A GUIDE TO WRITING PRACTICAL REPORTS IN PSYCHOLOGY

Learning how to write research reports is an essential part of your education in Psychology; so much
so that a number of core modules are devoted to developing your skills as a researcher and as a
communicator of your research findings. A key function of these modules is to give you practice and
feedback about how to write practical reports satisfactorily. But this can seem like quite a steep
learning curve when the conventions of writing style and organisation appear to be so arbitrary and
difficult to make sense of. This guide is intended to give you some insight into the rationale for why a
research report takes the form that it does and we hope that if you follow it closely you will be able to
avoid most of the kinds of errors that novices make when writing practical reports and dissertations.

In writing Psychology practical reports we want you to try and emulate the good practice of
established researchers who write their reports with the intention of submitting them to journal editors
to be considered for publication, with the ultimate hope that other researchers will read the paper and
be influenced by it. This may seem like a very ambitious aim for you as an undergraduate, and of
course we don’t expect your work to achieve such high standards very quickly (although some
University of Northampton dissertation studies have been published as shorter papers in Psychology
journals). It does, however, have two clear benefits; not only will your writing style benefit from the
close scrutiny and detailed feedback from your tutor, but also you will be much better able to evaluate
the published reports of others when reading material for other Psychology modules. With experience,
you can decide for yourself whether the research was competently done or described, and whether you
should necessarily agree with their interpretations or conclusions they offer.

It is useful, then, when writing your report to think not only about the tutor who will be assessing it,
but to consider what you would need to include if your ‘paper’ were to make an impact among other
researchers – could they follow your logic, could they replicate your method just based on the
description you give, will they be convinced that your analyses are appropriate and correctly
interpreted, will they be persuaded of your interpretation of the data or suggestions for what we
should do next? Adopting this mindset should hopefully make a little clearer the reasons for some of
the conventions that we adopt when organising the material that makes up our description of our
study.

The most obvious difference between a practical report and other forms of writing for your
Psychology modules is that the material is organised into the following pre-specified sections, which
you should always use unless advised otherwise by your tutor:

 Title
 Abstract
 Introduction
 Method
o Design
o Participants
o Apparatus / Materials
o Procedure
 Results
 Discussion
 References
 Appendices

These sections reflect the fact that a practical report must convey a lot of different kinds of
information in a relatively short space, since your reader will expect to be informed about all of the
following: what you were interested in and why, what you did, why you did it, how you did it, what
you found and what you think it means. Researchers who read (or re-read) reports will sometimes
only want the answers to very precise questions (e.g., how large was your sample of participants, what
kind of measures did you use, what exactly were the mean scores for the two groups, what were the
shortcomings of this study that you identified, and so on) and do not want, or have the time, to read
the whole report just to find this information. Your task as the writer of the report is to make your
reader’s job as easy as possible by ensuring that the appropriate material is given and that it appears
where your reader expects to find it.

The format we want you to adopt is the same as that used in most published papers in Psychology,
which means that you can find numerous examples in the library. BPS journals such as the British
Journal of Psychology are excellent sources to browse, especially if you are unsure as to correct
format or style. Note, however, that not all published work will adhere exactly to these rules, for
various reasons; for example, certain journals may have slightly different ‘house styles’, or some
papers may be published because of the importance of the idea or the status of the author(s) even
though it contains errors or is badly organised – even researchers (and journal referees) are human,
after all. Some types of report may also deviate from this format, notably those describing qualitative
research or some types of survey work, but if you should come across these exceptions in PSY 1002,
2003 or 2005, then your tutor will give you clear advice on what to do instead.

We’ll now discuss each section in turn, focusing on what the section is actually for and using this to
decide what kinds of detail it should contain.

1) Title (What you did)

In recent times, researchers have tended to use electronic databases such as PsycINFO to search for
published work that might be relevant to their own research. These searches scan through the database
looking for key words associated with the searcher’s topic so that if your work doesn’t include them
then it is likely to be overlooked. The results of the search typically include selected articles’ titles and
perhaps their abstracts. On the basis of these, the researcher will decide whether it’s worthwhile
printing off or requesting the paper, so it is crucial that the title is brief (no more than 15 words) but
still accurately reflect the content of the report, providing a single line summary of what you actually
did. Ideally, the title will mention the independent and dependent variables; “The effect of sleep loss
on the exploratory behaviour of gerbils” would be a suitable format for a title, whereas “Keeping
gerbils awake” would not. Try to avoid using catchy newspaper style headlines as titles — a formal
report is not supposed to be an exercise in journalism.

