Key Research and Study Skills in Psychology

This book provides students with a wide range of research and study skills necessary for achieving a successful classification on a psychology degree course. Its replaces the stress and fear experienced when encountering essays, reports, statistics and exams with a sense of confidence, enthusiasm and even fun. Sieglinde McGee presents indispensable instruction, advice and tips on note making and note taking, evaluating academic literature, writing critical essays, preparing for and doing essay and MCQ exams, understanding research methods and issues associated with conducting research, writing and presenting reports and research and also some important computer skills. Examples provided will show how to score well on assignments and exams and also the sort of approach, layout, errors, omissions or answer-style that would achieve a lower grade. Practical exercises and interactive tasks are integrated throughout to clarify key points and give the students a chance to practise on their own. This is a useful resource for students taking modules in study and research skills in psychology and an essential guide for all other students studying on psychology programmes.

SIEGLINDE MCGEE is an Associate of the School of Psychology at Trinity

College, Dublin, where she taught for several years.

McGee KEY RESEARCH & STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

‘I am happy to recommend this to my students as it covers jargon without using jargon and explains all those simple things that many academics take for granted. It also gives good examples of how to get the best from your time studying psychology from how to write good essays to the rules of writing lab reports.’ Dr Joy Coogan, University of East London

Sieglinde McGee

Key Research & Study Skills In Psychology

ISBN: 978-1-84860-021-8

Cover image © graficart.net/Alamy | Cover design by Wendy Scott

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© Sieglinde McGee 2010 First published 2010 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009932182 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-84860-020-1 ISBN 978-1-84860-021-8 (pbk)

Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India Printed in India at Replika Press Pvt Ltd Printed on paper from sustainable resources

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To my parents Donard & Ailis

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CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgements

viii ix

1

Useful Computer Skills

2

Note Making and Study Tips

22

3

Evaluating Academic Literature

45

4

Good Essay Writing

61

5

Good Writing Skills and Basic Numeracy

93

6

Doing Exams

104

7

Psychological Research Skills

132

8

Writing Reports

152

9

Presenting Your Research

174

Appendix 1 Appendix 2

The Sample Essays from the Exercise in Chapter 4, with Comments A Sample Report, with Comments

1

186 196

References

204

Index

207

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PREFACE

When I was an undergraduate I got the impression that students were expected to be divinely inspired about many things: how to perform certain tasks on a computer, how to evaluate academic material, how to write university-standard essays and exam answers, how to write reports and how best to study. I was a mature student and had successfully completed two professional qualifications in the years preceding my entry to university. In the almost complete absence of any guidance on how to do these things at university, I kept doing what had worked so well in those other courses. My grades were quite good but I had no idea how to improve on them. I was already spending seven days a week in the library, often one of the first to arrive in the morning and one of the last to be thrown out at night, so more work was clearly not the answer. I had been nationally-ranked in one set of professional exams so a lack of intelligence was clearly not the answer either. Requests for advice from lecturers were met with unhelpful replies such as ‘study harder’, ‘read more’ and ‘if you were doing something wrong then you would be failing’. The epiphany occurred when, as a doctoral student, I started teaching. There is a simple strategy that, if followed or adapted to suit the individual, can turn those 2:2s and 2:1s into better 2:1s and firsts. It is not about studying harder but about studying smarter. It has been my intention to write this book ever since that day and its aim is to share with you the secret to achieving higher grades in psychology. Once you master the techniques you will find that producing essays and exam answers in the upper 2:1 and the first-class range will become the norm. Each chapter states aims and learning outcomes and a note on what is expected of you at university level. There are ‘think about this for a moment’ boxes throughout to get you thinking actively about the material. Chapter 1 provides tips on a variety of computer packages and tools. Chapter 2 highlights the difference between note taking and note making, and looks at studying, learning styles, motivation and literature searches. Chapter 3 shows you how to evaluate academic literature. Chapter 4 takes you through the process of writing university-level essays in psychology and includes two full essays for an exercise that should help bring together everything covered within the chapter (see the annotated versions in Appendix 1). Chapter 5 focuses on good writing, Chapter 6 deals with preparing for and doing MCQ and essay exams, while Chapter 7 talks you through the process of designing and conducting research. Chapter 8 deals with writing reports (see the annotated sample in Appendix 2), while Chapter 9 covers the presentation of your research. There are also tips provided throughout the book for students who are studying via distance education or who may have a disability.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to all of the students whom it has been my pleasure to work with over the years and a special thank you to three colleagues and dear friends whose tips, comments and feedback throughout the writing process have been so invaluable: Maria Jordan-O’Reilly, Maeve Mangaoang and Maria McEvoy.

