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Aim: to gain a practical understanding of experimental cognitive psychology research.
Outcome: to demonstrate evidence of research skills through writing a research report.
Marking: the research report comprises 50% of your mark for this module. The university grade descriptors can be found on p. 14 of your handbook. I have also provided an example of the form which the markers will use to give feedback on SurreyLearn, along with examples of research reports written by previous students.
Deadline: the report must be submitted by 4pm on 1nd May 2018.
Word count limit: the length limit is 6 pages. Templates are available on SurreyLearn; in brief, margins should be 1 inch and text should be double-spaced in Times New Roman font size 12. Note that the title page, reference section, figures and tables (which should be in an appendix), and any other appendices do not count towards the word count limit. Some pages are for Psychology or SurreyLearn, for instance stating that the work is your own; these should be carefully and truthfully filled-out, and also do not count towards the page limit.
Report structure (Note that you can find marked examples of reports in chapter 23 of “Research Methods and Statistics in Psychology” by Hugh Cooligan (2009, 5th edition):
SurreyLearn preliminary stuff (stating that the work is your own, etc.) (not included in page limit)
Title page (not included in page limit)
Abstract
Introduction
Method
Results
Discussion
References (not included in page limit)
Tables – optional (not included in page limit)
Figures – optional (not included in page limit)
Any other appendices – optional (not included in page limit)
Specific guidelines for this report: What follows is deliberately general. Much of what is included here will help you to write other lab reports in future.
Report sections in more detail
The best way to understand what is required of a psychology report is to read some journal articles! Try Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance or Cognition for some examples suitable for a cognitive psychology report. However, since different journals have different formatting methods, the exact format for the report shouldn’t follow that of published articles, but instead should follow the format described here, which is based on APA style and is the format that is used to prepare manuscripts for submission to journals.
Title: Aim for something punchy and concise allowing the reader to know at a glance the nub of your study. A title like “Attitude measurement” is too vague whereas a title like “An experiment to show the effect of common versus uncommon words on response times in anagram solution” would be too long winded. About 10 to 12 words should suffice.
Abstract: The study should be summarised succinctly in a single paragraph (approx. 150-200 words). It should say what was done and why, providing a brief overview of the method, participants, findings and any significant conclusions or implications drawn. Please look at abstracts in published journals to help you craft your abstract. While the abstract is the first section of the report, it is often best to leave writing it until last, in order that you have a full understanding of the content of your report.
Introduction: This orienting section should have two components:
First, provide some relevant background information about the topic under investigation and include some references to the published literature in this area.
Second, indicate and explain your reasons for the study in the light of this background information (it will replicate or develop existing research on this topic) together with a statement of the hypothesis (es) it is designed to test or the questions it is designed to answer. State the independent and dependent variable logically derived from the background information. State what the predictions of the null and alternative hypotheses are in terms of the dependent variable.
Usually it is sensible to begin in broad terms by delineating the area, then to give brief descriptions of relevant studies reported in the literature, then to go on to develop the rationale behind the present investigation and describe the specific hypotheses being tested. In other words you should create a good argument for the relevance of your study, and its aim, before describing the specific hypothesis (es) at the end. Do not provide any results or conclusions in this section.
Key points:
· Avoid overkill in the introduction. What you include must be directly relevant to the problem being investigated. Avoid anything trivial or only tangentially related. Identify major findings and the implications of these to orient the reader to the relevant research context.
· If you disagree with what has been said before about the topic you are investigating, you will need to be able to substantiate this on the basis of more than mere anecdote.
· Always back up your argument with references. Avoid vague, unsubstantiated sentences like: “Some people say we tell more lies than we realise.” A better alternative would be: “Smith (1999) has shown that some people tend to underestimate the number of lies that they tell.”
· Avoid using quotations from other work unless you are unable to convey the information better in your own words. Putting information into your own words shows the reader that you understand the topic in question, whereas a quote cannot do this. Thus, a better mark is given to the student who paraphrases than the one who quotes.
Method: In the introduction you have told the readers in broad detail what your study is about. It is now time to tell them precisely what you did. You must give them enough information to be able to exactly replicate the study (i.e. repeat the study to check its consistency). The method section usually contains four sub-sections, each of which may have its own side-headings.