2) Abstract
After looking at the title, researchers will typically read the abstract. This is supposed to be a very
concise summary (about 100 to 150 words) of all the key aspects of the full paper so that the reader
has enough information to decide whether the paper is sufficiently relevant or interesting for them to
bother to print off / request / read the full paper. This isn’t to suggest that readers are lazy, but that
these days they are overwhelmed with material that might be relevant and they have to make
judgements about where to invest their energy or focus their attention. There are literally thousands of
Psychology journals, each publishing a number of issues per year, so there are a lot of papers out there
competing for attention alongside your own. The task of your abstract is to highlight where your
paper fits in the broader literature (so that your reader can recognise whether it is relevant to their area
of interest), to very briefly describe the key features of what you did emphasising what was novel (so
that they can judge whether you have added anything interesting), and describing what you found,
especially where your findings were unexpected. To do all these effectively, your abstract must
contain a brief (1 or 2 sentences) description of each section of the report, including: the rationale
outlined in the introduction, noting any influential published studies or research approaches, models
tested, etc.; major aspects of the method, particularly any novelties or improvements you have
introduced; main results (including the results of any statistical analysis); and an indication of the
main discussion points.
3) Introduction (Why you did it.)
Textbooks often describe the introduction as a literature review, and indeed it is the point at which
you should introduce your reader to the previous research that has led to your own study, but it can be
misleading to take this description too literally. It is very important to keep in mind that your
introduction is not supposed simply to be a broad, passive, and rather disinterested overview of
previous research on your topic; it is not your opportunity to impress your reader with your
scholarship by citing all the research that might be vaguely relevant to you topic. Rather, the
introduction is a place for argument and rhetoric, where you persuade your reader that your topic is
important, that further work in the area would be interesting and worthwhile, and that the study that
you conducted was a perfect way to answer any outstanding questions or to overcome any
methodological or theoretical problems with previous research. Therefore when describing others’
work you should continually make clear why you are telling your reader what you’re telling them,
what lesson they should be drawing from your review, and you should end your introduction with a
recap that explains how the points you have made will be addressed in your forthcoming study. It is
more important for your reader to know what the point of your study was than for them to have a
comprehensive reference list.

Your reader will expect you to flag up in your introduction everything that is central to the design or
focus of your study – they will expect that your study will be entirely predictable based on the way
your argument is going and they will not be pleased later to find some features of your design or
analysis that are surprising or unexpected (like a poor whodunit, where the murderer is only
introduced 20 pages from the end of the book). Indeed, if you describe some aspect of the literature in
any detail in your introduction, you will set up an expectation in your reader that this will be a central
feature of your study, so that you will be open to criticism if it turns out not to be (e.g., if you say that
previous measures of extraversion were inadequate, he or she will expect you to use a new measure
and explain why this is better).

When deciding at what level to pitch your description you should remember that Psychology is a very
large subject, which contains many quite narrow specialisms, so that there isn’t that much expertise
that we can be sure is shared by all our prospective readers. You should therefore assume that your
reader knows nothing about your study, or even your sub-area of Psychology, and so needs the
introduction to begin with some general background to the topic, so that he or she can place your later
rather narrower focus in context. You should then go on to discuss the particular research issue that
you want to tackle, going into some detail to describe what these researchers did and found. Then you
should describe why we need yet another study on this topic (e.g., because previous work had
methodological problems that you think you can overcome, because previous work can be generalised
to a new situation, because you want to introduce some new element, etc.) and briefly describe what
you did that was different. Finally be clear as to what predictions you made concerning your own
results.

