Quality of SPSS lab project reports The important aspects in judging quality will be:
1. development of the
research question and literature
review*
2. creativity of the design (be sure to cite reference if you borrow from an
existing design)
3. reporting of results (APA style tables and figures)
4. drawing conclusions
from the findings*
5. quality of writing
*This means integrating the literature (theories and opinions), offering explanations for resolving conflicting research findings, and drawing reasonable conclusions based on your research hypotheses.
Guide for writing reports:
The principal means of scientific communication is the research
report. Over the years, the format of such reports has become standardized
in a general way in all scientific fields. In psychology rather detailed
standards have been set for journals published by the American Psychological
Association (APA). These conventions are set forth in detail in the Publication
Manual of the American Psychological Association.
It is recommended that these guidelines be adopted in writing your own
reports and be considered in evaluating reports that you read in the journals.
These conventions are concerned with the organization of the
report and the style of presentation. Report writing should be both brief
and clear. An examination of articles in the Journal of Experimental Psychology
or the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, which
are available in the library, will give you a feeling for the style of
writing that is most common.
When writing the report of an experiment, it is necessary that you include what is relevant to your problem. It is important that you indicate the theoretical basis or the prior observations which suggested the experiment. Furthermore, the report should make clear in reasonable detail the manner in which the experiment was carried out, that is, what was done to manipulate and measure variables in the manner demanded by the problem under investigation. This means that the report must be sufficiently detailed so that someone else could duplicate the experiment. Finally, the report must state what results were obtained and what interpretation of these can be made.
The sections into which a report is conventionally divided are described below. Every report should contain all of the sections.
TITLE
A good title indicates the relationships among the variables studied. If it is an experimental study, uses verbs such as "The effects of ...on.." or "The influence of ...on" to reflect causation. For correlational studies refer to the direction (and perhaps strength) of the relationships between variables, e.g. "The direct relationship between self-esteem and successful academic accomplishments."
ABSTRACT
A brief (about 100 words) summary of the statement of the problem, procedure, results, and conclusions is to appear in this section. Do not include any new material that has not been covered elsewhere in this report. Also, this is not the place to introduce a moral or cliché statement. A brief and accurate summary of the full report allows the potential reader to determine quickly whether his study is relevant to his interests, and therefore, whether he wants to spend the time and effort to read it in full.
INTRODUCTION (Note: This section is not labeled).
This is a statement of what led up to the experiment and includes as much background material as is needed to place the experimental question in its proper setting. The problem may follow naturally as the next question from a body of previous research, it may simply have suggested itself as an interesting phenomenon or it may follow as a deduction from a theory. It should be clear from the statements in the introduction what prior information is to be assumed in conducting the experiment and where the sources of this information are to be found. The experiment will necessarily deal with some matters that are speculative, and these should be indicated and stated in terms that can reasonably be supposed to be generally and reliably understood.
A common fault is the absence of a proper approach to the subject matter of the experimental report. You are (or should be) writing for everyone who might at any time, be interested in the experiment and not for one or two people who presumably already know all about it. You should not assume that your reader has any special knowledge of your experiment. Since your report should be relatively "timeless" phrases such as "a few moths ago" or "last week" should not be used. Do not include information based on personal experience which others cannot evaluate Your personal reasons for conducting a particular experiment are not relevant. You may have been interested in the subject since you were a child, or you may be doing it only because it is required for this course. Your reader is not concerned with your motivation. What he wishes to know is what contribution in terms of empirical knowledge, concepts, etc., the research offers him. You must explain or exhibit this information by relating your study to other pertinent work in the field of psychology.
METHODS
This section usually contains three parts, one describing the subjects, one describing the materials or apparatus employed in testing the hypothesis, and one describing the experimental procedure. It should be sufficiently detailed to permit duplication by any other competent investigator. Equipment items should be described in detail only when the information is needed to indicate what has been done in terms that will be reliably understood. Details of procedure, technique, or instrumentation that have been adequately described by earlier investigators should not be described in details again, but references to the original sources should be cited.
The description of the procedure should summarize each step in the actual execution of the experiment, e.g., the instructions given to the subjects, the method informing the experimental and control groups, and the order in which the various experimental and/or stimulus conditions were administered. The criteria here are the same as before. The description should be written in terms that you can reasonably suppose are generally and reliably understood and in sufficient detail to permit duplication by other qualified investigators.
Published research reports often assume that both reader and writer understand why certain aspects of the experimental procedure were conducted as they were. It is reasonable to assume that readers of technical articles have considerable background knowledge of the problems and methods in a given area. In this respect it would be well for you to depart from the standard format and to indicate why you did what you did. Why were your particular procedures required by the questions to be answered, or in what way did they control some unwanted variable or variables?
RESULTS
This section should present a description of the data collected in the experiment and the analysis or analyses performed on them. It is desirable to summarize the results in tabular or graphic form in addition to the verbal description. A table or figure can frequently communicate your results far more effectively than words. Raw data should not be included in the Results section. I include an appendix for raw data, computations, etc.
Graphs and tables should be concise and clear. They should be numbered and referred to by number in the text. A brief caption should be included describing the contents of the graph or table. The salient points brought over by each table or graph must also be stated in the text of the results section. The results of statistical analysis of the data are to be given in the body of the text and also in tabular form where tables will clarify the presentation. Such table should indicate the number of subjects in each group, the mean value for each group or proportion performing in a particular fashion, and some measure of the variability of performance.
DISCUSSION
As indicated in the preceding section, a straightforward presentation of the results of the experiment is required. It is in this "Discussion" section that you should present your interpretation of the results obtained. You should give particular emphasis to any theoretical consequences of the results. You should also discuss any methodological considerations that you have found to be relevant. In considering the adequacy of the experiment as a test of the hypothesis, how- ever, it does not suffice to show that a host of things was varying in an uncontrolled manner. You must specify how these uncontrolled variables could affect the results favorably or unfavorably. You should also indicate in your discussion the implications of this experiment for future research and for evaluation of relevant theories.
REFERENCES
When you refer to some existing work, you must always give proper acknowledgement by citing that work. See the APA Publication Manual for the correct procedures for citing existing works.
There is usually some misunderstanding concerning "references" and "bibliography." References include those articles and other parts of the literature that are relevant to the problem which you refer to specifically. Any source that you have examined that you do not cite specifically cannot properly be included under you list of references but can be included, for purposes of our reports, under a separate list of sources labeled "bibliography." As you will see from journal articles, published research reports include only references and do not have a bibliography section.