BSc Psychology: Research Methods and Practicals 1
REPORT WRITING
Whenever you have conducted a piece of research you will want to tell the world about your findings. The usual way of doing this is to present your work in a written report so that others can read, review, evaluate and if necessary replicate your research. It is, therefore, important that you are able to present your research in a clear and concise manner. Writing clearly and concisely and in an appropriate format should not be underestimated. The guidance you are given in this course should enable you to write up your research in a way that is suitable for publication in a journal. We don’t give you research reports to complete because we are sadists we give them to you so that you can learn this important skill.
General advice
1.1. Write clearly – Ensure that your work is comprehensible, it is no use spending a lot of time writing a report if the person reading it cannot understand what you are presenting. Always read your own work (or, better still, get a friend to read it) to ensure that others can understand it. Avoid using lots of bullet points or writing sections in note-form, or including lots of overly short paragraphs as this has the effect of making your work disjointed. You should aim to make your points flow nicely from one to another and tell a coherent story.
1.2. Use the passive writing style (third person past tense) – Don’t use the first person (e.g. I, We, My etc). For example, you might want to write something like:
'The aim of my study is to find out if rugby fans have better memory ability than football fans. I, therefore, intend to select a group of rugby and football fans and test their memory for players' names. I hope to find that rugby fans have better memory ability than football fans.'
This is inappropriate as it is written in the first person and present tense. You should write it as follows:
'The aim of the current study was to find out if rugby fans have better memory ability than football fans. This was achieved by selecting groups of rugby and football fans and testing their memory for players' names. It was predicted that rugby fans would have better memory ability than football fans.'
This is the appropriate way of writing as it is in the third person passive writing style.
1.3 Don’t waffle. Remember to present your ideas concisely. Don't fill your report with scientific gobbledegook, keep it simple. Please do not assume that just because you are writing a scientific report you have to use long words and complicated language. Keep it simple. If you have trouble understanding what you are writing then your readers will also have difficulty understanding it
1.4. References - ensure your report is properly referenced. Each piece of work that you cite in your report should be referenced by including the authors' names along with the date of publication (e.g. 'Dancey and Reidy (2001)'). You will be given a separate handout about referencing as a part of the Social Science Skills and Methods unit, you should use that handout in conjunction with this one when writing your reports.
The general format for the report is the same for most reports that your will write. The details included in this handout are, however, most appropriate for quantitative research reports. In year two of this course we will cover qualitative research reports and you will be given guidance on how to write these at that time.
The sections of the research report are as follows:
Title
Abstract
Introduction
Method
Results
Discussion
References
Appendices
More detailed advice about what should be presented in each of these sections follows.
Title
The title is an important and often overlooked part of the report. A good title can convey the flavour of the research in one concise sentence.
2.1. Try to avoid long-winded titles; make it snappy. ‘An experimental study to investigate the difference between football fans and rugby fans for their memory for players’ names using a free recall task’ is rather long-winded and could be reduced to: ‘Memory differences between rugby and football fans for players’ names’.
Often students start their titles with statements like 'An experiment...' or 'A study...' when there is no real need. Here are some titles found from a search done on an online database for studies looking at gender differences in memory:
- Gender effects in eyewitness accounts of a violent crime.
- Differential aspects of memory self-evaluation in old and very old people.
- Laughter and humour in the classroom: Effects on test performance. (arousal, memory, gender differences).
- Gender differences in memory perspectives: Evidence for self-objectification in women.
- Computer testing of memory across the adult life span.
- Gender differences in memory for erotic stories.
- Gender-linked differences in everyday memory performance.
You can see that generally these titles convey the essence of the study without being too long-winded.
2.2. As a minimum you should include details of the IV and DV in the title and work around this.
Abstract
3.1. The abstract is a one paragraph summary of your research. The purpose of the abstract is to allow a researcher to see if the study is of interest without having to read the whole report. Researchers are busy people and so don’t want to waste time reading a whole report if it is not relevant. They can, therefore, simply read the abstract and then decide whether or not to read the full report for more details. The abstract is, therefore, an extremely important part of the report. It should be no more than about 150 words in length and should be clear and concise.
3.2. Effectively you summarise each section of the report in a sentence or two. Thus, there will be a sentence introducing the research area, a few sentences summarising the method used & the procedure (but don't include too much detail here), a few sentences about the main findings and your interpretation of these.
3.3. You should not include any statistical details or state exactly how the data were analysed, simply state in words your main findings. 'The analyses showed that football fans recalled significantly more players’ names than rugby fans' is OK, whereas ‘SPSS was used to conduct a t-test and this showed that football fans recalled significantly more players’ names than rugby fans (t(20) = 2.91, p < .05)’ is not.
