1. Experimental Psychology PSY 433
Chapter 5
Research Reports

2. Goals of the Final Report
Communicate to the scientific community.
Clearly describe your project in sufficient detail to permit replication.
Convince readers that your findings support your conclusions.
How strong is the evidence?
Does it justify your statements about theory?
Summarize your contribution to the ongoing debate on an important question.
Pay special attention to your abstract!

3. You Are Telling a Story
Introduction -- state your research question, review the literature, make your predictions (hypotheses).
Methods – describe how you explored the question in sufficient detail to permit replication.
Results – describe your findings and test your hypotheses using statistics.
Discussion – analyze your results and put them back into the context of your question.

4. Parts of the Final Report
Title page
Abstract
Text:
Introduction
Methods
Results
Discussion
References
Appendix, Tables and Figures

5. Abstract
This may be the only part of your paper that most people read, so make it count!
Write this last.
Tell the story of your study, with one sentence per report section.
Do not exceed 120 words – I will count them!

6. Use of Tenses
For the final report, revise the sections that were written for your proposal because they will be graded again.
Your proposal was written in the future tense (e.g., “subjects will…”), but for the final report…
Put the Methods section in the past tense.
Report your results in the past tense.

7. Reporting Results
Only include the results that are relevant to your research question, not all data collected.
Go from the general to the specific.
Provide tables for:
Multiple analyses.
Complex experiments (factorial designs).
ANOVA
Organize your results section around your hypotheses, testing one at a time.

8. Describing Data
Don’t forget to include descriptive statistics (means, SDs).
“The mean number of words recalled was calculated for each group. The means and the standard deviations for each group are shown in Figure 1.”
“Recall was higher for the drug group (M = 15, SD = 5.43) than for the placebo group (M = 10, SD = 4.98).”

9. APA Format Descriptive Statistics

10. Reporting Inferential Statistics
“The data were analyzed using an independent t-test. The t-test showed no significant difference between the mean of the placebo group and the mean of the drug group, t(34) = 1.35, p = .782.”
“Using one-way ANOVA, gender differences were found to be significant, with females scoring higher on the average than males, F(1, 23) = 23.89, p =.025.”
Show more complex analyses in a table.

11. Report Exact p-Values
The old approach simply tested results against a standard of p<.05 by looking up the critical value in a table.
Significance was an all-or-nothing judgment.
Only the critical value (cutoff) was known, not the exact p-value for your statistic.
Today, SPSS gives exact p-values for every result. Report those exact values (p=.031).
NEVER report p > .05 for a non-significant result. It implies use of p > .05 as a standard.

12. Critical values of F
If F is > 2.54 then the result is statistically significant at the p<.05 level.

13. Ethics of Reporting Statistics
Don’t change your hypotheses (prediction) to fit what you actually discovered. Instead say you were surprised by your results.
Decide how many subjects to test in advance.
Don’t stop collecting data because you already have significant results.
Don’t add more subjects because your results are almost significant and would become so with a few more subjects.
State your reason for ending data collection.

14. Avoid “p-Hacking”
p-hacking is the practice of trying different approaches to data analysis until you find one that gives significant results. It is unethical.
Collect at least 20 observations per condition.
Report all experimental conditions, even failed manipulations (studies that didn’t work).
List all variables collected in a study, even if they are not analyzed in your paper.
If there is any doubt, report results with and without excluded subjects, covariates.

15. Changes in Reporting
The internet is making possible different approaches to report writing.
Because journals are no longer limited in space, authors can supply complete data sets, stimuli (materials) and alternative analyses.
This represents a movement toward greater transparency.
Exact, not conceptual replications are needed results are marginal.

16. References
Only list the sources actually mentioned in the text of your report.
Everything listed in the references must be cited in text
Everything cited in text must be listed in the references.
Format varies depending on the type of material being referenced (e.g., book, article, web site).
When you mention a source referenced in another paper say: “as cited by…” and cite the source you actually read, not the original quoted by someone else.

17. Tables and Figures Tables go first – always use APA format.
Tables contain numbers or words.
Figures are pictures and typically present graphs of data, sample stimuli, equipment setup, diagrams of experiment flow, flowcharts of cognitive processes or diagrams of theoretical models.
Refer to them in text: See Figure 1.
Include at least 1 of each in your final report.

18. Converting from SPSS No vertical lines! Add a title at the TOP:
Table 1.
Sample data showing table format.

19. Sample Figure with Caption
These are optional.

20. Discussion First, state what you discovered during your experiment.
Do not repeat results but interpret them and state whether your hypotheses were confirmed.
Tell whether your findings are consistent with what others have found.
Describe any threats to validity and problems with your experiment (confounds, bias, limitations of generalizability, problems).
Conclusion – what are the consequences?

21. Samples from Past Student Papers
The participants will report to a specified lab room in building 5. Participants will be greeted and asked to quietly take a seat at a computer station.
Subjects will report to a specified lab room in building 5. Upon entering the lab subjects will be greeted and asked to quietly take a seat.
This is Unacceptable

22. Another Unacceptable Example
Using a bivalent within-subjects design, we will be measuring the affect…
Using a bivalent within-subjects design, we will measure the participant’s correct responses.
We will be using a bivalent within-subjects design measuring both the affects of the sex…
Using a bivalent design, the correct responses of the participants will be measured…

23. One More Unacceptable Example
Data was analyzed using SPSS a statistics software program produced by IBM. A 0.05 significance level was used.
Information was collected from the participants’ responses and was evaluated at the .05 level of significance using SPSS known as a statistical software developed by IBM.
One student clearly used a group member’s paper as a template for writing the Results.