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USEFUL COMPUTER SKILLS

Aims It is presumed that you know how to use a computer when you come to study at university level so if you have limited or no prior experience then you will have to teach yourself or take courses. It is entirely up to you to learn to type, if you cannot do so already, and to find your way around the popular word-processing and spreadsheet software. This chapter gives some tips on how to use some of these packages and it highlights some of the differences between Microsoft Office 2007 and all the previous versions of their popular software. By the end of this chapter, therefore, you should know: • • • • •

some of the basics of using a networked computer keyboard shortcuts and some features in Microsoft Word some useful tips for Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat what virtual learning environments (VLEs) and turnitin.com are about the existence of reference databases and online survey tools.

What is expected at university? You may already have had extensive experience of using a variety of software packages by the time you start university but there are many students who will have had limited or even no prior experience. Your school may not have been in a position to offer computer classes, you may not have had easy access to a computer or you may be returning to education after many years working in areas that did not require computer use. However, while you will be trained on the use of computer software such as SPSS, or other statistics programs, or in-house software for labs, it is likely that the only other computer training that you will get at university level is a handout that may be available through your university’s IT services. From time to time the IT services in universities may offer classes on any of a variety of different computer packages and it is recommended that you avail yourself of any of these that you can, if you feel that they would be helpful.

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Getting started Logging in/out You may already be familiar with having to enter a username and password to be able to access a computer as many newer versions of operating software require that you set up this facility. If it is your own personal computer then you are free to choose your username and password. Your university will issue you with a username and password, most likely as part of the materials that you receive on the day that you register, so that you can use their computer facilities. It is essential that you memorise these! Usually you will not be given a choice of username or password. If the department in which you are studying has its own private computer room, which it may use for teaching or lab work, or allows students to access lecture notes or other materials online, then you may also be issued with a separate username and password for their machines or materials. Your online behaviour can be monitored so it is very important that you never give your log-in details to anybody – you will be held entirely responsible for any misuse of facilities while you are logged in. When you are finished using the computer you must log out! These options will either be in the start menu (on a PC) or in the ‘help’ drop-down menu on a Mac.

Passwords Your username may be a number or some version of your name (usually surname and initial or first name.surname) but your password is likely to be a combination of letters and numbers. They are case sensitive (which means that you must type them exactly as they were given to you) and the reason for the rather complicated password is so that it will be very hard to guess. Hackers love to find people who use simple or easy-to-guess passwords. You should always change your password from time to time but there are some important points that you should consider in choosing it:

Box 1.1 – – – – – – –

never use the word ‘password’ do not use your name or the name of anyone you know do not use the name of a pet or any other animal do not use the name of a TV show or character do not use any word at all as your password do not use birthdays, anniversaries or any other dates make sure that your password contains a mixture of letters (at least one capital letter) and numbers – never give your password to anybody! – if you suspect that someone knows your password then change it immediately.

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The first six items on that list are also the first things that any hacker will try when trying to guess your password. Why make it easy for them? When you change your university password make sure that you do not forget the old one as you can sometimes find that different parts of the university computer system will seem to have no idea that you have changed your password and will still expect you to provide the old one. This is annoying but it does happen.

