #6. I administer the motivations for weight loss questionnaire retrospectively to a group of adults. Some of these adults currently have a diagnosis of an eating disorder, and the others do not. I want to know whether or not these two groups of adults differ in terms of whether or not they engaged in appearance-motivated dieting when they were adolescents. However, I suspect that adults who currently have a diagnosis of an eating disorder are more likely to recall and report that they were appearance-motivated dieters when younger, regardless of whether or not they actually were. If I’m right it would mean that their current levels of disordered eating might inadvertently affect my retrospective measure of their dieting behaviour!

YOU CAN NOW SUBMIT PART B
Part B is worth 10%.

If you score less than 6/10 you will be able to revise and resubmit your work to the same web link for a maximum mark of 6/10 (i.e., students will be penalised 4 marks for repeating it).

Of course, better than using trial and error, why not attend the Seminars dedicated to Part B and get help there!?!

 

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  • Posted on : September 22nd, 2018
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