Essentials of Psychological Research Writing PDF

Essentials of Psychological Research Writing art II  An empirical paper or proposal should Empirica describe a proposed or completed study l Paper With enough detail to demonstrate what or question the research was designed to answer, what else is k...

Essentials of Psychological Research Writing art II  An empirical paper or proposal should Empirica describe a proposed or completed study l Paper With enough detail to demonstrate what or question the research was designed to answer, what else is known about the topic Researc (which makes it clear why your study is needed and important), h Proposal exactly what was done or will be done in the experiment, and what the findings do or will mean to the field  Abstract The abstract is a summary (usually 150 Elements words or fewer) that provides the reader of an a framework for what is to come empirical The abstract should appear on a Paper/Prop separate page and should summarize osal each of the paper’s sections in a sentence or two The abstract should be comprehensible even if the reader never actually reads the full pape  The introduction should begin on the page after the abstract, and should not be labeled with a subheading Introducti on In the introduction you provide your reader with information about what question you have tackled (or plan to tackle) and how that question relates to other work in the field.  You should focus on explaining why the question is important, summarizing the history of the question, and describing previous theories and data that are relevant Introducti to the study you will describe on Contd Finally, you should present the hypothesis that you have tested (or will test) in your study  You should also note alternative possible answers to the question you raise, Introduction and indicate how your study will allow you to garner support for the hypothesis and at the same time rule out the alternative possibilities  A study that will produce results that are consistent with all possible hypotheses is of no interest Yup!! 01/29/2025 7  Method The method section explains how the study was conducted (or how it will be conducted). This section details the study’s participants, the materials used in the study, and the procedure the participants followed (or will follow) in the study 01/29/2025 8  Method The format for the method section is specified in the APA style guide. You should include enough details so that another person could replicate your study precisely, without consulting you 01/29/2025 9  Results/Predicted Results What did the study find or what do you expect it will In addition to detailing find? In this section your the results of the study, job is to provide the you will need to describe evidence that any steps you took in psychologists like best— cleaning up the data data. 01/29/2025 10  Sometimes, for proposals, professors will want you to speculate about what the results will look like. Present first the results that bear directly on your hypothesis, Always present the descriptive statistics (typically means and standard errors of the mean, often in a graph) along with the inferential statistics (such as tests of an analysis of variance) 01/29/2025 11  Discussion In the discussion section, your main job is to synthesize the results and offer your conclusions. 01/29/2025 12  Results What do these results mean? How do these findings relate to the research you discussed in the introduction? Do they support your hypothesis and rule out the other alternative answers to the question you asked? 01/29/2025 13 Results How do you explain any discrepancies between your predictions and your findings? What are the implications of your findings? How does what you found support or contradict established or provisional theories? What are the real world implications for your findings?  References Your reference section should begin on a new page after the discussion section. The format for your reference page is laid out by the American Psychological Association (APA). You should consult the APA style manual for specific guidelines 01/29/2025 15  A Psychologist’s Use of Evidence In psychology, evidence for one’s conclusions should rely on data, rather than people’s opinions Most of your sources for psychology papers will be empirical reports found in journals, though you may also cite literature reviews, chapters, or books from time to time 01/29/2025 16  Use of evidence. It is important to rely directly on empirical papers because when you cite from other authors’ summaries, you are asking your reader to gamble that the person whom you are citing understood and correctly represented the finding in question. On rare occasions it is not possible to find an original source, and in these rare occasions you will have to cite the secondary source 01/29/2025 17  One way to locate primary or empirical sources is to look up some of the empirical papers that your summary papers cite as a starting point. 01/29/2025 18  Use of sources Whenever possible, you should cite articles from peer-reviewed journals. How?? “Peer-reviewed” means that a journal requires that an article be reviewed by experts in the field before it is published. Findings that have not been published in peer-reviewed journals run a risk of having flawed methods, statistics, or conclusions 01/29/2025 19  How to access the data You will likely search for articles either on PsycINFO or Google Scholar. Both search engines provide information on how many times an article has been cited by other scholars. 01/29/2025 20  Accessing the data In general, an article that has been cited Of course, if a paper many times will be has only been considered more published recently, it central to the field will not yet have been than one that has not cited multiple times. been cited. 01/29/2025 21  Last pointers The citation of sources is very important in psychology. For all papers you will write for courses, you will use APA style. The best way to learn APA style is to buy the latest edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. This book is updated every few years with guidelines for how to cite papers. Some websites also describe APA format, but these websites may not be updated when new editions of the APA manual are published 01/29/2025 22