Writing Empirical Psychology Papers (for Beginners)
Please note: The below reviews the commonly accepted practices in writing an APA-style paper (5th Ed).
However, it was originally written for a specific class. Remember to refer back to your own assignment and your professor for more information.
Introduction
Use the following as a guideline for what to include in the introduction and how to organize it.
(1) Try to capture the reader’s interest right away in the first few statements. You want to introduce your topic. One way to do this is by posing an interesting question. You do not have to summarize your entire argument in this first paragraph. It is mostly a stylistic paragraph to orient the reader to the general topic and your question. I’d suggest writing this paragraph after you've finished the rest of the paper. (For more on this, see the section on "Opening Statements" at: http://dbem.ws/WritingArticle.pdf.)
(2) The main goal in the introduction is to provide a review of the relevant psychological literature, providing definitions and past research findings that inform the reader on your topic. Your goal is for the reader to understand the need for more research in the area (i.e., your proposed study), and to be able to clearly see the reasoning for your hypothesis. You should organize this section of your paper in such a way that you logically build to your study. You aren't just citing research, you are crafting a line of reasoning which leads to your research question. Avoid simply summarizing each of the different studies you read in a “list” type format. Remember this is a paper and you need to present information in a coherent way that moves from the broad to the specific, and in a way that leads the reader to the gap in the literature you’ve noticed. You can accomplish this goal in many ways (look through multiple published articles for ideas), but you might try the below as a starting point:
| INTRODUCING YOUR TOPIC, REVIEWING BACKGROUND LITERATURE | ||
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Provide a sensible heading for this section. Review the next relevant variable from your hypothesis. Again, define your terms and then elaborate on those defintions by providing more information about what is known about the variable/theory/concept (using empirical study descriptions where appropriate). Continue this process until you have defined all relevant terms and reviewed most of the relevant background literature. |
| LAYING OUT YOUR LOGIC, REVIEWING SPECIFICALLY RELEVANT ARTICLES | ||
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In a section labeled "The Present Study," present the logic for your conceptual hypothesis. Now that the reader knows the relevant definitions and background, you can bring together the research evidence reviewed above to formulate your argument. Lead the reader step-by-step to and through your hypothesis. This may involve a brief review of some of the ideas presented earlier, and it may include additional material (for example, you may want to provide information about a past study that is a "key" study and/or that closely mirrors your own research question). Be sure to say what is unique/original about your research. For example, (1) You might find a contradiction in the literature that leads to your study; (2) You might find a reason why the conclusions reflected in the reviewed literature might be wrong; (3) Perhaps there is a gap in the literature – something you consider important that has not been studied; (4) Or you might notice a point that, although it is dealt with in the readings, ought to be extended further in some other dimension. --> |
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In
the last paragraph of your Introduction, name
the specific variables you intend to study and generally what you will be asking your
participants to do (e.g. “…we plan to administer a
survey measuring both variables X and Y to determine if there is a
correlation.”). |
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Throughout the Introduction (and the entire paper), remember to provide a citation for any information that is not your own idea (including information from any of our textbooks). Put the citation at the very first mention of the cited material (not, for example, at the end of the paragraph). Read and follow the guidelines on in-text citations found at the webpage: Finding, Reading, and Citing Sources.
Method
All method sections need three basic categories of information:
Participants – who was in your study and did they volunteer or get some sort of course credit.
Materials – what were your measured variables (a.k.a. operational definitions)
Procedure – what exactly did you do (literally during the study session)
You may choose to use three different heading for this information (as presented in the example below), or you might want to combine procedures and materials into one section. Format the method section however it works best for you – but be sure to put participant information first and in its own section. Write in the past tense.
The
below example
should help provide you with
some commonly used (conventional) ways of writing out this information.
Method
Participants
Participants were __N___ college students enrolled in introductory
psychology
classes. The students received extra credit in exchange for their
participation. This sample consisted of _N_ women and _N_ men.
Participants were generally college-aged (M = XX, SD = XX), and most
selected "White" (XX%) when asked their race/ethnicity (XX% selected
"Black" and XX% selected "Latino/a").
Note:
In the participants section, gender, age (or year in school), and
ethnicity are
typical standard demographic statistics to include . You should also
report any
other demographic statistic that relates to your hypothesis.
Materials
Contingencies of Self-Worth Scale. Selected subscales from the contingencies of worth scale (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001) were used. The subscale of interest for this study was the school competency scale. The measure of school competency as a basis of worth consisted of XX# items. An example item is: “xxxxxxxx.” Participants indicated the extent to which they endorsed each statement using a 7-point Likert type scale (1=strongly disagree, 7=strongly agree). After reverse coding the appropriate items, the scale was created by averaging across items. The internal consistency of the scale for our sample was adequate/high/low (alpha = XX).
