PSY1023 Introduction to Psychological Inquiry
The Complete Study & Assessment Guide · S2 2026PSY1023 Overview
- Monash University
- Semester 2, 2026
- Level 1 unit
- Seminars and tutorials
- Three written assessment tasks
PSY1023 Introduction to Psychological Inquiry is Monash University's first-year unit on how psychological knowledge is created.
- Assessed by Three written tasks, one with a group report
- Core idea Assumptions about reality shape every method
- Main method Reflexive thematic analysis of interviews
- Watch for Hard word limits and no generative AI
How PSY1023 is assessed
| Component | Weight | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Assessment 1: Critical Reflection | 20% | Individual written reflection of 1,000 words on your own ontology and epistemology, due Monday 24 August 2026 |
| Assessment 2: Peer Feedback and Positionality Statement | 40% | Individual written task: a 1,000-word peer feedback report on a group member's Week 8 interview and a 500-word positionality statement, due Friday 18 September 2026 |
| Assessment 3: Qualitative Results Report (group submission) | 32% | Group written report of 2,000 words with introduction, method and reflexive thematic analysis plus four appendices, due Friday 23 October 2026 |
| Assessment 3: Qualitative Results Report (individual component) | 8% | Individual statement on how the group shared the work, submitted alongside the group report |
What PSY1023 covers
Follow the semester as one research project: from ways of knowing and ethics, through design, sampling and interviews, to reflexive thematic analysis, reporting and the quantitative contrast.
Ways of Knowing: Ontology and Epistemology
Week 1. How psychology became a science, realism, critical realism and relativism, rationalism and empiricism, positivism and its critics, methodology versus method, and the researcher as expert or learner.Every psychological study begins with assumptions that are rarely written down.
- What psychology studies and why its history matters
- The four levels from ontology to methods
- Realism, critical realism and relativism
- Rationalism, empiricism and positivism
- Constructivism and subjectivism
- Quantitative, qualitative and mixed methodologies
Ethical Research Principles and Practice
Week 2. Why research ethics exist, the historical breaches behind them, the Australian codes and ethics committees, research misconduct, decolonising research and the elements of informed consent.Week 2 turns from how we know things to how we are allowed to find them out.
- What research ethics covers and why it matters
- Historical breaches and the codes that followed
- Australian ethical framework and ethics committees
- National Statement principles as presented in the unit
- Informed consent and the explanatory statement
- Vulnerable populations and decolonising research
Designing a Qualitative Research Protocol
Week 3. What qualitative research is and is not, quantitative versus qualitative design, trustworthiness criteria, the contents of a research protocol and the design waterfall from problem to analysis.Week 3 moves from principles to planning. Once you know what you believe about reality and knowledge, and how ethics constrains research with people, the next step is to design a study that fits those commitments.
- Research design as a framework for data collection and analysis
- Quantitative versus qualitative designs
- The qualitative research design waterfall
- Alignment and validity in qualitative research
- Guba’s trustworthiness criteria
- Contents of a research protocol
Research Gaps, Aims and Research Questions
Weeks 3 and 4. Theoretical, empirical and methodological gaps, aims written with exploratory verbs, a rationale that follows from the gap, and the qualities of a well-defined qualitative research question.By the fourth week of PSY1023 your tutorial group has picked a sub-topic within the unit-wide theme of psychosocial factors shaping the university student experience. The next job is turning that interest into a study someone could actually run.
- The four core elements of the proposal and their order
- Defining a research gap and the situations that create one
- Theoretical, empirical and methodological gaps
- Gaps a short interview study cannot support
- Writing qualitative aims and testing the rationale
- Types and criteria of a qualitative research question
Qualitative Data Collection and Credibility
Week 4. Individual and group methods of data collection, methodological integrity as fidelity and utility, and the credibility strategies of prolonged engagement, persistent observation, triangulation and member checking.Week 4 of PSY1023 moves from planning a study to gathering its data, and it asks a question that runs through the rest of the unit: why should anyone believe what a qualitative study reports?
- Guba's qualitative counterparts to validity, reliability and objectivity
- Credibility and the idea of groundedness
- Prolonged engagement, persistent observation, triangulation and member checking
- Individual versus group methods of data collection
- Reading published method sections for credibility moves
- Planning credibility for a short interview project
Sampling, Reflexivity and Ethical Communication
Week 5. Population and sample, probability and non-probability sampling, what decides sample size, reflective journals and positionality, explanatory statements and consent forms.Week 5 is where the group project stops being a plan on a slide and starts involving real people. Three questions run through the seminar and tutorial. Who should you talk to, and what can their accounts tell you about everyone else?