The precise form of the method section may vary. Choose the form that allows you to convey to your readers simply and concisely exactly what you did. If the study is complex, you may have to include so many details that your reader would be in danger of getting lost without the help of further sub-headings. The usual sub-sections are as follows:
Participants
Who the participants are will contribute to the generalisability of the findings (i.e. the extent to which the findings are meaningful in terms of other samples of the target population rather than in terms of the peculiarities of one particular sample). Saying that ‘ten participants were used’ is inadequate – whilst providing ten life histories is not only unnecessary but tedious to read.
State briefly how many and who the participants were, giving any critical details of their characteristics (as a rule of thumb always report: number of participants, sex, mean age, age range). Give such details as are relevant to the nature of the study you are reporting and which may have some effect on the results (e.g. geographical location, social class, education level, occupation, vision, handedness, IQ etc). Provide details of how the sample was obtained including sampling procedures used and to what extent this was successful (e.g. response rates to questionnaires, opportunity sample). You will also need to mention any other participants involved, like stooges (i.e. confederates) and experimenters/observers.
You will also need to explain how participants were distributed (e.g. procedures for randomisation or matching) among your experimental conditions.
Stimuli/Apparatus/Materials
This section is like the “ingredients” section in a cake recipe: what you need to make the cake, or in this case to perform the experiment. Describe any specialised equipment or materials used. Use diagrams if this will help but, as a general rule, it is the function not the appearance that is important. Strike a sensible balance – you do not need to mention how many pencils were used unless they are critical to the experimental manipulations. If you are using a questionnaire or booklet of self-report measures/rating scales, provide a concise description of the items – and put an example into the appendices – again so that the reader can in principle replicate the study.
Design
There are a variety of ways that an experiment or study can be staged (the types of conditions, the order of events, how potentially confounding variables are controlled; is it an experiment or a questionnaire study, etc.). Here a brief but formal overview of the design is required (e.g. groups: between-participants, within-participants, matched participants, associational; conditions; further controls e.g. counterbalancing). Include a brief statement of the manipulation (independent variable) and of the outcome measure used (dependent variable).
This section should not include any details of procedure. Rather it is a brief depiction of the logical framework of the experiment/study that will dictate the nature of the data analysis. Keep everything as brief and as concise as possible.
Procedure
This section is like the instructions in a cake recipe: how to mix the ingredients to make the cake, from beginning to end. Here you need to describe exactly what happened in the experiment/study from the moment the participant enters until s/he leaves again, with sufficient detail and clarity that the reader would be able to repeat it if necessary (i.e. replicate it to check the consistency of the findings). All details are important (e.g. description and explanation of each experimental condition, the experimental/study instructions, the number of trials given and in what order, what response measures were taken, what rest periods were allowed, how long the experiment took, etc.). Provide all the details necessary to conduct an exact replication of the study. Think about the experiment/study as a staged event and all that this involves. The procedure section is often difficult to write and is a good way of practising clear, economical, descriptive writing.
You will also need to include a statement of any instructions delivered to subjects during the course of the study especially if these are part of the manipulation process (e.g. designed to produce a certain response set or orientation). If the instructions are lengthy, include them in the appendices and direct the reader to them.
Results: You can think of the results section as being divided into three parts (although sub-headings are not used). The three aspects to the results section are: data pre-processing; descriptive statistics; and inferential statistics. All three are essential; without pre-processing we don’t know what was done to the data; without descriptive statistics we don’t know what the results are; and without inferential statistics we don’t know what the results mean. The hardest part of the Results section is drawing all this information together into a readable piece of prose. Please look at some journal articles for examples of how to do this. Remember you are trying to tell a story so you can’t just list the statistics and expect the reader to know what they mean.
First briefly remind the reader what type of data were obtained (e.g. response times, questionnaire responses) and how they were pre-processed (outlier removal, tests of normality, normalisation, etc.).
Then describe the data (giving relevant descriptive statistics). At this stage you have not performed any tests so you cannot yet make any conclusions based on descriptive statistics alone. Use tables (Table 1, Table 2…) and figures (Figure 1, Figure 2…) if this will help the reader to understand the results. However, tables and figures are not compulsory. Tables and Figures should be ordered independently (e.g. Table 1, Table 2, Figure 1, Table 3, etc.). Figures and Tables dos and don’ts:
1) Always include a title that describes the content clearly and concisely (no abbreviations). Table titles go above the table; Figure titles go below the figure.
