10.8 Assignment

Imagine you are a health psychologist who is interested in factors that predict whether someone reporting chronic pain experiences invalidation in medical contexts. In this context, invalidation refers to experiences in which medical professionals dismiss, deny, or question the reality of a patient’s chronic pain. These experiences have important negative implications for access to medical care and mental health.

Within much of Canadian culture, young people are expected to be healthy and strong. Based on this, you hypothesize that young people will experience more invalidation when reporting chronic pain compared to old people.

You conduct a survey of 104 people with chronic pain. You record the following variables:

• age
• pis: Score on the Pain Invalidation Scale, which is a self-report measure of invalidating experiences in medical contexts. Scores range from 0–96, with higher scores indicating greater invalidation.

Download your dataset from Canvas in the folder for this lab. Your dataset is labelled with your name. It is important that you download only your data, since it is different from other students’ data.

Conduct a correlation analysis to test your hypotheses. Report your results in APA format.

As a reminder, you must complete this assignment independently, with no assistance from your classmates.