Purpose of Paper II: Study One Methods, Results, and Discussion

1). Psychological Purpose

The psychological purpose behind Paper II is to make sure you can tell your reader what you did on your study, how you did it, and what you found. By now you have read several empirical studies in psychology, so you should be familiar with the Methods, Results, and Discussion sections. Now is your chance to write your own sections!

Similar to the studies you cited in Paper I, your Paper II will provide information about your study participants, materials, and procedure in your Methods section. Your participant section goes first, and it includes descriptive statistics about your sample (means and standard deviations for age as well as percentages for gender and race/ethnicity). Your materials and procedure section includes information about what you did and how you did it. You should write this section for an audience who is unfamiliar with your specific study, but assume that they do know research methods. Thus educate your reader about your materials and procedure, giving enough detail so they could replicate the study. This includes explicitly describing your independent and dependent variables and discussing how you presented that material to your participants. My suggestion is to look at the articles you cited in Paper I and see how they wrote their Methods sections. This will give you a good idea about the level of depth and detail you need in your own Methods section.

Your Results section follows. The purpose of this section is to show how you analyzed the data and describe what you found.

Finally, you will include a short description of your findings in a Discussion section. Tell me if you supported or did not support your hypotheses and explain why you got those results (you can actually speculate here if you like, but make it an “educated” speculation!)