In other words, your introduction should cover the following:

Ÿ Describe and define the area that you wish to study, perhaps explaining why it is interesting
and / or important if this is not obvious.
Ÿ Describe previous work by others that is relevant to the area. The general textbook for the
Year is always a good place to start your background reading. Note that at this level of study it is not
considered appropriate for you to rely solely on basic textbooks (such as Gross,1996, or Atkinson et al.,
1999) as sources of information. Rather, you should be attempting to engage with original articles,
where they are directly relevant, and more specific reviews (either through journal review articles or
more specialised books) when giving an overview of a general area. It should be obvious that these
reviews should be current. If the latest papers they mention are from over a decade ago you must be
sure that no further work has been published in the interim that would change your assessment.
 Ÿ When referring to others, make sure that you conform to the guidelines described in the
Referencing Guide that is available from the Psychology web pages. It is (just about) conceivable that
you are investigating a topic that is new to Psychology and so has no previous literature, but this is not
an excuse to have no introduction — what existing literature suggested this departure, or what logic did
you follow in deciding that this would be a worthwhile topic of study?
Ÿ Identify the problems or shortcomings found in previous research with suggestions for how
these might be addressed or overcome in a future study (i.e. yours).
Ÿ Given the results previously found, and your proposals, what would you predict the outcome
of your study to be, and why? You should end your introduction with your hypotheses. It should be
clear from your account how these particular predictions are derived from the findings and theories you
have just described. The hypotheses can be explicitly expressed, for example “The hypothesis is that
there will be a difference between introverts and extraverts in the number of famous faces they can
recognise”. Or they can be phrased as predictions, for example “based on the outcomes of previous
research, we expect the mean number of faces recognised by extraverts to be greater than that for
introverts”. Try to make directional hypotheses (i.e. that A will be greater than B) rather than simply
predicting that there will be a difference between the two. Ordinarily you do not need to state the null
hypothesis. Where your work is exploratory, directional hypothesis may not be necessary; that is, you
predict a difference but don’t state which group will be superior to which. For example, you might be
confident that nursery school children and children who stay at home with a parent or carer might differ
on some measures of sociability or confidence, but you’re not altogether confident about who should
score higher than whom, and so you make non-directional predictions that there will be differences.

4) Method (How you did it.)

In the method section, you describe the essentials of how you gathered your data. The art of writing a
method section is probably the hardest to learn; it must contain enough information for the reader to
be able to repeat the study, but should not include any irrelevant details. For example, if you are
giving your participants lists of words to memorise, you would not be expected to include details of
the study setting such as lighting conditions or whether you gave your participants coffee when they
first arrived, unless you were specifically studying the effects of lighting or caffeine on memory.
However, you will need to mention anything that you think may have affected your results,
particularly if you go on to consider it in your discussion as a potential extraneous variable. In the
above example, then, you would need to give some detail concerning the number and kinds of words
that made up the list, or a description of the level of education or memory ability possessed by your
participants. It is a subtle skill to be able to recognise which details may be relevant and which
irrelevant, especially since they may vary from study to study, but you will find that with practice it
becomes more obvious. For now, a useful rule-of-thumb is to mention here anything that you may
later want to comment on in your discussion when trying to make sense of your results. If in the above
example you had to test people in two locations (some in the lab and some at home) and it turns out
that participants were performing better in one place than the other, then you would want to give full
descriptions of the places here (focusing on how they might be different from one another).

The method section consists of a number of sub-sections and these must be identified in your write-up
by separate sub-headings. The main subsections are indicated below (not all of these will always be
necessary, and the order of presentation may vary — use your discretion):

(i) Design
Some studies can actually be quite complex, with various conditions and perhaps various measures
being taken. It is important, then, to begin the method section with a brief overview of the key
features of your study so you reader can orient themselves. This section is likely to be quite short
(only 3 or 4 sentences) for introductory practicals, but you must get used to including the correct
information within it. To describe your study design you must note whether it took the form of an
experiment, a quasi-experiment, a survey, or perhaps adopted a qualitative method (see your research
methods textbook for definitions and illustrations of these terms). For experiments and quasi-
experiments you need to go on to state whether you used a related design (where each subject
completed all conditions) or an unrelated design (where each subject completed only one condition);
for surveys you should mention that you adopted a correlational design (where participants weren’t
assigned to discrete ‘conditions’, but rather scores on two or more measures were compared against
one another).