Computer networks Unless your school had a computer network or you have been working in offices or businesses that used networked computers, you will probably have had little to no experience of using them. The key software is usually saved on each individual machine but sometimes you may have to go to a shared network drive (just a different folder on the computer) to find other software. You will probably be assigned network space in which you can save your work and if so you should make sure that you also save a copy onto a disk. Networks can crash and if they do then you will not be able to access any of the information that you have saved on it until the problem has been resolved. This happened to my undergraduate class in the weeks just before our thesis was due in. We had all saved our work onto the network because we had been told to do so and only a few of us had made backup copies on disk. You may find that a networked computer is much faster than you have been used to but if there is heavy traffic on it then it can be quite slow, so be patient. Networks are monitored so you should not attempt to access websites or download software or imagery that would be in breach of university regulations. This monitoring is done by software so do not make the mistake of thinking that if the security cameras can’t see what you’re doing then you are getting away with it. You may find that you are forbidden from saving anything onto the hard drives of the computers in your university, which means that you will have to save it onto an external disk. If you can save to the hard disk of a university computer then make sure that you save a copy to your network storage, your USB key, and/or that you email it to yourself. This is because your file will be freely available to the next people to use that computer, that you will have to go to that same machine to be able to access it or that you may lose it completely if the stored documents are cleared out at night.

Basics of file management I cannot stress enough just how important it is that you save your work very frequently. If you stop to think, to look something up, to blow your nose – anything at all – then save your work. Computers can crash when you least expect it and networks will also go down. In addition, the latest version of Microsoft Word has a really annoying habit of crashing occasionally, usually when you are trying to save your work. Sometimes it’s a crash where it just shuts itself down, sometimes it just starts scrolling rapidly to the top of your document before freezing and other times it just hangs while trying to save; if it does any of these things then know that it wasn’t you. Various versions of

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SPSS (the major statistics package that you will most likely learn to use) have an annoying bug whereby you will think that your work is being saved when actually this is not the case. When this happens your work will be lost unless you select all that you have done, select copy, open an Excel file and paste it into that. You can spot that SPSS is having one of its fits if you keep an eye on the name of your file as it appears in the top left-hand corner of your screen. If the full name of the file is visible then it is saving when you tell it to. If it changes the name to an eight-character file name that contains a ~ symbol, then it is not saving anything (for example, mydataf~.sav). This is one of the reasons why it is recommended that you input all of your raw data in Excel and then copy and paste what you want into SPSS later. If you are going to type something then open Word and immediately save the blank document. When you select ‘save as’ you will have the option of giving the file any name that you want and also to save it anywhere that you want. Use the various drop-down menus provided to save the file onto your disk, rather than onto the university computer. This way you won’t be unable to find it later or forget to transfer it to your disk. The same applies with files that you are creating using any software; save the blank file first in the location that you want and then add your text or data. Get into the habit or organising your computer files from Day One. Do not just save them onto the disk presuming that you will easily find a file when you want it. This will be especially important with your statistics files (see Chapter 7). Create folders with clear titles (keep them short) and place the relevant files into those folders. Give your file a clear name, something short (no more than a few words) that will let you know at a glance what it is about. If you do not choose a name then the computer does it for you, poorly. A blank Word document gets the default (automatic) name of ‘document’, for example, and if it contains any text then the suggested name offered by Word is the first sentence of the text. If you download a journal article from one of the online databases available through your university’s library website (see Chapter 2) then definitely choose a name for it while saving it as quite often the default name is just a number, which is not at all helpful. I usually use a few keywords that let me know what the paper is about or if I have a folder of articles on the same topic then I use the authors and publication year as the file name. It is also a very good idea to start compiling a references database from Day One. You can do this in Word, or any word-processing package, or you can use a standard references database such as EndNote, if you have access to it. References are the full citations of the books, articles and other sources that were mentioned in the text and there is a specific format in which you must produce them (see Chapter 4).

