PS499 Unit 4 Research Proposal Example

Awe Walks Versus Ordinary Walks After the Night Shift: A PS499 Unit 4 Research Proposal

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS499: Bachelor's Capstone in Psychology

Unit 4 Research Proposal

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The hospitals, the crew and the planned figures are composite and illustrative; the measures and studies cited are real.

Research Question and Hypotheses

Unit 3's review turned up no trial of awe programs among people who work nights, and none pitting awe walks against plain walks at work. This proposal addresses that gap with one main question. When housekeepers finish a night shift, does a quarter-hour walk with an awe invitation, taken three times weekly over six weeks, lower perceived stress further than a plain quarter-hour walk on the same route?

Three hypotheses follow. First, participants in the awe walk group will show a larger decrease in perceived stress from baseline to six weeks than participants in the ordinary walk group. Second, participants in the awe walk group will report more awe during walks, and greater awe will be associated with greater stress reduction. Third, participants in the awe walk group will report a larger increase in felt closeness to their coworkers.

Design

The study is a two-group randomized pilot with measures at three points. Randomization separates the effect of awe from the effects of walking, fresh air, time of day and companionship, which both groups share. The design follows the comparison walk approach used by Sturm et al. (2022), who taught one group to cultivate awe on weekly walks while the other group walked without those instructions.

Participants

Participants will be environmental services staff who work at least three night shifts a week at two hospitals in a Lansing health system, which together employ about eighty night housekeepers. The goal is to enroll sixty. Inclusion criteria are age 18 or older, working nights for at least three months, and being able to walk for fifteen minutes. Workers with a medical condition that makes walking unsafe will be excluded. Because many staff speak Nepali, French or Swahili as a first language, materials will be offered in those languages.

Comparing awe walks with ordinary walks, not with sitting in the break room, is what lets the study say something about awe rather than about exercise.

Recruitment and Randomization

To avoid pressure on workers I supervise, recruitment will be done by a research coordinator from the hospital's nursing research office, not by me. Workers will learn about the study at shift meetings and through flyers, and those interested will meet with the coordinator privately. After consent and baseline measures, a computer-generated list will assign participants to the awe or ordinary walk group, separately within each hospital so that the groups are balanced across sites. I will not know any participant's assignment.

Intervention

Both groups will walk for fifteen minutes immediately after their shift on three of their working days each week for six weeks, on paid time approved by the department. Walks will follow the hospital's river trail and the top level of its parking ramp, which overlook the river and the eastern sky. Groups will walk on alternating days so that they do not mix.

Before the first walk, the awe group will receive a five-minute orientation, adapted from Sturm et al. (2022), asking them to notice things that are vast, such as the sky and river, or unexpected, such as changes in light, and to approach familiar sights with fresh eyes. The ordinary walk group will receive a five-minute orientation on walking safely and at a comfortable pace, without instructions about attention. A volunteer walk leader for each group, trained by the coordinator, will begin each walk.

Measures

Perceived stress, the main outcome, will come from the ten-question version of Cohen's scale, given at baseline, three weeks and six weeks. The scale asks how often in the last month respondents have felt that life was unpredictable, uncontrollable or overwhelming, and it has been widely used with working adults (Cohen et al., 1983).

Awe will be measured after each walk with a single item asking how much awe the participant felt, and at three and six weeks with the Awe Experience Scale, which measures several facets of awe, including vastness, a diminished sense of self and connectedness (Yaden et al., 2019).

Closeness to coworkers will be captured by Aron's overlapping-circles measure, a single item in which participants choose among pairs of overlapping circles to show how close they feel to another person or group (Aron et al., 1992). Attendance will be recorded by walk leaders. At six weeks, a subset of participants in each group will be invited to a short interview about their experience.

Analysis

The main analysis will compare six-week Perceived Stress Scale scores between groups, controlling for baseline scores, using all participants as randomized, regardless of how many walks they completed. The difference between groups will be reported as a standardized effect with its confidence interval. The second hypothesis will be tested by examining whether average awe ratings predict stress change within the awe group. Interview responses will be analyzed for common themes.

A study with sixty participants is too small to detect a modest effect reliably; detecting a medium effect with conventional power would require more than one hundred twenty. The pilot's purpose is therefore to estimate the size of the effect, test recruitment and attendance, and refine procedures for a larger trial.

Feasibility and Timeline

The study is designed to fit a hospital's routines. Walks happen on paid time already approved for a fifteen-minute post-shift break, so no worker gives up unpaid time. Questionnaires take about ten minutes and will be completed on a tablet in the break room, in the worker's preferred language, before the walk on measurement days. The coordinator will need about four hours a week during recruitment and two hours a week during the walk period. Walk leaders will receive a one-hour training. Recruitment will take one month, the walks six weeks and analysis one month, so the full pilot fits within a single season. Running it in late spring would put most walks after sunrise, which matters for an intervention built around the sky.

Limitations

Participants cannot be blinded to their instructions, and self-reported stress may be influenced by expectations. Attendance may be lower in winter, when walks happen before sunrise. Two hospitals in one city limit generalization. Finally, I work in the setting, and even with recruitment by a coordinator, some workers may participate to please their supervisor; the ethics paper in Unit 6 addresses this risk in detail.

Conclusion

The pilot pits awe walks against plain walks that match them in every other respect, to see which eases the crew's stress more. Its measures match its hypotheses, its recruitment protects workers from pressure, and its size is set honestly to estimate an effect for a future trial.

References

Aron, A., Aron, E. N., & Smollan, D. (1992). Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(4), 596-612. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.63.4.596

Cohen, S., Kamarck, T., & Mermelstein, R. (1983). A global measure of perceived stress. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 24(4), 385-396. https://doi.org/10.2307/2136404

Sturm, V. E., Datta, S., Roy, A. R. K., Sible, I. J., Kosik, E. L., Veziris, C. R., Chow, T. E., Morris, N. A., Neuhaus, J., Kramer, J. H., Miller, B. L., Holley, S. R., & Keltner, D. (2022). Big smile, small self: Awe walks promote prosocial positive emotions in older adults. Emotion, 22(5), 1044-1058. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000876

Yaden, D. B., Kaufman, S. B., Hyde, E., Chirico, A., Gaggioli, A., Zhang, J. W., & Keltner, D. (2019). The development of the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S): A multifactorial measure for a complex emotion. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 14(4), 474-488. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2018.1484940