For experiments you should then explicitly identify the independent variable(s) (i.e. the variable(s)
that you manipulated); if you conducted a quasi-experiment (where the variable you’re interested in is
not under your control, such as the sex or age of your participants), this should be referred to as a
classification variable and you should describe the classifications you used (e.g., male versus female,
under 30s versus over 40s); for surveys you should describe your measures and refer to them as
correlational variables. You should also tell your reader about your dependent variable(s) (i.e. what
was measured), being sure to describe this as specifically as possible (e.g., “number of words
recalled” rather than “short term memory”).

Finally, you should explain how you decided in what order the conditions were presented (for related
and correlational designs) or which experimental condition was to be performed by which subject (for
unrelated designs).

The design aspects outlined above are all extremely important and MUST be included, along with
some rationale for why your study adopted this design and not an alternative.

(ii) Participants
This should state how many participants were tested, who they were (i.e. from what population they
were drawn), how they were selected (e.g., random sample, volunteers, course requirement, etc.) and
any other important characteristics (e.g., mean or median age, sex ratio, education level). Which
characteristics are important will depend upon the task you are asking people to perform and the kinds
of conclusions you wish to draw. If you only study undergraduate students, you may not be able to
generalise to the elderly. If most of your participants are females (a common situation in Psychology
departments!) then you may not be able to generalise to males. Depending on the study, these details
may be trivial or extremely important. Again as a rule-of-thumb, err on the side of giving too much
information about your participants, although you should restrict yourself to accurate details — not
made up approximations. Avoid describing your sample as being ‘of mixed sex/gender’ unless you
really did test transsexuals…

(iii) Apparatus / Materials

Apparatus consists of any equipment necessary to present stimuli, and/or to record dependent
variables. Some experiments just involve trivial items (e.g., pencil, paper, stopwatch etc), and in such
a case an apparatus section is not needed. An apparatus section is only required when more complex
or unusual equipment is used (e.g. a computer running special software), and you should describe it in
sufficient detail, using a diagram if necessary, to allow equivalent apparatus to be acquired or even
constructed. This section will rarely be needed in PSY 2005 reports.

Stimulus words, puzzles, questionnaires etc., are materials, and a materials section should be included
that describes what these are and how you devised them. This should include sufficient detail for your
reader to have a grasp of their key characteristics – it s not sufficient to refer to a copy in the
appendix. For a questionnaire, for example, you should at least describe the number of items, the
response format used, a note on how response were scored/coded, and what high and low scores mean
in English. For stimulus words, you should give example items, give details of the criteria you used to
select them, and describe how they were presented (font size, how arranged, etc.). This should be in
sufficient depth to allow your reader to generate their own materials in the confident belief that they
will be equivalent to yours. For example, if using words as your stimuli for a memory test you should
tell the reader about any features of their selection, such as word length, word frequency (in the
English Language), or meaning (noun, verb, concrete, abstract, etc.). Even in the rare event that no
such features were considered, this is important and should be stated (e.g., the words were chosen by
the experimenters using no particular criteria). If you didn’t devise your materials, you need to give
credit to the person who did and refer to a source that the reader can turn to if they want to know more
about how they were developed. Also important, where relevant, is information such as how many
trials there were in each condition, and whether these were divided into blocks.

Avoid giving long lists of items in this section, which should be written as prose rather than as a set of
bullet points. Instead, give a few examples from each condition, and refer the reader to a full list in the
appendix. The materials section will almost always be necessary.

(iv) Procedure
This section describes how the design was actually implemented and should describe exactly what
took place during the testing session (and where). You should focus the description upon the events
that happened to the participant during the study, and so ideally should only describe what happened
from when you met the participant to when you left them. Earlier events (such as development of
measures and perhaps also pilot testing) really belongs in the materials section and later events (such
as scoring questionnaires or collating data across the class) really belong at the beginning of your
results section, since they involve data manipulation rather than data collection.

Be very careful to decide which details the reader would need to know to be able to replicate your
study successfully. For example, you obviously do not need to begin your description of the study
from the beginning of the lab class, only from when you started testing participants. Similarly, if the
class data have been written on the wipe-board, you do not need to describe this at all (you have
already collected your data, and writing them on the wipe-board should not have any effect on them!).
All details which you feel do not affect the outcome of the study can be safely left out (e.g., you won’t
need to detail how you actually randomised the order of the experimental condition — you can
assume that your reader knows how to perform randomisation).

