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Scientific report writing for Psychology undergraduate students
Alexandre Schaefer
Abstract:
The abstract is a short summary of your study. It MUST include:
1. The main research question
2. A brief outline of the methods
3. Main findings
Keep in mind that the abstract is the first thing that the reader will see. Therefore, he has
absolutely no clue of your methods, or of your results. Therefore, you have to explain
things in a simple way in the abstract (without being simplistic!), in such a way that the
reader can understand the big picture of your study just by reading the abstract.
Introduction
A good introduction has in general a number of specific goals:
1. The introduction has to “seduce the reader”: you need to demonstrate the interest and
importance of the phenomenon you want to investigate. This can be done by several
means, as for instance, giving concrete examples of the implications of this phenomenon
in everyday life or in mental health or for society, or also by demonstrating how the
scientific community is interested in the topic (or also: to demonstrate that this question
has never been investigated before, and yet it is so important)
2. The introduction has to “set the context”: you need to provide a relatively concise but
sharp review of the literature regarding the research question you want to investigate.
3. The introduction has to include how your research question was derived from this
literature: in general, it is because this is an outstanding question that has never been
tested, or because of the need of a replication, or the need to rule out alternative
explanations not tested in previous research, etc.
4. In the introduction, you need to explicitly state your hypothesis(es). Your
hypothesis(ses) need to be fully operationalized. “Operationalizing a hypothesis means
that we are stipulating in detail what are the IVs and DVs, how they will be measured,
and how the predicted results should look like.” (Definition quoted from PSY1022
lecture slides).
è For instance: “If schizophrenic patients are given a DA antagonist, then their
physician-scored symptoms on the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) should be
reduced compared to a situation in which similar patients receive a placebo, and a
situation in which patients do not receive any drug.”
Again, this example is taken from my PSY1022 slides.
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5. In the introduction, you need to briefly and clearly outline how you will test your
hypotheses (e.g. providing a short summary of your procedure).
Methods
The key advice here is that there should be enough information for anyone to replicate
your experiment. Therefore, you need to be as precise as possible, and as complete as
possible.
1. The reader has to be informed on HOW you did your experiment AS PRECISELY AS
POSSIBLE. For instance:
(a) If you are using a certain type of material (e.g. words), you need to state where
they were selected from and give a specific bibliographic reference in such a way that the
reader could find exactly the same database that you used. The same applies to a specific
psychological test that you would be using: Cite the original reference and any potential
validation study.
(b) You need to specify the exact timing and order of each element of the
experiment, how many trials (repetitions) there were in the experiment, etc.
2. It is very important to demonstrate that you understand the design, stating explicitly
which are the independent variable (IV) and dependent variables (DV) related to your
hypotheses, and the levels of each variable. This is crucial to demonstrate your
understanding of the study.
3. You have to know where things go in the methods section. Procedural aspects have to
come in the Procedure section, and not in the Materials section. If you struggle to write a
Procedure section separate from the Design section, then you can create a “Procedure and
Design” section.
4. Usually, a Methods section includes a Participants section, a Design section, a
Measures section, and a procedure section. Sometimes, if your data analysis is complex,
a “Data Analysis section” explaining the data analysis methods that you will use can be
included here, separately from the results section. In the Participants section, you need to
state the number of participants, the gender ratio, the mean and SD of the age of your
participants. If this is relevant to your study, you may want to also include other sociodemographic information (socioeconomic status, ethnicity, etc. This will not be needed
for the BART lab report). The Design section is where the reader will try to understand
how IVs and DVs were organized, and what type of IVs you had (within-subjects or
between-subjects), and how they were operationalized. The Measures section provides
specific information about the main measures of your study: personality questionnaires,
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cognitive tasks, physiological measurements, etc. The procedure section is where you
explain how the experiment actually unfolded in details.