- Population, sample and representativeness
- Probability and non-probability sampling
- Convenience, snowball and volunteer recruitment
- Influences on sample size and saturation
- Researcher reflexivity and the reflective journal
- Writing the AT2 positionality statement
Interview Guides and Interviewing Skills
Weeks 6 to 8. Unstructured, semi-structured and structured interviews, the interview protocol refinement framework, question and probe types, leading questions, active listening and transcription notation.Weeks 6 to 8 turn the research question into a working instrument and then put that instrument to use. Week 6 asks what kind of interview suits the project and how to write questions that open people up instead of closing them down.
- Structured, semi-structured and unstructured interviews
- Purpose and quality of an interview guide
- Question running order and content types
- Recognising leading questions
- Interview Protocol Refinement framework
- Opening, active listening and closing
Reflexive Thematic Analysis
Weeks 7 and 9. The six phases of Braun and Clarke's approach, codes versus themes, semantic and latent coding, inductive and theoretical analysis, and the pitfalls that weaken an analysis.Reflexive thematic analysis is the analysis method behind the third assessment task in this unit, the group Qualitative Results Report.
- Braun and Clarke's six phases and why the cycle is recursive
- Codes versus themes as units of analysis
- Semantic and latent coding on one spectrum
- Writing a theme definition and a claim-style theme name
- Phase 4 review at Level 1 and Level 2
- Recording themes, codes and quotes in the Appendix D table
Qualitative Paradigms and Research Designs
Week 9. Constructivism, interpretivism and critical theory, then phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography and case study, with induction, deduction and abduction.The Week 9 seminar widens the lens from coding to the traditions that qualitative researchers work within.
- Characteristics and aims of qualitative research
- Paradigms as ontology, epistemology and methodology
- Constructivism, interpretivism and critical theory
- Phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography and case study
- Narrative research and Creswell's five-approach comparison
- Describing an AT3 design without overclaiming
Reporting Qualitative Results as a Narrative
Weeks 10 and 11. Writing method and results sections for qualitative and quantitative studies, naming and defining themes, balancing extracts with interpretation, discussion and plain-language communication.This chapter covers Weeks 10 and 11 of Introduction to Psychological Inquiry at Monash, the stage where the group research project turns from coding interviews into writing them up.
- The Analysis section as the argument of the Qualitative Results Report
- Word budget: 2,000 words with about 300 introduction, 700 method and 1,000 analysis
- Qualitative versus quantitative conventions in the Method and Results
- Claim, extract, interpretation and link: the rhythm of a theme
- Naming themes without one-word or domain-summary labels
- Discussion, conclusions and trustworthiness
Quantitative Research Principles
Weeks 10 to 12. Variables and operationalisation, sampling and power, reading reported t-tests, choosing a statistical test from the design, and how quantitative reports differ from qualitative ones.Introduction to Psychological Inquiry spends most of the semester on qualitative research, but Weeks 10 to 12 open a window onto the quantitative tradition.
- Deductive logic, empiricism and positivism behind quantitative research
- Independent and dependent variables and operationalisation
- Choosing among t-test, ANOVA, correlation and regression
- Reading an APA result line: M, SD, t(df) and p
- Designs and analyses in the quantitative starting references
- Five questions for reading an article critically
Rather than surveying findings, it asks where findings come from: what researchers assume about reality, how those assumptions lead to a choice of method, and what it takes to collect and analyse evidence responsibly.
The unit is taught through weekly seminars and tutorials, and the tutorials double as the workspace for a semester-long group research project.
The project topic for 2026 is the psychosocial factors that shape the university student experience in the twenty-first century.
Each tutorial group chooses one of three sub-topics: eLearning technologies and artificial intelligence, psychological wellbeing, or emerging adulthood.
Groups read three starting references for their sub-topic (one qualitative, one quantitative and one mixed methods study), use them to launch their own literature search, and then design, conduct and analyse a short qualitative interview study of their own.
The weeks follow the life of that project.
Week 1 sets up the philosophy: ontology asks what reality is, epistemology asks how we can know it, and those answers shape methodology and methods. Week 2 covers research ethics, from the historical breaches that produced modern codes to informed consent and decolonising research practice.
Weeks 3 to 6 move into design: research gaps, aims and questions, credibility and trustworthiness, sampling and reflexivity, and building an interview guide. Week 8 is interview week, when students interview one another and give structured feedback.