This section should, however, include a description of any instructions given to participants, even
quoting entire instructions if the exact wording was important for your results. Any particular
emphasis, such as instructing participants to be as fast and as accurate as possible, should also be
mentioned. It should also include details of any controls that were important, and should note how the
dependent variable was recorded. Other relevant information could include the rate of presentation of
trials (e.g., one every five seconds), number of errors which were allowed before a participant’s
performance was regarded as suspect, how long a rest period participants were given between trials,
and so on.

(v) Ethical considerations

Where you are reporting on a practical for which you (or your student group) had some input into the
design you adopted (as opposed to running studies that have been prescribed to you by your tutor) you
are required to complete an ethics form that asks you to consider the ethical implications of your
study. This form must be signed by your tutor to confirm that the planned research is ethically sound
before you can consider collecting any data, and a copy of the signed ethics form must be included
with your report. Nevertheless, it is essential that you also show in the write-up itself that you have
considered the potential ethical issues that arise from your research and that you have attempted to
design and run the study in as ethical a manner as possible. For reports in Year 2 this concern is
addressed by a requirement for you to include an ‘extra’ subsection of the method section with the
heading ‘Ethical considerations’.

The guidelines of the BPS are available from the Psychology Division and you should read these
thoroughly before you run an experiment and before you report on it, so that you are confident that
you have met these minimum requirements (there are also useful sections in Coolican, 1994, Chapter
26 and Clark-Carter, 1997, Chapter 23). Note, however, that although it is important to be able to
identify the processes that you incorporated into your design (e.g. that you secured informed consent,
or included a thorough debrief, or explicitly allowed participants to opt out of the study at any time,
etc.), this would not be sufficient. You must also consider why you introduced these elements – what
was the ethical concern that you were addressing? For example, informed consent may be especially
important if there is some aversive or potentially embarrassing aspect to your study so that you had to
ensure that participants knew what to expect before they agreed to take part and didn’t feel let down
or misled about what they would be asked to do.

5) Results (What you found.)

Begin this section with a description of what data were gathered from your participants (i.e. what the
dependent variable was). This can be followed by a description of how you treated your data. For
example, if you discarded reaction times whenever a subject made a mistake or if you discarded the
entire data of any participants because they were not good enough at your task. Always explain
clearly what criteria were used to decide what to omit and what to retain.

NEVER put tables of raw (i.e. un-summarised) data in the Results section — if anywhere, raw data
should go in an appendix. Instead, you should present a clear, concise summary of the data using
descriptive statistics. Usually, this will take the form of a table or graph showing the mean (or
median) score on the dependent variable(s), at each of the different levels of the independent
variable(s), with some idea of the spread of performance associated with each mean (using ranges or
standard deviations, for example). A graph can also be a good way of presenting your findings in a
way that is easy to interpret and gives “visual impact” to the results section. Note that graphs or other
pieces of diagrammatic information, including pictures, are referred to as Figures. Only true tables
are referred to as Tables. All tables and figures should be clearly numbered, titled and labelled
(including units). You should always refer to tables and figures by number (e.g., “We can see in Table
1 that…” rather than “We can see in the Table below…”).

However, a table or figure does not stand instead of a verbal description of the trends in your data, but
only complements it. The main rule to bear in mind here, then, is that tables and figures can never
stand in isolation — they must be referred to in the text. In your verbal account, you should guide
your reader through the main trends that are evident in your results (even where you feel that the
trends are ‘obvious’ — don’t be afraid to be pedantic here).

Next, mention the inferential statistical tests that you performed and present the results of these tests.
Although you should give a brief justification of your choice of statistic, you should not present the
detailed working of the tests themselves (these may go into an Appendix, appropriately referenced).
Finally, give one or two sentences to translate the statistical findings into English, drawing attention
to the most important aspects of them where necessary. In the results section keep to a description of
the facts and do not begin to interpret what they mean until the discussion. This section could
sometimes be as brief as:
The mean reaction times for the caffeine and no-caffeine conditions were 45 and 56 seconds
respectively, a difference which was found to be significant (F2,38 = 12.8, p = .002). Thus,
participants in the no-caffeine condition were slower than those in the caffeine condition.
However, we can see that males and females did not differ greatly from one another in their
overall reaction times (the mean for females is 49.2 seconds and for males is 50.8 seconds) and
this difference is not significant (F2,38 = 1.07, p = 0.23).