è Here is an example form a Procedure section (Pottage & Schaefer, In Emotion, 2012,
vol. 12(1), 33-38):
##########################
Procedure
For each trial, participants viewed a fixation screen for a randomly variable duration (2000-2500
ms). Next, a picture was displayed on the screen during 2000 ms while 10 numbers were
displayed sequentially on the center of the picture at a rate of 1 number every 200 ms (see Figure
1). Each picture was centered on the screen and given 100% of the height and width of the screen
to display its maximum pixel size, any remaining background space was white. Numbers were
black digits on a white background, resized to 75 X 150 pixels for single digit numbers, or 150 X
150 pixels for double digit numbers. The amount of even numbers per sequence (1, 2, 3, or 4) was
randomly selected for each trial. In the full attention condition, participants were instructed to
watch the picture and ignore the numbers. During the divided attention condition, participants
were instructed to watch the numbers and try to detect even numbers. At the end of each trial, a
screen prompted participants to press the space bar (FA condition) or to indicate with a key press
how many even numbers appeared (DA condition). Participants were encouraged to respond as
accurately as possible, and a feedback screen (“Correct” or “Incorrect”) was displayed (1500 ms)
in the DA condition.
At the end of each block of 24 pictures, participants were given 2 min to complete mathematical
tasks taken from U.K. school exams to prevent rehearsal. Next, participants were given 4 min
recall time. Participants were informed they could take more time if needed although this was
rarely used. During recall, participants were asked to write down a brief description of each
image they remembered according to the following instructions:
“For each remembered image please write down a descriptive phrase, or a few words. These
should be of sufficient detail to allow the researcher to distinguish which image you remember
from all other images, however a very full and detailed description is not necessary. It is
important that you report every image that you can remember. Try not to leave out any image
even if you start to feel that you are guessing.”
These instructions followed a liberal recall criterion to boost the number of recalled memories. It
has been shown that using a similar liberal criterion can boost the amount of accurate information
retrieved during memory tests (Wright, Gabbert, Memon, & London, 2008).
Participants completed both attention conditions (the order was counterbalanced across
participants). Each attention condition consisted of an initial practice block, followed by eight
experimental blocks of 24 images. Pictures were divided in four categories: Neutral, Negative
Low arousal, Negative Medium arousal, and Negative High arousal. Emotional and Neutral
pictures were intermixed, and the order of presentation was fully randomized.
#######################
è Sometimes, the Procedure and Design are merged in the same section. For instance, in
the example above, the Design information was included in both the Procedure section
and in a “Measures” section and thus did not need a separate section.
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Results
The results section is probably the single most important part of a research report (in my
personal opinion). This is the section that contains objective information that will be
important to convince your reader about the quality of your claims.
1. Your Results section MUST be a logical consequence of your hypotheses and your
experimental design. Therefore,
(a) Re-stating your hypotheses/predictions at the beginning of your results
sections can help.
(b) Your results section has to include ALL the results that are necessary to
evaluate if your hypotheses were confirmed or disconfirmed. The reader has to have a
clear idea about it just by reading your results section. Don’t assume the reader will guess
anything. Don’t assume that the reader will believe in you if you say that a difference is
significant if you don’t report the actual statistical results. Don’t expect the reader will go
in the appendices to read your SPSS outputs to understand your results. In “real life”, e.g.
in research reports that you have to write for an employer or for a scientific journal, you
won’t paste any SPSS output there.
(c) It is not necessary to include analyses that do not address your research
question. It is actually desirable to leave those out, because they can only distract the
reader.
(d) At the end of your results section, it is always good practice to describe the big
picture of your results, and whether your hypotheses are supported/unsupported by your
results.
2. Your data analysis has to be reported following a logical order and in agreement with
conventional statistical practice .
FOR INSTANCE, if you are using t-tests:
Any statistical effect has to be reported according to a standard format presenting
the type of statistics that was computed (e.g. t for t-tests) the degrees of freedom, the
value of the statistics, and the p-value (for instance: t(18) = 2.41, p < 0.03). If any of
these effects is non-significant, you have to also mention it.