The second half turns data into findings.
Reflexive thematic analysis, following Braun and Clarke, is the analytic method the unit teaches in depth: familiarisation, coding, generating and reviewing themes, defining and naming them, and writing them up.
Week 9 places that method alongside other qualitative paradigms and designs, Weeks 10 and 11 cover reporting results as a coherent narrative, and Week 12 contrasts all of this with the principles of quantitative research.
Assessment is entirely written. Assessment 1 is an individual Critical Reflection on your own ontology and epistemology.
Assessment 2 combines a peer feedback report on a group member's interview with a positionality statement. Assessment 3 is a group Qualitative Results Report with an individual component. Each task has a strict word limit with no leeway, and the assessment guides state that generative AI must not be used in preparing or editing the work.
This guide follows the same path.
Each chapter explains the ideas a week introduces, works one fresh example from start to finish and ends with practice you can check yourself. The aim is fluency in the vocabulary that every task in the unit rewards: being able to say which ontology and epistemology you hold and why, how a design follows from a research question, and how a theme differs from a topic summary.
Worked example · free
Budget the words of the Qualitative Results Report against its marks
- 1Convert the suggested word counts into shares of the 2,000-word limit: introduction 300 ÷ 2,000 = 15%, method 700 ÷ 2,000 = 35%, analysis 1,000 ÷ 2,000 = 50%.
- 1Set each share beside its rubric weight: introduction 15% of words for 20% of marks, method 35% of words for 25% of marks, analysis 50% of words for 55% of marks.
- 1Read the gap: the method uses ten percentage points more of the words than of the marks, so it is the section to keep tight, written in prose under its four subheadings.
- 1Decide where spare words go: the analysis carries the largest single weight, so a sentence of interpretation under a theme earns more than another sentence of procedure.
Key terms
- Ontology
- A set of assumptions about the nature of reality, for example whether there is one reality, many realities, or an objective reality that people know only partially.
- Epistemology
- A position on how knowledge about reality can be gained, such as through measurement and experiment or through interpreting meaning and experience.
- Critical Realism
- The position that an objective reality exists but our knowledge of it is shaped by the viewpoint of the observer.
- Reflexivity
- Continual critical self-evaluation of how the researcher's position, values and actions may affect the research process and its outcome.
- Positionality Statement
- A short account of a researcher's identity and assumptions and of how they relate to the participants, topic and analysis of a study.
- Informed Consent
- Agreement to take part in research that rests on adequate information, genuine comprehension and voluntary choice without coercion.
- Semi-structured Interview
- An interview built around prepared open questions that still lets the interviewer follow and probe what the participant raises.
- Thematic Analysis
- A method for identifying, analysing and reporting patterns of meaning, called themes, across a qualitative data set.
- Member Checking
- Sharing transcripts or early analysis with participants so they can confirm, correct or extend the researcher's account.
PSY1023 FAQ
What does Introduction to Psychological Inquiry cover?
It introduces how psychological knowledge is produced. You compare philosophical positions on reality and knowledge, learn the ethics and design of research, then carry out a small qualitative interview study with your tutorial group, analyse it with reflexive thematic analysis and write it up.
How is this Monash psychology unit assessed?
Through three written tasks: a 20% individual Critical Reflection, a 40% individual Peer Feedback and Positionality Statement, and a 40% Qualitative Results Report split into a 32% group submission and an 8% individual component.
Do I need references in the Critical Reflection?
The Assessment 1 guide says no references are required, but the piece must still follow APA 7th formatting, include a title page with the final word count and stay within 1,000 words because writing past the limit is not marked.
What should a positionality statement cover?
Two prompts set by the unit: your own identity together with your current ontological and epistemological perspectives on the project, and how well your group's positions align with yours, including your role in the group's dynamics and teamwork.
How many themes should the results report present?
The annotated template asks for between three and five themes and recommends four. Each theme should describe a pattern across all the interviews rather than the answers to one interview question, and each needs illustrative quotations.
Is generative AI allowed in the assessment tasks?
No. Each assessment guide states that AI and generative AI tools must not be used in preparing or writing the task, and that this extends to editing, refining, polishing or shortening text you wrote yourself.
What happens if a task is submitted late?
The guides deduct five marks per day late, counting any part of a day as a full day, and work more than seven days late receives zero. Short extensions are not available for the group report.
Questions students ask in each PSY1023 chapter
- What is the difference between ontology and epistemology?
