BY264 Human Sexual Selection Practical Report Guidelines
We will use the specific points below as marking criteria for your Human Sexual Selection ‘Lonely Hearts’ practical report, in addition to the general university grading descriptors. Use these as a guide when you are completing the report and make sure you have addressed all the points (check-list) before submitting your assignment. This will help you to get a good grade and allow you to understand both the subject matter itself and the process of undertaking and reporting (communicating) scientific studies.
NB you do not need an abstract.
Overall presentation: (10%)
• Is the piece of work clearly laid out as a scientific report with all the requested sections?
• Is the report within the word limit?
• Are sections clearly labelled/sub headed?
• How is the grammar, spelling and sentence structure – is it written in appropriately scientific language? (although you won’t lose marks on spelling, use of spell checker and proof reading and editing of grammar and text considerably aids presentation and allows us to understand what you are talking about!)
Introduction: (20%)
• Does the introduction explain the theoretical basis to the study giving relevant background information with references?
• Does the introduction clearly state the aim of the study and hypothesis that you are testing? This should be at the end of the Introduction i.e. the final paragraph.
• Is the hypothesis relevant to the theory of mate choice and sexual selection? (if not, change your hypothesis!)
• Can the hypothesis be tested using the data given? (if not, change your hypothesis!)
Methods: (20%)
• Are the methods clearly explained so that the reader would be able to replicate it (do it themselves)?
• Note that for this assignment the methods are all desk-based i.e. the data ‘collection’ is the extraction and collation of relevant variables from the dating advertisements to test the hypothesis that YOU decide on.
• The methods should include a statistical methods (data analysis) section. This should explain clearly:
o what data exploration was carried out
o what statistical test was used. The description of the test used should include what variables were tested (e.g. age of partner sought; age of advertiser; number of attributes requested by advertiser; whether or not advertiser wants children etc.) and how analyzed
[e.g. for a regression analysis, which variable was the independent (predictor) and which the dependent (response); for a t-test what were the variables in the two groups e.g. mean age requested by men seeking women; versus mean age requested by women seeking men; for a chi-squared test for association how many categories were there for each of the two variables e.g. 2 categories: wants children; doesn’t want children].Results (data presentation and results of statistical analysis): 20%
• Are the results presented in a summarized and reader-friendly way? This could be in text form, and/or as a figure (graph) or table.
• Are tables and figures correctly labeled and presented? They should have a legend underneath rather than a title.
• Is there text in the results section explaining and referring to the figures/tables?
• Are the key results emphasized?
• Results section SHOULD NOT include interpretation of results (i.e. why the results are as they are). This should be in the Discussion only.
Discussion (20%)
Does the discussion:
• Comment on your findings and how they provide evidence to support/reject your hypothesis?
• Interpret (provide reasons for) your findings in the light of published studies on the subject (i.e. the scientific literature)?
• Critique your methods and data and use this critique to make recommendations and suggestions as to further questions to ask; and future methods that should be used were this to be expanded as a larger study?
Discussion section SHOULD NOT include results of tests (e.g. test statistics, P values, tables, graphs). You can however summarize the results in text (e.g. ‘the lack of a statistically significant difference between men and women in terms of number of attributes sought may be explained by….’).
Reporting and Referencing: (10%)
• When you stated a fact did you reference where you got that fact from?
• Did you cite all your references at the end in the correct scientific format: e.g. Stiling, P. (1999). Ecology, theories and applications. London, Prentice- Hall. 357 pp.
• Did you use a range of resources from key recommended ecological text books or scientific journal articles?
BY264: Practical 2
Using online dating advertisements (‘Lonely Hearts Data’) to test theories on human sexual selection
You will need to have attended the lectures, particularly the sexual selection and human behaviour lectures, to help you to understand relevant theories and develop your own hypothesis.
Exercise:
The aim of this exercise is for you to develop a way to test one hypotheses of your choice related to ‘mate choice’ theories in sexual selection.
You will be testing this in humans using the data provided, which are a series of 100 anonymised dating profiles posted by men and women on a popular dating website in 2018/19. The data have been edited for compliance with GDPR and contain the following information:
Age [from 18-65]
Gender [roughly equal ratio men: women]
Type of relationship they want (e.g. casual, serious)
Whether they want children or not (not all adverts have this)
What age bracket they are looking for in a partner
What qualities they want in a partner (not all adverts have this)
For simplicity, ALL ADVERTS ARE BY PEOPLE SEEKING HETEROSEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS
You will need to refine a hypothesis that you can test with the data – so you need to look at the data carefully to determine what they can be used to test. NOT ALL THE DATA WILL BE USABLE TO TEST YOUR HYPOTHESIS. YOU NEED TO EXTRACT THE RELEVANT VARIABLES* TO TEST YOUR HYPOTHESIS.
* from the word document containing the data. You will need to copy and paste/transpose the variables you need into spreadsheet/database form and then conduct analysis in appropriate statistical software.
You will need to think about how to summarise the data and apply statistical analysis to the data to test your hypothesis.
Practical report (1000 words excluding references and figure/table legends, ± 10%):
Introduction: A brief background to sexual selection and mate choice theory that you will test with appropriate references.
Hypothesis: State clearly the hypothesis tested using the data provided.
Methods: Details of how you processed the data to extract what you required and how you analysed them.
Results: Presentation of an extraction of the data in summary form and statistical analysis of data.
Discussion: Discuss your findings in relation to the literature and any limitations of the approach that could be improved upon (but don’t spend the entire discussion criticising the methods/your findings!). At the end include a brief statement summarising the key points and making suggestion/s for further work.
References: List all references cited in the standard format according to the PABS formatting guide.
There are several publications on human mate choice using lonely hearts e.g.
Waynforth, D. & Dunbar RIM (1995) Conditional mate choice strategies in humans: evidence from ‘Lonely Hearts’ advertisements Behaviour, Volume 132, Issue 9, pages 755 – 779. DOI: 10.1163/156853995X00135 (available online).
Detailed grading criteria are included in the Assessment and Module Information areas of StudentCentral to help you further with your report.