File extensions Quite a few people have asked me what is meant by a file extension, usually after they have been told by someone to change the file extension in an attempt to open the document using a different program. The name of every computer file, from basic lines of codes to complex databases, usually ends in a three- or four-letter KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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extension (it can be fewer or more letters and numbers) and it is this that enables the computer, and the user, to identify the type of file that it is. If you double-click or right-click on the name of the file (not the icon) then you can alter the name of the file, although there is no guarantee that just changing the file extension will enable you to open it with software different to that in which it was created. You do not need to worry too much about this but I have provided a table below that identifies some of the most common file extensions. It can be a help when you are trying to organise your files or when you are trying to identify which files are your Table 1.1 .doc

Some common file extensions

Microsoft Word document of any version before Word 2007

.docx

Microsoft Word document created by Word 2007

.xls

Microsoft Excel spreadsheet of any version before Excel 2007

.xlsx

Microsoft Excel spreadsheet created by Excel 2007

.rtf

Rich text format. Basic text style that can be opened by most notepad or word-processing software

.pps

Microsoft PowerPoint presentation of any version before Office 2007

.ppsx

Microsoft PowerPoint presentation created by Office 2007

.wps

Microsoft Works document – never submit your assignments in this format as they cannot be opened in Word, which is what your lecturer or tutor will have on their computer

.pub

Microsoft Publisher document

.txt

Text file; very basic often plain text often created using Notepad

.sav

An SPSS database

.spo

An output file (i.e. all your statistical analyses) for SPSS

.pdf

Portable document format. They can be created in Microsoft Word if you download the appropriate plug-in file but are most commonly associated with Adobe Reader, which you can download for free. They are created and can be edited in Adobe Acrobat, which is not free

.exe

Executable file. This is a piece of software, a program, and you should only run it if you know what it is. If you receive one in your email do not open it (unless you know what it is and were expecting it) as it may be a virus, worm or trojan

.bat

Batch file; a type of executable file so do not open it if you receive one in your email

.dll

Dynamic link library file. Never delete these as they are a very important part of your computer’s software

.bin

Binary file. Never delete these as they are part of your computer’s system software

.gif

A common picture format

.jpg

Pronounced as jay-peg; this is a common format for pictures

.bmp

Bitmap, a common format for pictures but often a much larger file size than other formats as it may have a much higher resolution

.dot

A Microsoft Word document template. The default settings for Word are saved in a file called normal.dot and if you want to change the default settings you will be asked if you really want to overwrite that file

.wav

A common sound file

.mp3

A common music file

.zip

A compressed file or folder of files that will have to opened in order to access the contents. Often used for fast transfer of large amounts of material via the web

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notes, your journal articles, your dataset or your statistics output. If you come across one that is not listed here (there are thousands of them!) and are curious as to what it is, then check www.file-extensions.org.

USB keys The best way to store your files is on a USB key. A 1GB stick will hold every file for your whole undergraduate degree, all your notes, your essays, your lab reports and the journal articles that you download. Do not rely on just one as they are small and can be easily lost or damaged. It is possible to buy a three-pack of 1GB sticks for around £20–30 (€ 25–35) so do not spend that much on a single one. Brand names are pretty much irrelevant as a memory stick/key is just a stick of RAM within a plastic coat so you are not getting a better one by buying a more expensive one. It is perfectly fine to use one as your main storage unit but do make backups regularly. They are reasonably tough but if you mishandle or step on them then you can break them, so be careful. Any computer made in this century will have at least one USB port.

Email You will be assigned an email address when you register at the start of your first year. You may already have several email addresses but it is very important that you use your university one, as it is to this one that important information about timetables or exams or deadlines will be sent. What you can do, however, is to set your university email account to forward into another account that you have, preferably one that has an almost limitless storage capacity, for example gmail. There will be an option somewhere in one of the menus of your email account so just follow those instructions. It is very handy to have all your email accounts forwarding to a single account, a non-university one, as when you leave the university you will not have to change your email address. For example, you have your university email forwarding to your gmail account. Once you leave university you will no longer be able to log-in to that account but because you set it up to transfer all incoming messages into your gmail account you will continue to receive any messages that anyone sends to your old address. This is particularly useful if you attended or presented at a conference but then left university or moved to a different one. The delegates can still contact you by using your old address and without having to track down your new details. If you are using an email system that shows you when your various contacts are also logged in – for example, in gmail you will see a green blob beside their name – then remember that this means they may be able to see that you are online. Be careful what you put in your status as if one of the people that you have mailed recently is a lecturer and s/he also has this facility on their mail, then your comment may be visible on their page too!

