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Life-Span Developmental Psychology

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Research Requirements

Independent Study

Students take Independent Study (PSYC 795) to obtain course credit for empirical and library research. As indicated in Item 2 below, developmental students are required to take Independent Study in their first year in order to begin their research experiences at the outset of their graduate training. Students are encouraged to take Independent Study as often as possible thereafter, so that they will have had opportunities to coauthor journal articles and papers presented at meetings before they graduate.

First-Year Research

Developmental students are required to become involved in research in the Fall semester of their first year, taking Independent Study for 3 credit hours. The involvement can be in an on-going project by a faculty member or another student, or the student’s own project. Normally, the project will involve primary data collection and analysis.

In the Spring semester of their first year, developmental students who entered the program without a master’s degree are required to take Independent Study for 6 credit hours in order to develop their master’s thesis proposal.

The first-year experience--including course work, assistantship work, the first-year research, etc.--should provide the student at least some exposure to the processes of data collection, data analysis, literature review, and research design. The student need not have primary responsibility for all or even any of these processes, but is expected to learn something about each of them in the first year.

3. Master's Thesis

Students are required to obtain a master's degree before obtaining the Ph.D. The master's thesis must be based on empirical research, although the data need not be collected by the student. A minimum of 6 credit hours of PSYC 698, Research, is required for the thesis work (not counting the 6 credit hours of Independent Study in the first year). In general, the thesis work is closely supervised by the thesis chair, and any publication or presentation is co-authored by the student and thesis chair. Guidelines concerning the thesis and rules for students who enter the program with a master’s degree are included in the Graduate Handbook.

4. Doctoral Dissertation

The doctoral dissertation must be based on empirical research, including data collected by the student. The number of credit hours of PSYC 798, Research, permitted is unlimited. A publication or presentation based on the dissertation research may or may not include the dissertation chair as a co-author, depending on how independently the student works. Guidelines concerning the dissertation are included in the Graduate Handbook.