As the abstract is a summary of each section of the report it makes sense to write this after you have written the other sections. Also, you need to ensure that the abstract is comprehensible on its own. That is, people should not have to read the whole report to be able to understand the abstract. Therefore, you should not use terms in your abstract (such as abbreviations) which are only explained in the report.
Introduction
The main purpose of the ‘Introduction’ is to provide the rationale for the research being conducted. The rationale is conveyed with reference to previous theory and research in the area of interest as well as highlighting how the research is to be conducted and how it follows from the previous research. All too often in research reports students will give a good overview of relevant theory and research but neglect to explain why the proposed research is important, how it fits in with the previous research and how it is to be conducted. So please ensure that you present the rationale for the study.
4.1. The structure of the Introduction is important. You should think of the introduction as a funnel. You start off quite broadly, giving a general introduction to the area of interest. You then discuss the relevant theory and research whilst gradually coming down to a narrow focus on the proposed research, thus:
A general introduction to the area: Be sensible with such introductions, you don’t want to be too general. For example if you conducted the football & rugby fan study indicated previously it would be unnecessary to start with ‘Psychologists have been interested in memory ever since the research by Ebbinghaus in the 19th Century.’ It is much better to start with something like: ‘There has been much recent research investigating how expertise affects memory for information relevant to the domain of expertise’. This provides a nice general introduction to the area of interest. The first approach is far too general and makes your job of gradually focusing on your particular research more difficult. Also, if you start off too generally your Introduction will probably be longer and this will affect your ability to stay within any word limits for the report.
4.2. Main theories and research: Once you have provided a general introduction to the topic you should then go on to give a discussion of the relevant theories and research in the area. Here you should ensure you only cover research and theories that are pertinent to your research. Be careful not to get into theories and research which are not strictly relevant. It can be quite easy to go off at tangents and stray into irrelevancies. There is a skill in identifying the relevant literature so don't expect to get it perfect first time. You will be given feedback if you are straying too far from the point. A good way to decide if theories or research are pertinent is to ask yourself whether the research you are discussing helps in explaining the rationale for the study. If the answer is 'No' then you should think about omitting it from your Introduction. A good discussion of the relevant research and literature is evaluative rather than merely descriptive. You should, therefore, aim to evaluate the research you include here. So rather than stating that Reidy (2001) has shown that football fans have poorer memory ability than rugby fans, you might go onto to evaluate this finding by referring to other research which either does or does not support it.
4.3. Rationale: The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines 'rationale' as:
a set of reasons or logical basis for a course of action or a particular belief.
What we want you to do in setting out the rationale for you particular study is explain the reasons why it is important or interesting within the context of previous theory and research.
You need to ensure that the Introduction gives the rationale for the study you are conducting. Often students provide a wonderful discussion of the relevant theory and research but fail to provide the rationale for their own study. When you have written your Introduction ask yourself the following questions:
§ Is it clear how the proposed research follows from previous research?
§ Is the reason for conducting the research clear?
§ Does the Introduction give an indication of how the research is to be conducted?
If the answer to any of these questions is 'No' then you need to think about changing your introduction to ensure that these issues are clear.
4.4. Finally, at the end of your Introduction you need to explicitly state your hypothesis or hypotheses. Here a sentence or two detailing your hypothesis / hypotheses is enough. For example, 'It was predicted that rugby fans would recall more players' names than football fans.'
You should not include details of the Null hypotheses.
Method
The purpose of the Method section is to allow another person to replicate your study. That is, they should be able to run another study in exactly the same way as you have conducted yours. You, therefore, need to include enough detail in the Method section to enable someone else to replicate the study.
When writing the Method section you should use continuous prose rather than bullet points or note-form. The use of bullet points or note-form leads to rather disjointed reports and should be avoided.
In order to make the Method section clear it is divided into a number of subsections:
§ Participants
§ Design
§ Apparatus / Materials / Stimuli
§ Procedure
You should present your Method sections with these sections in the order presented here.
Participants
In your Participants section you need to give details about the people who took part in your study. The details to be include are:
5.1. How you selected the participants.
§ Here it is not enough to state that University students were used. You need to inform the reader exactly how you recruited the university students. Did you accost them on the campus or did you recruit them using a poster? If the students took part in the study as part of a Research Methods class you should say so. Also, it is not enough to simply say that you had an 'opportunity sample'. You still need to state how you were able to recruit this opportunity sample.
5.2. Provide relevant information about your participants in terms of:
· The mean age, age range and gender split of the participants
· The number of participants recruited
· Any other noteworthy aspect of your participants, e.g. If they were predominantly left-handed.
Remember you should ensure that somebody reading your report would be able to select a similar sample to yours if they wanted to replicate the study.
Design
5.3. In the 'Design' section you need to include any details relating to the design of the study. So here you should state:
§ Whether you had a between-participants or within-participants design