Reporting psychological research

• Report


  Designed to tell other psychologists everything they need to know about why a study is conducted, how the study was conducted, what was found, and what that means
• Report


  • Gathers information across as efficiently as possible
  • Set out in a very predictable format
• Sections of a psychology research article

  • Abstract
  • Introduction
  • Method
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • References
• Abstract


  One or two paragraphs that summarise the entire paper, including the researcher's aim, hypothesis, information on how the study was conducted, and the main results and conclusions
• Literature review


  Psychologists do this in the planning stage of a study to review all the existing studies, potentially looking at hundreds of papers
• Introduction


  Guides the reader through the background theory and research that has come before the study, and the reason why the current study is being conducted
• Method


  A how-to guide on conducting the study, providing all the information another researcher would need to replicate the study
• Sections of the method

  • Design
  • Participants
  • Materials
  • Procedure
• Results


  An objective summary of the data collected, including tables of descriptive statistics and relevant graphs, as well as calculations using appropriate statistical tests to show if the results are significant
• Discussion


  Where the researcher considers how the findings fit in with previous research, identifies potential weaknesses of the study, and suggests ideas for future research
• References


  An alphabetical list of all the researchers whose work has been used as part of the development of the paper, providing credit for their ideas and allowing other researchers to easily track the sources
• Plagiarism is claiming other people's ideas or work as your own
• Psychologists use the Harvard referencing format for their references
• When first mentioning other researchers' ideas, you can put the author's surname, date of publication, and page number in brackets
• In the references section, start with the author's surname and initials, then the date of publication in brackets, followed by the name of the journal article or book, the location of publication, and the name of the publisher
• You can find the unique reference number (DOI) for a source and use that to generate a formatted reference
• Starting a Word document to keep track of references in alphabetical order can help you find relevant studies to use in future essays
• The references section of a paper is a good place to start when looking for related studies to demonstrate wide reading