writing a psychology research report: the method

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> The abstract
> The introduction

Onto the method - in this section you’ll be describing exactly what you did in your study. The main idea here is that you want to be able to provide enough detail to help other researchers replicate your study, which means including appendices if necessary (e.g. if you used an original questionnaire). It’s customary to break the method down into the following sections:

1. Participants

• How many (and how many of each gender)?
• Are they from a certain group (i.e. were all participants students from your university)?
• What was the age range?
• How were participants obtained (did you approach people on the street, was it advertised online etc)
• If it’s relevant to your study you could include the requirements participants needed (e.g. if it was a study with a visual component mention that all of the participants had normal-to-corrected vision)

E.g.:

Figure 1. From Gaunt (2013)

Figure 2. From Ryan & Xenos (2011)

2. Materials/design

This section really depends on your experiment so it’s hard to think of any standardised bullet points, but just think of all the information you’d need if you were to explain to someone how you conducted your study. If it was a questionnaire, briefly explain how it was set out (as previously mentioned, if it’s an original questionnaire then refer the reader to the appendix), including examples of questions and the scoring system. If it was a computer generated task, outline the software you used to create it and again describe how everything was set out.

E.g.:

Figure 3. From Ross et al. (2009)

3. Procedure

Outline everything that happened in your experiment from start to finish. Include how the participants were introduced to the study, any standardised instructions, and how long the experiment took.

E.g.:

Figure 4. From Baart, Vroomen, Shaw, & Bortfeld (2014)

Figure 5. From Gaunt (2012)

These are the basic subheadings to use but you may require more or less based on your experiment.

Extra tips:

• Always write in past tense (as with the rest of the report!)
• There’s no need to write pages and pages of detail, especially if you have a word limit. The most important thing is that there’s enough information for replication.
• You could include tables or figures to demonstrate certain aspects of your experiment if you think it’ll aid understanding

References
Baart, M., Vroomen, J., Shaw, K., & Bortfeld, H. (2014). Degrading phonetic information affects matching of audiovisual speech in adults, but not infants. Cognition, 130(1), 31-43.

Gaunt, R. (2012). Breadwinning moms, caregiving dads: Double standard in social judgements of gender norm violators. Journal of Family Issues, 34(1), 3-24.

Gaunt, R. (2013). Ambivalent sexism and perceptions of men and women who violate gendered family roles. Community, Work and Family, 16(4), 401-416.

Ross, C., Orr, E. S., Sisic, M., Arseneault, J. M., Simmering, M. G., & Orr, R. (2009). Personality and motivations associated with Facebook use. Computers in Human Behaviour, 25(2), 578-586.

Ryan, T., & Xenos, S. (2011). Who uses Facebook? An investigation into the relationship between the Big Five, shyness, narcissism, loneliness, and Facebook usage. Computers in Human Behaviour, 27(5), 1658-1664.

Next: the results