Guidelines for Authors of Research Proposals, Prospectuses, Theses, and Research Reports

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1 Guidelines for Authors of Research Proposals, Prospectuses, Theses, and Research Reports Claudia J. Stanny Beginning writers encounter similar problems and make similar errors when preparing manuscripts. Some of these errors are formatting errors. The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2001) provides detailed answers to formatting questions. Only the most frequent problems with APA style will be addressed here. These guidelines will primarily focus on the conceptual problems beginning writers frequently encounter when they begin to organize and write a technical research-based paper. Organization of the Introduction The simplest structure for an introduction will have three major parts, although these parts are not labeled. The first part frequently consists of a single paragraph in which the general problem to be studied is introduced. The goal in writing this paragraph is to introduce the problem in an interesting and engaging way. This is the paragraph that provides the reader with a reason to continue reading. Some authors achieve this goal by describing the problem in terms of an everyday example: John has misplaced his keys again. Anyone who has searched for a misplaced object appreciates the problem of representing and remembering the spatial location of objects. Problems might be introduced by describing their practical importance: Although numerous laboratory studies demonstrate that eyewitness memory is fragile and easily distorted (Loftus, Miller, & Burns, 1978; Wells & Bradfield, 1999), testimony from eyewitnesses can be compelling and decisive during jury deliberations (Cutler, Penrod, & Dexter, 1989). What are the conditions that moderate the accuracy of reports from witnesses to emotional events? Other problems are important because their solution is important: The rate of attempted suicide by adolescents has increased dramatically during the past decade (Jones & Exeter, 2001). Effective intervention requires timely detection of suicidal intent. How can we better predict when an adolescent is at increased risk of attempting suicide? The bulk of the material in the introduction is found in the second part. This is where the general literature is reviewed. A simple organization for the introduction is one in which the author begins with a broad picture of the major relevant issues in the research literature and gradually narrows to a discussion of the issues that are directly relevant to decisions the author made during the selection of variables to manipulate and choice of dependent measures for the research project. The literature review should be carefully organized to present an argument that supports the author s hypotheses and justifies the methods used in the research project. These guidelines for the structure of this part of the introduction are necessarily vague. The appropriate logical arguments and the amount and kind of evidence that must be organized to convince a reader that a research project has merit will vary with each project. Background information about the research area is also provided in the introduction. The amount of background information and the level of detail devoted to explanation of concepts and specialized terms will depend in part on the intended audience for the paper. Journals will discourage extensive presentation of marginally-related material and detailed explanations of general knowledge. (Remember that the editors are thinking about the general knowledge of an audience of expert researchers when making this judgment.) Theses, dissertations, and student research papers serve a different audience and have dual purposes. First, the author must provide a compelling literature-based rationale for the research reported. In addition, the paper might also serve as an extended essay exam.

2 Stanny Guidelines for Authors 2 Although committee members who read a thesis or dissertation may be equal to journal readers in the extent of their general knowledge, committee members are also interested in the extent of the author s knowledge. Therefore, they may demand substantive proof of that knowledge by demanding longer and more detailed literature reviews than a journal editor would tolerate. However, even these extended reviews assume a sophisticated level of knowledge that precludes the inclusion of textbook-level explanations. Although the literature review for a thesis or dissertation may be more expansive than the literature review for a journal article, both must display logical cohesion. All the pieces of research described should fit together neatly to form a complete picture. There should be no gaps or missing pieces. There should be no extra pieces. All the parts should serve a purpose toward developing reasons for why the research is interesting, why the research problem is important, why the research should be carried out as described, and why the predictions made for the results are reasonable. When you finish the literature review, all of these questions will be answered satisfactorily. If you detect any nagging little problems lurking around, the literature review needs further revision. If the middle part of the literature review has been done correctly, the final part will be short and tothe-point. The final part summarizes the conclusions to be drawn from the literature review. These conclusions should be something on the order of given what we know from the preceding discussion, an experiment in which we manipulate the following variables and measure the following outcomes can be expected to produce the following results. Thus, the final part of the introduction presents the issues discussed in the literature review in terms of the specific variables that are manipulated and measured in your experiment. The hypothesized results are the results that should logically be expected based on the material presented in the literature review. Some thesis and dissertation chairs will require students to formally state each research hypothesis that will be tested. A thesis or dissertation might include a formal section labeled Hypotheses that consists of a numbered list of hypotheses. An editor of a journal article is unlikely to demand this level of formality. Instead, predicted outcomes may be discussed ( We expected that conditions with increased depth of processing would produce the best performance on the recall test. ) or a series of questions may be posed ( Experiment 1 addressed the question about the relation between depth of processing and performance on a recall task. ). Thus, although hypotheses might not be stated formally, they should be relatively easy to derive from the author s predictions or questions. Completeness and recency are critically important for a high-quality literature review. You must ensure that your literature review addresses all important historical work directly relevant to your topic and that your review is absolutely up-to-date. Topics for which no research has been published in the past year or two are extremely rare (I have yet to encounter one). Thus, reviews that fail to cite research published in the last year or two are almost certainly inadequate. The presentation of related research must be detailed enough to allow the reader to evaluate the relevance of the research to the research problem. Students often err in presenting too little information about cited material, producing "blind" citations. An example of a "blind" citation is "Jones (1990) reported an effect of study time, but this experiment was criticized by Smith (1991) for methodological flaws." In this example the author fails to adequately describe the effect reported by Jones and does not identify the methodological flaws identified by Smith. Without this information, the reader is unable to evaluate Jones results, Smith s critique of the methods used, or the relevance of this debate to the author's arguments.