- Ontology is about what reality is, for example one truth or many truths. Epistemology is about how anyone can come to know that reality, for example through reason, experiment or interpretation. A researcher settles the first before the second makes sense. Chapter 01 · Ways of Knowing: Ontology and Epistemology
- Why does the unit spend a week on research history?
- Modern ethical codes were written in response to real abuses. The Nuremberg Code of 1947 followed wartime experiments, and the Belmont Report of 1978 followed further unethical studies, so the history explains why committees and consent rules exist today. Chapter 02 · Ethical Research Principles and Practice
- Why is qualitative design called process-oriented?
- Qualitative designs can adjust methods and even research questions as a study unfolds, responding to what participants reveal. Quantitative designs tend to be chosen from a fixed set at the start and are built mainly to block threats to validity. Chapter 03 · Designing a Qualitative Research Protocol
- Can our group use the starting references to establish the research gap?
- The unit treats the starting references as background reading to help you understand each sub-topic. Your gap should be informed by your own search of recent peer-reviewed journal articles, logged in the research matrix, rather than resting on those few papers. Chapter 04 · Research Gaps, Aims and Research Questions
- Is credibility just another word for validity in qualitative research?
- It is the qualitative counterpart of internal validity in the mapping the unit takes from Guba (1981) via Shenton (2004). Transferability, dependability and confirmability correspond to generalisability, reliability and objectivity, so credibility covers only one of those four concerns. Chapter 05 · Qualitative Data Collection and Credibility
- Is convenience sampling a weakness I should hide in my report?
- No. Most student projects rely on non-probability recruitment, and markers respond better to an honest label plus a specific limitation. Name the technique, explain why it was practical, and state which perspectives the sample may not capture. Chapter 06 · Sampling, Reflexivity and Ethical Communication
- How many main questions should the guide include?
- The tutorial guidance is roughly four main open questions for a 15-minute interview, supported by planned probes. Fewer, broader questions leave time for follow-up, which is where much of the useful detail appears. Chapter 07 · Interview Guides and Interviewing Skills
- Is the third phase called searching for themes or generating initial themes?
- Both labels describe the same work of collating codes into candidate themes. Braun and Clarke's 2006 paper uses searching for themes, while the unit's Week 7 seminar uses generating initial themes; either is acceptable if you cite the method correctly. Chapter 08 · Reflexive Thematic Analysis
- Is reflexive thematic analysis a research design like phenomenology?
- Braun and Clarke treat thematic analysis as a method that is not tied to one theoretical framework, whereas phenomenology and grounded theory carry their own theoretical commitments. Describe an AT3 project by its paradigm plus the analysis method rather than borrowing a design label it does not meet. Chapter 09 · Qualitative Paradigms and Research Designs
- Can I quote published authors directly in the Qualitative Results Report?
- No. The assessment guide states that direct quotations from articles are not accepted, even for definitions of key terms, so paraphrase in your own words and cite in APA 7 style. Short extracts from your own interview transcripts are a different matter and are expected inside each theme. Chapter 10 · Reporting Qualitative Results as a Narrative
- Will I need to calculate statistics for any assessment task?
- No. None of the three assessment tasks involves statistics. The Week 12 Moodle page describes the quantitative readings and videos as optional resources that may not help much with current assessments but should be useful in future psychology units. Chapter 11 · Quantitative Research Principles
How to prepare for the assessments
Treat the unit as one research project told in twelve steps, and keep a single working document that grows with it. After Week 1, write two sentences naming your ontology and your epistemology and one experience that shaped each; that draft becomes the spine of the Critical Reflection and later your positionality statement.
As the design weeks arrive, add your group's gap, aim, rationale and research question and test the question against the four criteria the unit gives: exploratory, phrased as a question, focused on one phenomenon, and bounded by a defined sample and setting. Before interview week, rehearse your guide aloud and mark which questions are open, which are probes and where a leading phrase has slipped in.
For the analysis, work through the six phases on your own transcript before the group meets, so the group compares codes rather than impressions. Finally, read every assessment guide twice: once for the task, and once for the rules on word limits, references, quotations and generative AI.
Your AI Psychology tutor for PSY1023
Stuck on a hard PSY1023 question? Sia is AskSia’s AI Psychology tutor — ask any PSY1023 Introduction to Psychological Inquiry question and get a clear, step-by-step explanation grounded in how the course is actually taught and assessed. Read this whole study guide free, then take your hardest questions to Sia.