3. Obviously, what you report in your results section has to be an accurate interpretation
of your SPSS outputs.
4. You have to illustrate your data, i.e. you have to present the critical and relevant means
and standard errors. It can be done using either tables or figures (=graphs). Graphs are
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nicer, but sometimes tables can be more appropriate (e.g. when the results are too
complex to be depicted in graphs).
If you choose to present a graph, please don’t just paste the graph that SPSS
provides to you without modifications. The X and Y axes MUST be labelled. Use
legends, give a clear title and explanation of your graph. Don’t expect the reader will be
motivated to the point of spending hours trying to figure out what your graph means.
Your graph needs to be clear enough that it will be understood quickly by
someone who has read only your abstract.
Guidelines and complete advice on how to create good tables and graphs are provided in
the “Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association”, published by the
APA, ISBN-10: 1557987912
Discussion
1. Start your discussion describing the main findings of your study.
2. In your discussion, you have to provide an interpretation of your results: try to find a
convincing explanation for both expected and unexpected results. In general, this will be
attained by referring to the literature and reflecting on the psychological mechanisms
involved by the task that you have used, or also by reflecting on
procedural/methodological features of your study.
3. Refer to the literature! This is extremely important!
4. Try to speculate (reasonably) on the broader theoretical and/or applied implications of
your results.
5. Suggest future directions for research on this topic.
è Contrast between the Introduction and Discussion:
The Introduction needs to go from a general to a more specific level, and the
Discussion needs to achieve the opposite. In other words, the Introduction needs to first
describe the phenomenon that you are investigating and why it is interesting and
important. Next, it has to present existing theories trying to explain it and finally the
introduction needs to be led to the very specific level of operationalized hypotheses. In
contrast, the discussion has to start from a very specific level – the findings of the study –
and take them progressively to a more general level: how can these results be explained,
what are their implications for existing theories, and why are these results important in
general? The figure below tries to represent the dynamics of the Introduction and the
Discussion in scientific writing:
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General: Phenomenon of study, and
existing theories.
Specific:
Hypotheses
Methods
Participants
Design
Measures
Procedure
Results
Specific: Findings of the study
General: explanation of the findings, Relevance
of findings to theory and other implications.
General scientific writing tips
1. Don’t use colloquial language
2. Avoid overly flowery / colourful language
3. Go straight to the point
4. Don’t express personal opinions (“I think that”)
5. Don’t throw your ideas on paper as they come to your mind (very common in an
exam situation): plan the structure before you write
6. Justify your statements with evidence or (good) logics
7. Avoid factual errors (e.g. “Darwin used MRI scanners in his research”)
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8. Use paragraphs: 1 idea = 1 paragraph
9. Try to have a line of thinking guiding the text all throughout (especially important
for the introduction).
10. Don’t deviate from this line of thinking, be consistent, systematic and relentless
11. Avoid digressions
12. Don’t be one-sided: present both sides of an argument.
13. Cite respectable sources (Wikipedia and general media are not considered as
proper scientific sources. Websites are not proper citations either)
14. Try to cite recent papers with cutting-edge developments.
15. Be careful with style, grammar and spelling mistakes (e.g. The effect vs. The
affect), it matters more than you think!
16. Always do a “reality check” of each of your arguments: is it convincing?
17. If you decide to criticize a theory or a paper, don’t be cavalier: try to be subtle,
diplomatic and objective.
18. Criticizing a well-established theory is a difficult job that usually requires a very
careful explanation of your criticism, with very convincing evidence.
19. Tip for a first class mark: Try to write a conclusion/discussion that adds
something interesting to existing knowledge. For instance, do your
findings/conclusions suggest that we should have a different look at the
phenomenon that you are examining? Do your conclusions suggest that current
theory is not enough to explain this phenomenon? Do your conclusions suggest
new experiments, new lines of research?
20. Ask someone else to read and provide a candid criticism of your project
21. Try to read the APA publication manual