Age range 18-79
F=258
M=94
Other =6
APA Paper
– Title Page
– Header
– 3 Sections one
– Page number (current position).
– Introduction – introduces the topic.
– Try to grab people’s attention. This paper is a scientific report. You want to grab
people’s attention but you have to do it with dignity and composure.
– Formal. No profanity.
– You want to win people over with content and not form (aka fancy language won’t
help you in this paper).
– The prior science that has been done on the topic.
– With our paper, we will be intentionally exploring 4 journal articles.
– A chunky paragraph each.
– Talk about their topic. What they did. What they found.
– Don’t care about their participants. Don’t report t-test scores or f-test
scores. Use narrative summaries of their results.
– When you’re doing a journal article, you should be teasing out:
– Theory (how are they describing the relationship between these
variables)
– Primary methods
– Primary analyses summarized (in narrative form not actual data)
– Also where we state our hypotheses.
– This will be the last thing in our intro.
– They can be a paragraph (doesn’t have to be chunky).
– So our intro should be a minimum of 6 paragraphs.
– What are you studying? What’s been done? What you think is going to
happen.
– Method – tell people how you did your study. People should be able to replicate your
study with your methods section.
– Talk about your participants (this is important to report)
– Immediately follows your intro
– 4 subsections
– Participants
– Design
– Materials
– Procedure
– Participants
– Where do they come from? It’s us, other students, our acquaintances.
– How many participants do you have? How many males, females, other?
– Location of those participants (roughly). “Moreno Valley College. A
community college in Southern California. It is a diverse campus.”
“Primarily psychology students.” because we are mostly psychology
majors in this class.
– Age (range and average). He wants both. He wants to know what he’s
working with.
– You need to also mention what we did, Snowball Sampling. Participants
become recruiters.
– How participants were compensated. “Participated as part of a class
activity. Offered extra credit to recruit extra participants.”
– Design
– Where you report your research design and your IV’s and DV’s.
– Correlational or experimental
– Between subjects or within subjects.
– Between: Participants are exposed to one level of an IV
– Within: Participants are exposed to all levels of an IV
– Did you make a categorical variable a continuous variable?
– Do a median split. Then you take the lower and the higher
– Example: “Extraversion was turned into a categorical variable
using a median split.”
– If you use random assignment you would put that information in this
section (we did NOT use random assignment).
– Materials
– What you used based on your hypotheses
– When you talk about the satisfaction of life you need to cite it, how many
items it is, what the scale is on, and you will give example items.
– You won’t list all of them, but maybe a couple.
– I didn’t use need for cognition so I don’t need to talk about it?
– Gender was not created but the rest of my variables were.
– You do it for all your variables, not the whole list of questions
– Procedure
– What did the participants do?
– Link was sent for the study.
– Study was taken in an online environment.
– Link was clicked and a page describing the study and consent was given
to participate.
– Took a survey with multiple questionnaires
– Include parts that you didn’t use. Not all of them but at least a few
of them.
– How does our study end? After completion, participants were given extra
credit to send the study to others.
Discussion Section
– Discuss your results in light of your predictions.
– Relate your results to prior studies.
– Did your findings support prior research? Did it contradict?
– You should be seeing some citations in this section.
– Discuss the limitations of your study (in terms of internal validity).
– Do NOT say sample size.. Or he will spin kick your throat!
– Future directions. How do we extend our study?
– Does halo effect work with different demographics?
– Address the question in different ways.
I’ve attached my paper that I turned in and it got really bad feedback from my professor:
Title page: -Missing header -Title page information not correct. Stick to the script. -Title is slick Intro -Good intro to topic -Missing summary of prior literature -2 -Hypotheses: structure these like normal paragraphs. -Correlations: missing “such that” language. Method -Get rid of that “This section” part. Stick to the script. Participants -Use past tense -Missing lots of information -1 Design: -Cross sectional? -Missing information. Mats: -Use normal formatting. -Missing information. No idea what’s going on here. Fix this or you will lose about 10-15 points on your final paper. Proc: -Random sampling eh? -The study is done. What is happening here? -Good start on real information. Need more. References: -Fournier is good. -Huang is good -The rest have some issues. Check how we do references.