Sexual Orientation Prime Manipulation. We designed a PowerPoint slide show in order to prime either heterosexual or homosexual relationships. Both slide shows consisted of 20 slides, ten of which showed photographs of neutral objects (e.g, trees, tables, houses) and ten of which showed photographs of two people hugging, holding hands, or touching one another's faces with obvious affection. Participants in the heterosexual condition saw images of male/female couples. Participants in the homosexual condition saw five images of male/male couples and five images of female/female couples. All images were free-use photographs downloaded from various internet sites.
Another Scale or Variable. Continue in a new paragraph with a new heading for any other scales or manipulations that are relevant to your hypothesis. (If you are reporting data from a larger data set collected by several researchers, you do not need to report scales that you are not relevant to your hypothesis.)
(For scales/questionnaires, be sure to always include a reference (unless you wrote all the items), the number of items on the scale, the response format, the internal consistency, and an example question.)
Procedure
In this section, include what participants were initially told about the intent of study, how they run (e.g., in groups or individually? in what order were the questionnaires administered?), and also mention that an informed consent statement was administered and a debriefing session was conducted. (If there was no informed consent or debriefing, you should explain why in this section). You’ll probably want to combine Materials & Procedure for studies with simple procedures (like a short survey). For a more complex study (for example, one which uses a manipulation like the one described above), you will probably want to keep the Procedure section separate from the Materials section.
Results
The results section is where you tell the reader several things about your data and data analysis. First, provide basic descriptive information about the scales you used (report the mean and standard deviation for each scale). If you have more than 3 or 4 variables in your paper, you might want to put this descriptive information in a table to keep the text from being too choppy and bogged down (see the APA manual for ideas on creating good tables). Most central to the Results section, you tell the reader what statistics you conducted to test your hypothesis (-ses) and what the results indicated.
Include the following, in this order, in your results section:
Give the descriptive statistics for the relevant variables (mean, standard deviation). The purpose here is to summarize what your data set "looks like" before you examine your hypothesis. As such, the means, etc. you present in this first paragraph should be overall means for the entire sample rather than means broken down by condition.
Provide a brief rephrasing of your hypothesis(es) (avoid exact restatement). Then tell the reader what statistical test you used to test your hypothesis and what you found.
Explain which findings were in the predicted direction, and which were not (if any). Were differences statistically significant (i.e., p =.05 or below)? Don't merely give the statistical numbers without a supporting sentence. You also cannot use statistics as though they were parts of speech (i.e., nouns). For example do not write “The correlation between private self-consciousness and college adjustment was r(60) = - .26, p = .01.” Instead, translate important data for the reader into words and provide the statistics as evidence for your reported results. For example, “The negative correlation between private self-consciousness and college adjustment indicated that increased self-consciousness, predicted poor adjustment, r(60) = - .26, p = .01.”
However, don't try to interpret why you got the results you did. Leave that to the Discussion.
For each finding, you should also include an effect size statistic (if you know what that is and how to compute it).
Tips:
You may wish to also examine this document for more information about writing a result section. (You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this file.)
For each research finding, you need to report the following information either in the text of your paper or in a table: statistic (r, t, z, F, etc.), degrees of freedom (if relevant), and the significance level (p value). APA now asks that you also report effect sizes and power statistics.
For example, if you are reporting a single correlation for the whole results section, report it in the text of the paper as follows:
r(48) =.26, p = .04 or r = -.11, n.s.
Note: Use n.s. if not significant; if your result is significant, report the exact p-value.
If your result was non- significant, but p < .10, it is commonly accepted to still talk about the results. You might write something like the following text in your paper: “While the correlation was not significant using the standard alpha level of .05, the p-value was less than .10.” BUT, you must provide a rationale for why you should still be able to discuss this non-significant correlation (e.g, power, effect size issues). You may cautiously interpret such a correlation. Don’t make grand conclusions or use strong language based on the existence of a marginally significant finding. Also, you should indicate that a marginal finding is non-significant in a table; only refer to the statistic as “approaching significance” in the text of the paper.
If putting your statistics in the body of your results section seems to make the section difficult to read (i.e., if you feel the reader is distracted from your results by too many numbers and statistics), consider putting the statistics in a table. For example, with simple bivariate correlations, you should create a correlation matrix like the example (see the link below). If you include a table, you should, in the text of the result section, refer readers to your table instead of typing out the statistics for each finding. (See below for Tables.)
You need to report the actual statistics in some way in your result section, but regardless of whether you use a table or type the statistics in the text, you should put sentences describing the results in this section:
E.g. “As expected, college adjustment was positively correlated with the amount of contact with friends and family members (see Table 1).”