2) Label both axes of a figure.
3) For scatterplots and line/bar charts, the dependent variable is on the Y-axis.
4) Use line graphs for continuous variables (age) and bars for categorical ones (experimental conditions).
5) Always check tables and figures for accuracy against your SPSS file, one last time.
6) Add information about variability as well as means to your tables and figures. Report standard deviations in tables and confidence intervals in figures.
7) Don’t tabulate or graph (1) participant characteristics; (2) the same data twice; (3) half of your data in one figure and half in another.
8) Never copy and paste tables or figures directly from SPSS.
When describing the data, you should include the mean and standard deviation of each condition in the text and discuss which values seem to be different from each other (although you can’t make any conclusions until you have performed the inferential statistics), making sure you refer to your Table or Figure at the relevant point.
Only after giving the descriptive statistics, proceed to the more inferential aspects of the analysis giving details of any statistical assumptions that have been made, the precise test used and why it was used. Report the precise value obtained from the statistic you used – i.e. the obtained value together with any additional information necessary to help the reader understand the key findings and the statistical significance of these (e.g. the critical value, the degrees of freedom, effect size).
We follow the most recent book of APA style (6th edition) for reporting of inferential statistics. Here are some key points:
1) Report statistics to two decimal places. Report p values to two decimal places unless the value is significant or marginally significant. Report % to one decimal place (e.g., 36.1%).
2) Use Greek symbols rather than writing them out; “alpha” is wrong, α is right.
3) Italicise the letters used to indicate statistics (common ones include F, t, r, M, n, SD, p)
4) Write precise significance test values. p = .031 is right, while p < .05 is wrong.
5) Note that even if SPSS tells you that p = .000, you should never report this. In this case, p < .001.
6) Always put a space between ‘operators’ like < , +, =, and >. Hence p < .001 is right and p <.001 is wrong.
7) Don’t use 0 if reporting anything that varies between 0 and 1 (proportions, correlations). Thus r (35) = .25, p = .042 is right, r (35) = 0.25, p = .042 is wrong.
8) Always report degrees of freedom for F and t.
9) Never report inferential statistics without an accompanying explanation of their meaning.
10) Effect sizes are required for inferential statistics like F, t, and regression analyses.
11) Watch out for singular-plural errors. “Data” are plural. “Percentage” is singular.
12) Never introduce acronyms from your SPSS file. It might be called “Gend-P” in variable view, but the reader doesn’t need to know that. You can just call it ‘participant gender’.
State briefly any statistical support for the hypotheses guiding the study (but do not discuss the results yet or draw any conclusions).
Key points:
· Write in full sentences!
· Include helpful figure(s). Figures should generally include error bars (standard error of the mean or 95% confidence interval; be clear what they represent) or other features to help readers understand the level of variability in the data.
· Do not discuss or draw any conclusions about the data until they have been systematically analysed. In the absence of appropriate tests it is not possible to tell whether observed values are important in terms of the population or signify merely chance variation.
· If the obtained value is not significant (e.g. p > .05), abide by the statistical decision (i.e. acknowledge that no effect was obtained and do not attempt to interpret a difference that is not statistically significant).
· A significant result is not automatically positive evidence for your hypothesis: does the effect go in the same direction as the hypothesis?
· Include sufficient information to enable the reader to come up with their own conclusions about the implications of the data.
· Do not be afraid to squeeze all relevant information from the data but at the same time don’t go into irrelevant detail.
Discussion: In this section an attempt is made to link the results gained in the experiment/study to the ideas described in the introduction. Use plain English. Did the experiment/study confirm or undermine the hypotheses tested? If not, why not? Can you suggest improvements that could have made the experiment/study more powerful? If the results were confirmatory, what further research would you suggest to develop the findings? Present tentative explanations for unexpected findings, outlining briefly how a further study might help to determine between them. Consider the shortcomings of the methods of the study suggesting appropriate remedies.
The Discussion could be structured in the following way:
· Remind the reader, in brief, what the issues were, what experiment(s) were conducted and what the results were. Summarise the results in lay terms
· State whether the experimental hypothesis (or hypotheses) was accepted or rejected. If there were multiple hypotheses (this is better), state which of them are most consistent with the obtained data.
