Reading (and hopefully understanding) a Psychological Research Article
William Ashton, Ph.D.
City University of New York, York College
APA (the American Psychological Association) Style is designed to allow
researchers to create research articles in a standard format. This standard
format allows readers who are familiar with the format to quickly and easily read
and understand research articles, and quickly and easily find specific
information about an experiment.
You’re first step to understand APA-Style articles is to understand the different
sections of APA-Style. Follow this link to see my outline of APA-Style.
Now you’re ready to start to read an APA-Style article!
But first a word of warning. APA-Style is designed to be concise. Here’s why.
The more concise an article is, the shorter it is. The shorter an article is, the more
articles you can fit into a journal issue. Thus, more professors can publish articles.
A professor of mine in graduate school told me all of the time that you need to
“unpack” articles. You can’t read them like a textbook (which is written to be
read). You need to unpack an APA-Style article.
Okay, now you’re really ready to start to read unpack an APA-Style article!
First, read the title. The title usually tells you what the IV’s and DV’s are. That’s
important, because the article is all about the IV’s and DV’s and you need to be
tuned in to what they are.
Second, read the Abstract. From the Abstract, write down notes about the
hypothesis, procedure and results. This will act as a roadmap to help you with
your journey through the article.
Third, read the Abstract again. It’s really dense and you probably won’t get
everything from it the first time.
Fourth, read the first paragraph (or two) of the Introduction. The authors should
be introducing the area of interest or research question. Write it down.
Fifth, go to the end of the Introduction. If the authors are good writers, they will
have their hypotheses or predictions at the end of the Introduction. Write down
their hypotheses or predictions.
Sixth, now that you have the research question and the hypotheses or
predictions, read the rest of the Introduction. Going through steps four and five
first allow you to follow the logic of the authors more easily. Write down
important information from the Introduction in your notes.
Seventh, skip the Methods and Results sections! Go right to the Discussion (or in
the case of articles with multiple studies the General Discussion). At the
beginning of the Discussion the authors discuss whether their hypotheses or
predictions were supported in plain English, without any statistical jargon! Yeah!
The authors should do this thoroughly enough so that you may not need to look
at the Results section at all! Note whether their hypotheses were supported.
Eighth, read the latter parts of the Discussion section. The authors should discuss
their results (again, in English) in relationship to the past research and theories
they discussed in the Introduction. The authors should also discuss the limitations
of their study or problems with their study. Finally, the authors might discuss the
practical implications of their results.
Ninth, if you need to, read the Methods section to learn specifics about their
research methods.
Tenth, if you need to, read the Results section to learn specifics about their
statistical tests and results. Don’t be intimidated by the statistics or the names of
the tests (t-test, F-test, Chi-squared). Ignore that and focus upon what they say
about the tests. Most often the authors will clearly describe (in English) what
happened.