Search engines There is a wide variety of search engines: google, alta vista, cuil and yahoo are some with which you may be familiar. These can be a great source of information but, as KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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we will see in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, you should not use these to help you find information for your essays or lab reports. Anybody can put anything on the web so there will be no guarantee that the material you might find is accurate or up to date. If you do find information on a university website then this will probably be fine but you should really only use the databases that are made available to you through your university library (see Chapter 2). You will know British college or university websites from their web address, which will end with .ac.uk – American and Canadian universities have an address that ends with .edu

Social networking sites You can use your status or set up groups on social networking sites to recruit participants for your final year project (see Chapters 7 and 8) so long as you can obtain the appropriate ethics approval in your university department. However, the ease with which information is available on the web also means that you should be careful about what you put up on the internet. Your status on Facebook, Twitter or MySpace, for example, may be visible to other people in your university and to future employers. Photos that you post online may also be visible to any of your lecturers, tutors or classmates, so do keep this in mind. Do not post material that you would not want them to know. Just last year, for example, there was a publicised case of a young woman who was fired from her job after posting and updating her status on one of the social networking sites saying that her job was boring. I have seen students posting derogatory remarks on these websites about their university department or people in it and this really does not look well if you are hoping to get a good reference from that department and its staff. It also looks bad if you post pictures or comments about drunken or antisocial behaviour. Don’t forget that your lecturers, tutors or potential employers use these sites too.

Blogs Weblogs, known as blogs for short, are a great way to gain experience of setting up and maintaining your own website, without having to worry about learning html code. However, you should be aware that the contents of your blog will be picked up by the main search engines once the blog has been up and running for a while. So be careful about what you post in your blog or in anyone else’s blog. If you have a blog that gains a wide readership then you can use it to help you to recruit participants for your final year project, again so long as you can obtain the appropriate ethics approval in your university department.

Improving your typing skills In this day and age there is a presumption that everybody knows how to type. If you have recently come through the school system or if you have been working in an environment where daily computer use is a requirement then you probably can

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type quite well. However, you may never have had the chance to learn to type if you are a mature student who has either been a stay-at-home parent or who has spent many years working in jobs that did not require computer use. You might find it beneficial to take typing classes but the quickest and cheapest way to learn how to type, or to improve your keyboard skills, is to do it yourself. Everyone differs in what they find helpful; I was bored in typing classes where an instructor marched over and back at the top of the room intoning ‘a s d f ; l k j’ over and over. What I found to be the quickest and most fun way to learn to type was to type up articles in the newspaper or from a magazine. Yes, it is very slow when you begin but you will speed up fairly quickly. It does not matter what fingers you use to press keys and while many will say that you can only build up speed if you use the ‘correct’ typing method (it does help), I have seen media colleagues who are extremely quick two-fingered typists. Use whatever works for you but if your typing skills could benefit from improvement then make the effort.

Using Microsoft Word If you are not already familiar with how to use Microsoft Word then the best way to learn is to experiment with the various options. Word was pretty much the same from its earliest versions to recent ones but it is very different in its 2007 form. In fact it is so different in places that it makes expert users with nearly twenty years’ experience feel as though they are novices. If you have any version of Word that predates the 2007 edition then do not be in a rush to upgrade unless you are prepared to take the time necessary to relearn how to do a lot of quite basic things. Teaching you how to use the various computer packages is beyond the scope of this book. However, what I will show you is some tips on how you can do various things in Word that either cause problems or you might not have used before. I will also show you a list of the keyboard shortcuts for common functions. These are a great tool as they will save you having to click through the various menus and layers to find what you want; they will bring you straight there and instantly execute the command that would have taken several mouse clicks.

