200004 PR Forschungsorientiertes Praktikum (2025S)

The aim of this course is to serve as an alternative for a research internship in Psychology as might be conducted in a third-party institution, research lab, etc..

In this class, students will gain real-world experience in conducting research by working on research questions in groups, learning methodological skills relating to data acquisition, analysis, and the designing and conducting of studies, as well as discussing and critiquing one's own and other published empirical scientific work.

Content/Focus: In this semester, our specific focus will be on the assessment, data collection, and evaluation of the urban space (Vienna) and the specific aesthetic or artistic features that may impact well-being. We will consider the role of the arts or urban design (murals, sculpture, as well as, for example, graffiti) in the city, how this might be located, quantified, and connected to both individual and to population-wide impacts and psychological implications. Students will have the opportunity to learn and actively perform a mixture of both field-based behavioral data collection/surveys of individuals' assessments of specific urban spaces or features. We will also employ wide-scale mapping of target features in the urban space as a basis for subsequent assessment of population-wide health and well-being statistics. This will be combined with general discussions of mapping, theoretical discussions of urban design, and geo-humanities , considering this emerging trend in psychology.

Content will include: lectures and group discussion on underlying theory and practice , lecturer-led planning of onsite data collection, assessment design, discussion of public engagement and data collection procedures, as well as reading of key papers, and presentation of the output of students' work.

An overall theme of the course will be that students will be treated, and expected to act as if they were performing as interns in the PI laboratory, contributing work to the project, but also with the extra addition of a learning framework.