Discuss limitations of the study, to what extent those limitations temper the conclusions that can be made, and possible improvements.

Aim: To gain a practical understanding of experimental social psychology research.

Outcome: To demonstrate evidence of research skills through writing a research report.

Marking: The research report comprises 80% of your mark for this module. The grade descriptors/marking criteria can be found on SurreyLearn under ‘Psychology – Undergraduate Support/Useful Forms & Guides/Assessment and feedback.’ This document presents the Psychology-specific marking scheme (based on the University grade descriptors) that will be used to mark your research reports. This makes clear what is expected for a 2:1, 1st class mark etc. so do refer to this before submitting your work.

Deadline: The report must be submitted by 4pm on Tuesday, 29th March 2022

Page limit: The page limit is six pages. Templates are available on SurreyLearn under ‘Psychology –
Undergraduate Support/Useful Forms & Guides/Assessment and feedback/Psychology UG coursework template (for ALL written coursework assignments).’ In brief, margins should be 1 inch and text should be double-spaced in Times New Roman font size 12. The initial three pages on the template are for administration, and for 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:

  1. Preliminary pages that are part of template (i.e., stating that the work is your own, etc.) (not included in page limit)
  2. Title page (not included in page limit)
  3. Abstract (not included in page limit)
  4. Introduction
  5. Method
  6. Results
  7. Discussion
  8. References (not included in page limit)
  9. Tables – optional (not included in page limit)
  10. Figures – optional (not included in page limit)
  11. Appendices – optional (not included in page limit)

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).

Specific guidelines for this report: What follows is deliberately general. Much of what is included here will help you to write other research reports in future. However, as this is the first research report you will be writing, in order to help you get used to the structure and conventions of reporting psychological research, some of these guidelines are specific to this report only. In the case of differences between this and other documents, the present document should take precedence for the PSY1019 report only.
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 Personality and Social Psychology or Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology for some examples suitable for a social 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:

Abstract (not included in page limit):

The study should be summarised succinctly in a single paragraph (150 words or less). It should say what was done and why, providing a brief overview of the method, 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.

Abstract checklist: (one or two sentences per point, see general APA guidelines for further information):

  1. What is the theoretical background to the study?
  2. What questions are being addressed?
  3. What was the method?
  4. What did you find?
  5. What are the limitations and applications of the findings?

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/hypotheses 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.

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/hypotheses at the end.

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 from previous studies 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 uses quotes.

Purpose: The purpose of our experiment was to examine whether viewing a group with different morally condemning emotions (contempt versus disgust) because they have a bad moral character impacts levels of active harm.

Primary hypothesis: When a group is viewed with disgust this will elicit higher levels of active harm than when a group is viewed with contempt.
o Independent variable: Monroes viewed with contempt versus disgust.
o Dependent variable: Active harm.

Additional hypothesis: As you have a range of variables in your dataset, you should test one additional hypothesis in your report, which you may generate yourself based on relevant literature.

Background articles:
At a minimum, you should read and reference the following articles, all of which are available via the
Library’s reading list for the module. There is a link to it on SurreyLearn:

• Fiske, Cuddy, Glick and Xu (2002) (combinations of warmth/competence associated with different emotions.)
• Cuddy, Fiske, and Glick (2007) (found that stereotypes and emotions predict behavioural tendencies.)
• Goodwin, Piazza, and Rozin (2014) (found that morality is also important to person perception)

Additional readings you might consider are:

• Ekman, P. (1999). Basic emotions. In T. Dalgeish & M.Power (Eds.), Handbook of cognition and emotion (pp. 45-60). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
• Haidt, J. (2003). The moral emotions. In R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer, & H. H. Goldsmith
(Eds.), Handbook of affective sciences (pp. 852–870). New York: Oxford University Press.
• Russell, P.S., & Giner-Sorolla, R. (2013). Bodily moral disgust: What it is, How it is different from anger and Why it is an unreasoned emotion. Psychological Bulletin, 139, 328-351.

Introduction checklist:

  1. What was the aim of the study that you conducted?
  2. What previous research is relevant to the study?
  3. What gap in the literature does the study build on?
  4. What variable did you manipulate (independent variable)?
  5. What did you measure (dependent variable)?
  6. What was the hypothesis?

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 sub-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, gender, 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 explain how participants were distributed (e.g. procedures for randomisation or matching) among your experimental conditions. Finally, you will need to discuss how ethical considerations were handled – for example, regarding the use of deception.

Participants checklist:
• How many?
• Demographics: age, gender.
• How sampled?

Make sure to include, in our case:
o How many participants were tested?
o How were they sampled?
o Any data excluded? Why?
o Age including mean, range and standard deviation?
o How many male/female/other?
o How many participants in each emotion condition?

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 variables).

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.

Design Checklist:
• Formal design identified?
• Condition (independent variable) described?
• Outcome measure (dependent variables) listed?

Make sure to include, in our case:
o One between-subjects factor with two levels (contempt versus disgust)
Outcome measure (active harm)
Additional variable(s) of choice

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, materials or stimuli 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, again so that the reader can in principle replicate the study.

Materials Checklist:
• Manipulation described in enough detail to allow replication?
• Measures described in enough detail to allow replication?
• Questionnaires etc. in appendix?

Make sure to include, in our case:
o Description of the emotion manipulation of social group
o Description of the measures providing enough detail for the variable (e.g., active harm) that your analyses focus on. For the other measures you can refer to an appendix.

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). 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.

Procedure Checklist:
• Have you described exactly what happened in enough detail to allow replication?

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 output 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 your output.

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 (7th edition) for reporting of inferential statistics. Here are some key points:

1) Report statistics to two decimal places. Report p values to three decimal places when p<.10 and 2 decimal places when p is equal or greater than .10. 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 your output 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 = 0.042 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 useful 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 output 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).

Further 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.

I would recommend that you analyse the data using the following steps. Report on each step in your lab report.

  1. Check the data for any anomalies
  2. Create mean score for active harm DV
  3. Look at skewness, kurtosis, and normal distribution for DV.
  4. Retrieve descriptive statistics for DV.
  5. Conduct a t-test (or appropriate non-parametric analysis)
  6. Follow-up with any additional analyses that are applicable/interesting, such as t-test for another variable or regressions/correlations.

Results checklist:

  1. How were the data prepared? (pre-screening, means created)
  2. Have you described the data using descriptive statistics?
  3. Have you reported whether the data met parametric assumptions or not?
  4. Have you performed inferential tests on the data?

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 supported
• 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. 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.

Discussion checklist:

  1. Have you provided a brief description of the purpose of the research?
  2. What are the main findings and conclusions?
  3. How did your study differ from prior research?
  4. What are the limitations?
  5. How would you improve your study or build on these results for future research?
  6. What are the theoretical and practical implications of the research?

References: You should reference all mentions of other researchers’ work in APA style throughout the report. 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): The table title needs to appear above the table.

Figures – optional (not included in page limit): Figures include graphs, histograms, diagrams and
depictions. The figure title needs to appear below the figure.

Label all Figures and Tables consecutively (but separately) starting with the first one of each class to appear. 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.:

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).

× How can I help you?