Opening a document You may think that this is as basic as it gets but there are three times when just doubleclicking on the name of the file that you want to open does not work, presuming that it is a Word document or another type of text file that Word can read. I have seen students panic when this has happened, particularly if they are suddenly being told that their thesis file cannot be found. –

Too modern: If the file has been saved using Word 2007 and it is in that format rather than in ‘compatible mode’ then you cannot open it in any previous version of Word. This is a very important fact to know as if you have an older version of the software and someone is sending you a file then you must tell them to save it in your format. To save a Word document in a different format choose ‘save as’ and select the type, e.g. Word 97-2003 document.

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Just won’t open: In various versions of Word before the 2007 version it occasionally happens that when you double-click a file to open it it just will not work. If you are sure that your file is a Word document or a file that should be readable by Word then just open Word and then try your document. This should work. Word 2007’s file cannot be found message: In Word 2007 it happens quite often that if you double-click to open a document then it will open Word and give you an error message telling you that your file cannot be found. This is a rather annoying glitch and one that creates panic in novice users. Just try opening it after Word has opened and you will have no problem.

Headers and footers Sometimes students are told that they must put their name and/or student number as a header on the top of every page of their assignment. Many will know how to do this but if you have never had to do it then you may not be aware of how to set up a header and to edit it. In all versions of Word pre-2007 you must go to ‘insert’ and select the option for ‘header’ (or footer if you were told to put it on the bottom of the page; psychology does not use the footnote system). Once the box appears at the top of your page you can just start typing. However, it is likely to appear in a font and size that do not match the rest of your document so you should highlight the text and alter the font so that it matches and alter the size so that it is a little smaller than then main text. In Word 2007 you must go to ‘insert’, select ‘header’ and select ‘blank’, then proceed as before.

Page numbers You should always insert page numbers in your essays and reports, usually at the bottom of the page. In Word 2007 you select ‘insert’, ‘page number’, select ‘bottom of page’, and then select the ‘plain number’ option that places the number where you want it: on the right, the left, or in the middle. If you have a large document that is in separate chapters, or if you want to insert a very large table that will take up a page and you want to design it in a separate document, then you might not want to start on page 1 – you might want to start on page 12. Here you just need to select ‘insert’, ‘page number’, and ‘format page number’ to make your choice. In previous versions of Word you must select ‘insert’ and ‘page numbers’ and everything you might need will be in the one box. You can choose where you want the number to go, where you want it to start, and so on.

Tables In all versions of Word you can create a table by selecting ‘insert’ and ‘table’. You can use the grid to select the number of rows and columns you want, if it is a small table. Alternatively, select ‘insert table’ and choose the number of rows and columns that you want. You should remove the gridlines before printing your document as having lines around every cell of the table looks unsightly. To do this in Word 2007 you right-click on the table, select ‘borders and shading’ and select ‘none’. Inserting and removing rows and columns can be done in a similar way; right-click on the

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table and then select the appropriate option from the drop-down menu. Alternatively, you will find various options for editing tables if you click anywhere in the table (just once) and look in the ‘design’ and ‘layout’ tabs that appear on the top of your screen. Removing gridlines and inserting or removing rows and columns can be done in this way in older versions of Word too, but in those you can also select ‘table’, ‘table properties’, and ‘borders and shading’ to remove the borders. Use ‘table properties’ (in any version of Word) to align the table with the left or right margin or to centre it between the page margins.

Textboxes Sometimes you may want to insert a textbox, for example as a way of making some piece of text stand out (see the ‘Think about this for a moment’ boxes throughout this book) or if you are constructing a model or diagram in Word. In Word 2007 you must select ‘insert’, ‘text box’ and, most usually, ‘simple text box’. You can start typing immediately; it will overtype what is already there. The default setting has an indentation set up so you can drag the lower triangle on the margin (as you would to alter the margins in any Word document) to remove this. To make the text of your document flow around the box (for university work usually just top and bottom rather than wrapping around it) click once in your textbox and then click on the new ‘format’ tab that appears at the top of your screen. Select ‘position’, ‘more layout options’, and ‘text wrapping’ and then click on the appropriate icon. In previous versions of Word you just click once in your textbox, select ‘edit’, and ‘textbox’, press the ‘text wrapping’ tab, and select the icon of your choice.

