Contents of the Web site
Preface
To students
How to use this book
To tutors xxi
Part 1 Writing reports
1 Getting started
1.1 Experienced students, inexperienced students,
and the report
1.2 Writing the report 8
1.3 The importance of references in text
1.4 The practical report and the research paper
1.5 Finding references for your introduction
1.5.1 How to structure your reading and what
to look for
1.5.2 Generating potential references
1.5.4 Rubbish and temptation on the Internet
1.6 Ethics 18
1.7 The rest of the book and the book’s Web site
2 The INTRODUCTION section
2.1 The ?rst part of the introduction: reviewing the
background to your study
2.2 Inexperienced students, experienced students,
and the introduction
2.3 Your own study
3 The METHOD section
3.1 The design subsection
3.2 The participants subsection
3.3 The apparatus or materials subsection
3.4 The procedure subsection
3.5 Interacting with and instructing participants
3.6 Optional additional subsections of the method
3.6.1 Pilot test
3.6.2 Ethical issues
3.6.3 Statistical power
3.7 Writing a method when your study is not an experiment
4 The RESULTS section
4.1 Describing the data: descriptive statistics
4.2 Analysing the data: inferential statistics
4.3 An example results section
4.4 Nine tips to help you avoid common mistakes in
your results section
4.5 Rejecting or not rejecting the null hypothesis
4.6 Reporting speci?c statistics
4.6.1 Chi-square, χ2
4.6.2 Spearman rank correlation coef?cient rho, rs
4.6.3 Pearson’s product moment correlation coef?cient, r
4.6.4 Mann-Whitney U test, U
4.6.5 Wilcoxon’s Matched-Pairs Signed-Ranks Test, T
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內容試閱:
When you ?rst signed up for a psychology course, the chances arethat you did not really expect what was coming, particularly the emphasis on methodology and statistics. For some of you this may have been a pleasant surprise. For most, however, it will undoubtedly have been a shock to the system. No doubt in other parts of your course you will examine critically academic psychology’s scienti?c aspirations. My task in this book is to help you as best I can to face up to one of its major consequences for you. This is the prominence given in many psychology courses to doing practical work especially experimenting and the requirement in most instances to write up at least some of this work in the form of a highly structured and disciplined practical report.
All a report is really is the place in which you tell the story of your study; what you did, why you did it, what you found out in the process, and so on. In doing this you are more like an ancient storyteller, whose stories were structured by widely recognized and long-established conventions, than a modern novelist who is free to dictate form as well as content. Moreover, like the storytellers of old, although our will invariably be telling your story to someone who knows quite a bit about it already, you are expected to present it as if it had never been heard before. This means that you will need to spell out the details and assume little knowledge of the area on the part of your audience. The nature of your story – the things that you have to talk about is revealed in Box 1.1.
1 What you did
2 Why you did it
3 How you did it
4 What you found including details of how you analysed the data
5 What you think it shows
Box 1.1 The information you should provide in your practical report.
Title
Abstract
Introduction
Method
Results
Discussion
References
Appendices if any
Box 1.2 The sections of the practical report.
Our ?rst clue as to the nature of the conventions governing the report comes with a glance at its basic structure. The report is in sections, and these sections by and large follow an established sequence. What this means is that, in the telling, your story needs to be cut up into chunks: different parts of the story should appear in different places in the report. The typical sequence of the sections appears in Box 1.2.
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