E.g. “No significant relationship was found between the importance of one's social life and social adjustment to college, r = -.11, n.s.
E.g. “As shown in Table 1, some of my predictions were supported. There was a significant correlation between extroversion and life satisfaction. However, life satisfaction was not significantly related to college adjustment.”
It is helpful to write the words of the results section first, and then go back to insert the numbers and statistical information. Really - write the words only first. Then go back and add numbers.
TABLES
If you are using Word as your word processor, create the table, then you can adjust the "borders and shading" for each cell/row/column to get the table formatted properly. Another tip is to play around with double-spacing your tables and/or using the "Format" "Paragraph" "Spacing before/after" features. Other word processors, PowerPoint and Excel can produce similar tables. Do not use Figures or Tables from SPSS.
Click on this link to see 2 examples. (You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this file.)
See the APA Manual for more specific instructions for certain kinds of tables.
Discussion
In your discussion section, relate the results back to your initial hypotheses. Do they support or disconfirm them? Remember: Results do not prove hypotheses right or wrong, they support them or fail to provide support for them.
Include the following information in (roughly) the following order:
Provide a very brief summary of the most important parts of the introduction and then the results sections. In doing so, you should relate the results to the theories you introduced in the Introduction. Your findings are just one piece among many -- resist the tendency to make your results the final story about the phenomenon or theory of interest. Integrate the results and try to make sense of the pattern of the findings.
In the case of a correlational project, be careful to not use causal language to discuss your results – unless you did an experiment you cannot infer causality. However, it would be impossible to fully discuss the implications of your results without making reference to causality. That is fine. Just don't claim that your results themselves are demonstrating causality.
Talk about any limitations relevant to the interpretation of your findings (all studies have weaknesses/qualifications).
If your results did support your hypothesis, the limitations section often includes a discussion of possible "third variable" explanations, unmeasured mediators, and/or issues with the generalizability of your results.
If your results did not support your hypothesis, the section on limitations often includes discussion of various features of the study which might be responsible (e.g., operational definitions, self-report biases, unmeasured moderator variables, the size or composition of the sample). Where possible, support your speculation with references.
BE SPECIFIC when discussing limitations. For example, if you claim that a third variable might affect your correlation, tell the reader what that third variable is and how it affect the results. If you think that the fact that the use of a convenience sample (and thus, a non-representative/random sample) is a limitation, you must explain what segment of the population might respond differently than did the participants in your sample and why.
Speculate about future directions that research could take to further investigate your question. This might relate back to any weaknesses you’ve mentioned above (or reasons why the results didn’t turn out as expected). Future directions may also include interesting next steps in the research.
A discussion section is about “what we have learned so far”; and “where we should go next”; Your final conclusion should talk briefly about the broader significance of your findings. What do they imply about human nature or some aspect of it? (Don't wildly speculate, however!) Leave the reader feeling like this is an important topic... you will likely refer back to your opening paragraph of the introduction here and have partial answers or more specific responses to the questions you posed.
Other Parts of the Paper
Title page - Try to write a title that maximally informs the reader about the topic, without being ridiculously long; 10-12 words is the maximum recommended by APA. Use titles of articles you've read as examples of form. Also provide the RUNNING HEAD (an abbreviated title that appears in the header of each page along with the page number). Provide your name and institutional affiliation (Muhlenberg College). See APA Manual and sample paper.
Abstract: Write the abstract LAST. An abstract is a super-short summary and is difficult to write.
In 120 words or less your abstract should describe:
--the topic of research (an "introduction" type sentence)
--the specific question and method of doing so (a "method" type sentence)
--the results (no numbers, just words)
--a hint about the general direction the discussion section takes
References: Use APA style. See your APA manual, textbook and the sample paper for examples of how to cite and how to make a reference list. Make sure that all references mentioned in the text are also mentioned in the reference list and vice versa. Also see Finding, Reading and Citing psychology sources for information.
Tables and/or Figures: Use APA style. Tables go at the very end of your paper. Make sure you refer to the table or figure in the text of your paper.
*See APA manual for information on how to format each section of your paper and how to order the sections.
More examples of APA Style - http://www.uwsp.edu/psych/apa4b.htm
Purchasing your own APA Style Manual - http://www.apa.org/books/4200061.html
Finding, Reading and Citing Psychology Articles- help with PSYCHINFO, reference pages and other citation issues
Writing Empirical Papers: Beginners
Writing Empirical Papers: Advanced (PDF)
General Writing Tips on Writing Psychology Papers
Avoiding Inappropriate Paraphrasing
Website maintained (such as it is) by Connie Wolfe.
Last update: 01/11/07