Subject Guides: PSYC 381: Principles of Statistics & Experimental Design: Write Up Your Writing Assignment

Nadine Anderson, Behavioral Sciences and Women's & Gender Studies Librarian

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Put Together Your Writing Assignment

Sections

1. Introduction: a review of the literature that you used to build your research questions about the relationships between your variables. Your Introduction should:

Bring together theories and results from your articles to describe the relationships between your variables and why your statistical analyses are important.

2. Methods: provides detailed information about your research study design. Your Methods section should include:

include the statistical analyses that you ran, including descriptive statistics such as the mean and the median, and well as the Pearson r Correlation
your use of SPSS software

3. Results: report the findings of your statistical analyses, written in the past tense, without bias or interpretation. Your Results section should:

Focus on being concise and objective
Organize your results around tables and graphs that summarize the results of your statistical analyses
Include summary text that describes the results in your tables and figures
- Describe the trends in your data but do not interpret it
Organize your key findings in a logical sequence, generally following your Methods section
Don't omit relevant findings, even those that don't support your predictions

4. Discussion: interpret and describe the significance of your findings in light of what is already known about the research area you're investigating. Your Discussion shoul:

Restate your research questions from the introduction in different words
Use evidence from research sources to build arguments about what your study findings mean (keeping in mind that correlation does not imply causation)
References to previous research: compare your results with findings from other studies
End with a strong, final statement that ties the whole paper together and makes it clear the paper has come to an end

5. References List: a list of the sources you cited

For more writing help, contact the Writing Center and make an online appointment to meet with one of their consultants.