3 Stanny Guidelines for Authors 3 Guidelines for the Research Proposal The research proposal is to be prepared using APA style (APA, 2001). The format includes the following sections: Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, References, and Appendices. The research proposal must be typed with double-spacing and appropriate margins. The text of the average paper (excluding references, appendices, and other ancillary materials) will be pages in length. The cover page should list the title, your name and affiliation, and state that the paper is a research proposal for PSY Refer to the APA Publication Manual for a discussion of modification of APA format for theses, dissertations, and student papers. Particular modifications for the research proposal will be described in the discussion of each section presented below. As in any paper, clarity of thought, correct grammar, and correct spelling are important. The Publication Manual includes a chapter on writing style. Bordens and Abbott (2001) also discuss scientific writing and the specific parts of an APA - style manuscript. Questions of editorial style (e.g., punctuation, spelling, capitalization, use of italics, abbreviations, numbers versus numerals, etc.) are addressed in the Publication Manual. All writing benefits enormously from revision, which has become significantly less painful with the availability of word processors. If you do not already know how to use a word processing program, you should learn to use one now. Plan your writing schedule to allow time to set a draft of your manuscript aside for a few days before making a final revision. All students will be required to prepare drafts of their proposals to submit to peer review and will review the proposals of fellow students. Plagiarism Plagiarism occurs when a person presents the words, ideas, creations, or scholarship of another as their own. Plagiarism is a violation of University standards and a violation of Principle 6.22 of the ethical code of the American Psychological Association (1992) and will not be tolerated. Refer to the Publication Manual and Bordens and Abbott (2001) for specific advice on how to avoid plagiarism in your work. Be sure to give credit where credit is due for scholarly ideas. However, extended quotations are discouraged. Clear writing entails maintaining a consistent style or voice. This is one reason why extended quotations are discouraged. The voice of the author of the quoted material will differ from your voice and adjustment to a new style places an extra burden on the reader. More important, a passage lifted from its context loses much of its clarity. You are more likely to clearly state the author s idea if you express the context and the idea in your own words (i.e., in a paraphrase). Make sure you still cite the source of the idea. If you feel you cannot adequately paraphrase, you probably don t have a complete grasp of the author s idea and need to do more reading. Sometimes a primary source is difficult to obtain. If you cannot obtain the original work and must rely on a secondary source, be sure to indicate this in your text (e.g., Jones (1942; cited in Smith, 1989) reported an effect of... ). Be cautious when using secondary sources. These sources can be inaccurate or otherwise misrepresent the original work. For example, the author of a secondary source might interpret the data quite differently than the original author did. When using a secondary source, only the secondary source is listed in the reference section. In the example above, Smith (1989) but not Jones (1942) would appear in the reference list.