Note that very often the results of analyses are relegated to parentheses; take care when writing up
your results that the statistics do not distract you from why you conducted the study in the first place
— it is the effect that we are interested in rather than the p value for its own sake. A common error is
for students to go into enthusiastic detail about how significant their ‘study’ was, without ever
actually telling the reader what the actual effect was (i.e. who was faster than whom, or who recalled
more words, or who gave higher attractiveness ratings, etc.). Check that the analyses you have
performed relate directly to the hypotheses that were offered earlier, clearly stating whether or not the
predictions were supported (it is often useful to arrange your results section into subsections, one for
each of the predictions you originally made). Note that the symbols representing various statistics are
always italicised for emphasis. See the separate handout Reporting the Results of Statistical Analyses,
available on the Psychweb, for detailed examples.

One final point; as in the above example, when you write reports, try to use informative shortened-
names to your conditions, as this will make the description of any design far easier to follow. For
example, if you are looking at differences between smokers and non-smokers, call them the S and NS
group rather than groups A and B.

6) Discussion (What you think it means)

This is the section in which you can interpret the results of your study and discuss their meaning.
Begin by summarising your main findings and noting whether these supported your original
hypotheses and hence relate them to the theories or findings of others that suggested those predictions
in the first place. It is essential that your discussion relates your results to the issues raised in the
Introduction, since this presented the reasons for conducting the study in the first place and the results
should provide more details about these issues. In particular, how do your results compare with
expectation? What implications do they have for the validity of your hypotheses? How consistent are
they with the previous work that you discussed in the introduction? Does it weaken or strengthen the
case for the model or theory you are evaluating?

Although you should always think about your results in terms of other work, be wary of
overinterpreting your data – scientists are by nature rather humble in the claims they make for the
importance of their findings. Try to account for any differences in findings in terms of differences in
the studies (perhaps the materials that you used were different, or your sample has different relevant
characteristics, such as having a higher average level of education). There may also have been
methodological shortcomings that need to be discussed (with suggestions for their correction).
Always think carefully about these. Never simply list a series of possible flaws, and say that these
could have affected your results in some (unspecified) way. This section isn’t intended to serve as an
opportunity to trash your study, or show how self-critical you can be. Rather, the point is to learn as
much about the phenomenon you’re interested in as your study will allow. If you find that you didn’t
get the learning effect you expected but also noted how unexpectedly noisy the testing conditions
were, then this allows you to make a positive statement about the conditions under which learning
will occur and to make predictions about what you’d expect in a future study, where you might
contrast quiet and nosy conditions more systematically.

Always try to think about the exact way in which a design weakness could have affected your data (if
you can’t, then perhaps the ‘problem’ is not so important after all), and suggest ways in which it may
be overcome or investigated in the future. For example, if there was a departmental party the previous
day, and all your participants were hung-over, a poor discussion might note
All of our participants were hung-over and this could have affected our results, rendering our study
invalid. This could be corrected by repeating the study on non-hung-over participants.

But wait, how would hung-over participants perform differently from normal subjects? How exactly
could this have changed things? If you think that the participants simply performed more slowly than
would otherwise have been the case, and your experiment was looking for a difference between two
conditions, then their current mental state would not have changed matters. If all participants are in
the same state then perhaps this is not a problem at all. If both conditions are being performed more
slowly, then exactly the same difference would have been found. Can you go back to the literature and
find any clues as to what to expect from hung-over participants? What kinds of psychological effects
have others reported?
Instead of mentioning as many methodological flaws as you can think of just for the fun of it, try to
focus on just one or two shortcomings that could account for any unexpected or counter-intuitive
findings you made. Any such comments should be supported by evidence to show why a particular
feature of methodology would have confounded the results of the study. For example, the fact that
participants will, in many cases, have been psychology undergraduates may be important in certain
cognitive and personality tasks (since they might already know something about the phenomenon and
might simply conform to their expectations, or perhaps they are more sceptical of your briefing so that
an intended deception doesn’t work), but there will be many others in which it is quite unimportant
and you undermine your credibility by raising it. Of course, there may be occasions when the lack of
control of one or more variables means that the study is inconclusive. All that one can do here is to
recommend that the study be re-run with appropriate changes. Even a study of this type is not a
complete waste of time; it has at least identified some confounding variables, and (importantly) made
a contribution towards your education as an experimenter.

