Drinking intentions measured among undergraduate students of University

“What am I being asked to do for this coursework?”
The purpose of the quantitative data analysis coursework is for students to demonstrate their understanding of non-experimental quantitative research methods encountered in PY7158. This will be achieved by demonstrating knowledge of methods of data analysis commonly used in quantitative research with a correlational design. You must conduct these analyses using an SPSS data file containing survey responses from undergraduates about their drinking behaviour. You should then present these analyses in an ‘extended results section’ which can be understood as a scaled-down version of a full journal article with an emphasis on the results section rather than on other sections.

GENERAL GUIDANCE
Start off by looking at the data. Think about which items can be combined to make a ‘composite scale’ variable. Then examine whether your dataset meets parametric assumptions and if not which diagnostic details you could usefully include in your report.
Next, think about the relationships you would like to explore. Note here that you have a number of different variables to include but do not need to include them all to produce a strong, accurate analysis in your report. You will probably wish to focus on the relationship between drinking intention or recent drinking behaviour and psychological variables. An important consideration is to choose a set of items/scales to focus on which will produce a coherent, manageable analysis.
For your analysis, draw on quantitative methods of analysis encountered in PY7158. As with variable choice, there is no need to be exhaustive in terms of the analysis/es you present in your report. You should aim to present a multiple regression, possibly preceded by a correlational analysis- there is scope for this in terms of the range of variables available to you and in terms of the range of analyses you have encountered. Given the tight word count and complexity of the approach it will not be possible to present a factor analysis for this piece of work, but you should present reliability analyses for each of the scales that you use.
For your report, write up your analyses as if you were preparing a results section for a paper that you are due to submit for publication. Spend some time considering how results sections similar to the one that you will produce have been presented (see the two example papers on Moodle for guidance with this). You may include a maximum of two tables or figures. All of these decisions should be judicious: think about what information would be most useful to present and about how to present information in the most useful/ informative way for your reader.