4 Stanny Guidelines for Authors 4 Method The purpose of the Method section is to describe the experiment in sufficient detail to enable the reader to replicate the experiment. The Method section is divided into a number of subsections. Refer to the Publication Manual for a detailed discussion of the content of these subsections and their functions. All Method sections should include a Participants, Apparatus (or Materials), Design, and Procedure section. Other sections are included as needed. For example, if you propose to use a standardized assessment instrument (or develop your own assessment tool), you should discuss the reliability and validity of the instrument in the Method section. Modification of APA Style. In journal articles, the Method section is a historical account of the essential details involved in variable manipulation and data collection and is written in the past tense. Your paper, however, is a proposal for future research and should, therefore, be written in the future tense. Results In a typical Results section, the data are described first. These may be presented in a Figure or Table but are also described verbally with a reference to the related Figure or Table. Always describe what the reader will find in a Figure or Table (e.g., Means and standard deviations for the Beck Depression scores for each of the three treatment groups are presented in Table 1. Scores on the Beck were highest for the untreated group and lower for both the drug and therapy groups. ). The results of inferential statistics are presented next, along with statistical conclusions based on these tests. (e.g., The drug group had significantly lower scores on the Beck following treatment than did the untreated group (F(2,37) = 6.79, MSe =.663, p <.05). Results of a Tukey LSD test indicated that the drug group was not significantly different from the therapy group, although both groups had significantly lower scores than the untreated group. ) Studies that include several dependent measures (for example, studies that include one or more manipulation checks or studies that measure different variables to answer different research questions) are generally organized by measure. The data for the manipulation check would be addressed first, followed by inferential statistics and conclusions about the effectiveness of the manipulation. Next, the dependent measures would be presented. As each measure is presented, the reader will be reminded of the purpose for that measure (that is, the research question that this measure is intended to help answer). Results sections for correlational studies will generally address the descriptive statistics for all of the measures before continuing with a discussion of the correlational analysis itself. Modification of APA Style. You will not collect actual data for the research proposal. However, you should be able to make some specific predictions about the structure of the data your study would generate. You should present these results in the same format used to report actual data. You will have to present imaginary data, but your knowledge about the dependent measures and the expected effects of the variables studies should enable you to generate reasonable values. Discussion Whereas the introduction begins with broad questions couched in terms of theoretical issues and concludes with narrow questions framed in terms of operationally-defined variables, the discussion

5 Stanny Guidelines for Authors 5 reverses that process. It begins with specific, narrow conclusions that can be drawn based on the data described and statistical tests presented in the Results section. Then the discussion broadens. How do these results fit into the broader research picture? Do they corroborate the findings of other researchers or lend support to one theoretical model? Do they disconfirm a model? In either case, you must explain why you reach this conclusion. If your findings are inconsistent with the findings that are typically reported, you must address why your findings might have differed from those obtained by others. This might entail discussing procedural differences or differences in materials or measures used. The final part of the discussion should be broadly theoretical. What are the implications of these research findings for current theories or models? What questions have been resolved and/or what new questions are raised by these findings? What is the next logical step in your research program? Authors of theses and dissertations may also be asked to speculate on lessons learned from the process of designing and conducting the research. If you were to begin designing this study today, knowing all that you learned from your experience during data collection and analysis, what would you do differently? How might your study be modified to get a clearer answer or more compelling evidence for your hypothesis? References Every published (or unpublished) work cited in your paper should be listed in the Reference section. List only those sources cited in your paper. You will find that you will read more papers while developing your research proposal than you will actually cite. Reference list entries and citation of references in the text of your paper should follow APA format (see the Publication Manual for detailed information about citations). An excellent review of the literature would include at least primary references (i.e., original work published in a journal or book). Keep copies of the work that you read for your proposal. When you turn in your research proposal, you will also be required to turn in a binder containing copies of the sources cited in your paper. If you use a book or monograph, include copies of the title page and all pages where ideas you cited were discussed. If you use a chapter from an edited book, include a copy of the book chapter. Copies should be filed in your binder in the same order they appear in the Reference section. References should be single-spaced, with a double-space between references. Use the hangingindent format for references. You may substitute italics for underlining if you wish to do so. Appendix Various ancillary materials are included in appendices. For the research proposal, the appendix should include the following materials: 1. Copy of the informed consent form. (Theses will also include a copy of the IRB approval.) 2. Instructions to subjects (if relevant for the design) 3. List of stimulus materials or accurate description of stimuli used (if relevant)

6 Stanny Guidelines for Authors 6 References American Psychological Association. (1992). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. American Psychologist, 47, American Psychological Association. (2001). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author. Bordens, K. S., & Abbott, B. B. (2001). Research design and methods (5rd ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill Company \MyFiles\PSY6217\HANDOUTS\Guidelines for Authors.wpd