At the same time, however, beware of only looking for design flaws if your result is non-significant
— studies that confirm the hypothesis can benefit just as much from a critical consideration.
Likewise, don’t assume that a failure to support the prediction must necessarily mean that there were
problems with your study design. Even with a well-designed study, the results may not have led to
clear-cut answers to the questions raised initially, so your discussion might have to suggest further
studies which can now be seen to be necessary for answering the initial question.

Finish by discussing the implications of your study for future research. In other words, are there ways
in which you could extend the present study to consider additional hypotheses? How could you
improve on the methodological shortcomings outlined above? Are there any practical applications of
your findings? etc.. Always be explicit as to what questions and problems your research raised, and
how you would answer/solve them. Never (lamely) conclude that further research is required, leaving
your reader to guess what the further research possibly could be.

7) References
Note that this section is not labelled ‘Bibliography’ and so isn’t asking you to list all the sources that
you might have read or dipped into in preparing for the study and writing the report. Rather, you
should only list those sources that are explicitly cited in the text. Your assessor is likely to check that
cited work appears in your references, and, equally, that all the references listed do actually appear
somewhere in the body text. Citations will normally occur in the Introduction section, but may also be
found in the Materials and Discussion. They are essential to providing a background for your
experiment and for justifying the questions asked, methods used or techniques of analysis. Try to get
into the habit of reading around and citing references properly. Note the conventions described in the
separate Reference Guide.

8) Appendices
The final section of the report is the Appendix section (or Appendices if plural). You should include
here all material that would have been obtrusive or damaging to the ‘flow’ of the report itself, and not
just use it as a bin to contain things you wished to say but could not fit into the main report.
Therefore, the contents of the Appendices usually consist of raw data, statistical formulae and
computations, lengthy protocols, examples of stimuli and details of stimulus preparation, etc.. Have a
separate appendix for each type of material, instead of just ‘lumping’ everything together. Appendices
should be consecutively numbered and given separate titles (similar to the way tables or figures are
identified).

9) Ethics form
For some reports, in which you describe a study for which you (or your student group) made some of
the key decisions about the design you adopted, you MUST complete an ethics form. This asks you to
consider the ethical implications of your study in great detail, and needs to be signed by your tutor to
confirm that the planned research is ethically sound before you can collect any data. For some
modules, your assignment cannot be marked until it includes a copy of the signed ethics form as an
appendix. For reports of studies that have been prescribed to you by your tutor (e.g., some of the
practicals in PSY 1006), an ethics form may not be needed. Copies of the form are available via your
tutor or from the PsychWeb.

10) Some Important Notes on Style

Learning to write reports in the ‘correct’ style can be very difficult, especially if you have not written
formal reports before. With practice, the conventions described below should become fairly
automatic. Adopting these recommendations will make your report more lucid and more professional
in appearance. This isn’t just window dressing — you are likely to lose marks for inappropriate or
unscholarly style. Again, by browsing through journal papers you should get some idea of what the
usual practices are.

(i) Use of personal pronouns

It is usually assumed that you, the researcher, did not affect your results in any way that could be
unique to yourself (e.g. personality, dialect, etc.). If other people followed your method, they should
obtain exactly the same results. Thus, you should not use personal pronouns (we, I, etc.) in either the
method or the results section. A notable exception to this is found in some qualitative research, and
we’ll discus this in more detail during classes on qualitative methods. The discussion/conclusions
sections (perhaps also the introduction) are more open to personal interpretations and personal
pronouns are more permissible. Even so, be sparing with these, as every one you use can make your
arguments seem weaker, appearing dependent upon your subjective interpretation (as opposed to
being obvious conclusions derived from the available information). Despite this, try not to be
frightened of putting forward your own views and interpretations, so long as this does not to go too
far beyond what your data are telling you.