· Link back to the background literature mentioned in the Introduction; discuss what your result implies for this area of research and any further research that might be necessary
· Discuss limitations of the study, to what extent those limitations temper the conclusions that can be made, and possible improvements. Acknowledging limitations is important. But avoid the rookie mistake of being unreasonably morbid or nit-picking. Every study has limitations; in the Discussion you can acknowledge what the main limitations are, and think reasonably about how much they temper the conclusions that can be drawn.
· It is helpful to discuss implications for society, for theory, and for further research. How would you explain the importance of this if you had 3 minutes in an elevator with the prime minister? Try to conclude on a strong point.
Key points:
· Ask yourself, ‘What caused the difference?’ or ‘What caused the relationship?’ observed at the statistical level in question. Are there confounding variables that could equally well account for the difference/relationship? To answer these questions you will need to look back over the design to assess its quality and to ascertain whether it is reasonable to assume that the independent variable is the cause of the effects obtained or indeed whether there is some aspect of design that may have acted to nullify the effect.
· If the results are unexpected this may not necessarily be due to a design flaw. Unless you have evidence that the design is fundamentally flawed (lack of appropriate control) then there is no reason why you should feel obliged to search for explanations here.
· In writing the discussion follow the sequence of thinking outlined below:-
a) agree what needs to be explained and summarise the key findings
b) try to account for these findings and then
c) draw out the implications of these findings
findings -> meaning -> implications…
· beware of over-generalising the implications
· do not repeat in the discussion what you said in the introduction. Nevertheless refer to what you said to make sense of the findings – link to background literature.
References: You should reference all mentions of other researchers’ work in APA style throughout the report. The handout “How to reference APA 6th” contains more information regarding referencing.
When psychologists publish research, they are expected to only cite information from reliable, primary sources that they have read. While you will not be penalised for occasionally referencing abstracts and general textbooks where we know the primary sources are difficult to obtain, we expect the majority of your references to show that you have read original journal articles (full-text, not abstract). You may cite books where these are the original sources of the material being referenced but you should not extensively cite secondary sources taken from general overview and introductory books. These books should be used as a starting point for literature search and further reading, not as the end point. Sometimes books cite research incorrectly so you need to be aware of this. For the same reason, you should never copy and paste citations from other papers or books. You may not reference research or theory presented in newspaper and magazine articles or from pages on the Internet (e.g. Wikipedia), as these are not academically reliable sources of information.
Tables – optional (not included in page limit): Label all Figures and Tables consecutively (but separately) starting with the first one of each class to appear. The table title needs to appear above the table. Please refer to tables and figures in the text (e.g. “As shown in Table 2…”) and give them informative titles. Tables and Figures are presented at the end of the report but you need to mark where in the report the figures should appear, e.g.:
Figure 1 shows…. text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text.
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Figure 1
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Text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text.
Figures – optional (not included in page limit): Figures include graphs, histograms, diagrams and depictions. The figure title needs to appear below the figure.
Any other appendices – optional (not included in page limit): You should include copies of instruction sheets, questionnaires etc. Appendices should be labelled in alphanumerical order, i.e. Appendix A, Appendix B, etc.
Language style:
· Until recently, most psychologists wrote in a passive voice: e.g. “An experiment was run”. However, the APA and BPS have now become less strict and suggest that the active voice can be used where it helps clarify the flow of your writing. Do not over-do it however. Vary your sentence style. “I did this. I did that” for example would not read well.
· Use past tense, e.g. “each participant completed the…” except when drawing inferences and conclusions (here you can use the present tense).
· Brevity and conciseness: make your points explicitly and precisely
· Do not waffle
· Tell the truth
General points:
· Substantiate all factual assertions by indicating who says what, when and on what basis the claim is being made in the form of citations
· Separate facts from your opinions about the facts (your interpretations)
· Learn to develop your arguments in a logical way and to articulate them clearly
· Define your terms
· If you use abbreviations, define them on first appearance
· Avoid prejudicial language (such as sexism).
Document compiled by Caroline Catmur, February 2012, with contributions from Peter Hegarty, Henry Hogh, Darragh O’Neill, Ellen Seiss and Naomi Winstone; updated December 2012, January 2014, January 2015, February 2016; by Jonathan Nelson on January-March 2018.
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