(ii) Use of Tenses

Tenses can be very difficult to use correctly, and these guidelines can only provide very general rules
of thumb. Basically, anything that is history should be written in the past tense. When you write up
your work, even your method and results will be history, and should be described in the past tense.
The conclusions of previous workers are history; however yours are still current and should be
described in the present tense. The theories and models that were derived from the results and
conclusions still make predictions today (even if they are the wrong ones) and their predictions thus
should be described using the present tense. Thus, for a previous piece of work that you are
describing:
Smith et al. (1970) found that … they concluded that … and developed the XYZ model. This model
predicts that … etc.

If you were discussing the results of your study:

It was found that ... and thus we may conclude that… Our ABC model predicts that … will occur.

(iii) Spelling
ALWAYS proof-read your work or have someone else read through it for you. There is no excuse for
poor spelling, particularly when most word processors come armed with spell-checkers. Common
errors include:
 “Procedure” has only one E after the C.
 “Questionnaire” has two Ns and one R.
 “dependent” ends in ent (a dependant is a person who relies on you for
support or shelter, such as a child or elderly parent). Peculiarly students
 rarely misspell ‘independent’, so just keep in mind that dependent is spelt
similarly.

(iv) Miscellaneous other points to note

 Avoid contracting words (don’t, can’t, couldn’t etc.) in formal writing.

 ‘Data’ is a plural word so takes the plural form of verbs. For example we
might say that the data were analysed rather than the data was analysed.
 Results can be statistically non-significant, meaning that they could have
arisen just by chance, but should never be described as insignificant,
meaning that they are of little value.
 Try not to confuse the words affect and effect (both of which can crop up in
reports)
o Affect (verb) means to have an influence on something, so that
“something has affected my study” implies that something has
changed my study.
o Effect (verb) means to cause something to happen, so that “something
has effected my study” implies that something has done my study for
me (!)
o Effect (noun) refers to a consequence or an outcome, so that “this is a
negative effect” implies that this is a bad outcome.
o Affect (noun) refers to an emotional state, so that “this is a negative
affect” implies that this is a bad mood (!)
o Most common usages are affect (verb) and effect (noun). For
example,. “The problems described above affected the results by
reducing the size of the effect.”
 You can assume that your reader understands the meanings of basic
methodological words and phrases such as between-subjects, dependent
variable, etc. Thus, avoid writing:
o The independent variable (i.e. the variable that was manipulated) was
the length of the words (short or long).

 Note the difference between an experiment (in which you are free to allocate
participants to any of the conditions) and other forms of study, such as quasi-
experiments and surveys. Do not use ‘experiment’ as a generic term for all
research but only use it when describing actual experiments. Appropriate
generic terms you can use instead include ‘study’, ‘investigation’, ‘research’
and ‘project’, and the ‘experimenter’ can be referred to as the ‘investigator’,
‘researcher’, or ‘author’.

(v) Some General Advice:

 On the whole, pieces of information should only occur once in the report, and
therefore, if you find yourself repeating material in different sections you
have gone astray and one section probably has too much information in it.
The exception to this rule is the abstract, which should only contain
information reported elsewhere.
 Write the title and abstract after you have written the rest of the report, so
that you are in a better position to effectively summarise the contents. Clip
this to the front of your report. Keep the raw data and intermediate
calculations but do not include them in the report (other than in an appendix).
  Remember that you may produce an excellent method section, but get a low
mark because your discussion section was confused. Most people master it
eventually. Don’t despair!
 Finally, it is always a good idea to keep a copy of any assessed work that you
are required to hand in, so either make sure you have saved it on disc if you
use a word processor, or take a photocopy of your work and keep it in a safe
place. Make sure that you keep your SAO receipts safe as well!

For more details on the design and reporting of experiments see:

Clark-Carter, D. (1997). Doing quantitative psychological research. Hove: Psychology Press. Ch 23.
Coolican, H. (1999). Research methods and statistics in psychology (3rd ed.). London: Hodder &
Stoughton. Ch. 23.
Harris, P. (2002) Designing and reporting experiments (2nd ed.). Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Langdridge, D. (2004). Research methods and data analysis in Psychology. Harlow: Pearson Education.

All of these are available on short-loan in the library.