Dictionary You should always perform a spelling and grammar check on your work and the quickest way to do this is to press the F7 button on your computer. Before you run the check you should make sure that the language set for Word (and your document; sometimes it seems to change by itself) is either English (UK) or English (Ireland) and not English (US). Keep an eye on this while it is doing the check because, for some bizarre reason on what are thankfully rare occasions, the language setting can change mid-check! You will spot this if it suddenly wants you to change the word endings to American-English. Be smart about what the computer suggests as a change as sometimes its suggestion will be incorrect in the context of what you meant or wrote. For example, one time I was writing an article on the history of the Irish Derby (yes, nothing to do with psychology) and Microsoft Word queried ‘Maid Of Athens’. It suggested that the term ‘maid’ was gender-specific and perhaps I should consider using a more neutral term such as ‘servant’. I selected ‘ignore all’ as Maid Of Athens was the name of a horse who had won the race during the nineteenth century. If you are going to type all of your assignments on the same computer then use the ‘add to dictionary’ option while performing your spell-check. It will query the KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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names of theorists or neuroanatomical terms or any terminology that you use but which has not been pre-saved into the dictionary of Microsoft Word. If you are certain that a spelling it queries is correct then add it to your dictionary so that it will not query it in future documents. All versions of Microsoft Word produce those red and green wiggly lines under words or phrases that it thinks are incorrect and while this may be very useful in many working environments, it is very irritating if you are working in an area that contains a lot of terminology that is not included within the computer’s dictionary. You can turn off these wiggly lines (select ‘options’ after you press F7 and untick the boxes for checking spelling and grammar as you type) but do not forget to check your spelling and grammar before you print your essay or report. You should also proofread your documents yourself as the computerised checks can miss a lot of errors, words that are spelled correctly but have been misused or are typos. Even better, you should ask a friend or classmate to proofread it for you. Why? You will learn about how expectations can influence perception when you study cognitive psychology, and it applies here. You wrote the document so you know what it is supposed to say. Sometimes our brain tells us what it should say rather than what it actually says and so we miss what might otherwise have been a really obvious error. If you do not have someone who is willing and able to proofread for you, then try to wait at least a few hours, if not a day or two, before rereading it yourself.

Keyboard shortcuts The first question that I ask someone if I am about to show them how to do anything on a computer is this: are you a keyboard person or a mouse person? Some people prefer to use the mouse for every command while others prefer to use the keyboard commands as often as possible. The table below shows a list of keyboard shortcuts for a variety of common commands. Most of them have been automatically set up in Word 2007 but every one of them works in older versions of Word. Most, if not all, Table 1.2 Some useful keyboard shortcut for use with Microsoft word. Many of them work with other software too! Function

Action with the text

Hold down

Press

create new document

ctrl

n

open

ctrl

o

print

ctrl

p

close

ctrl

w s

save

ctrl

save as

alt

f

quit

ctrl

q

select all

ctrl

a

font

ctrl

d

11

Then

Then

a

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Table 1.2 Function

Action with the text

Hold down

Press

bold

highlight

ctrl

b

italics

highlight

ctrl

i

Then

Then

underline

highlight

ctrl

u

subscript

highlight

ctrl

d

release ctrl button

alt b

superscript

highlight

ctrl

d

release ctrl button

alt p

select text/ highlight to perform an action

place cursor at the starting point

ctrl and shift

down arrow or right arrow

copy

ctrl

c

cut

ctrl

x

paste

ctrl

v

find

ctrl

f

go to a specific page

ctrl

g

find and replace

ctrl

h

insert page number

alt

i

undo last action

ctrl

z

insert page break

alt

i

u b

press OK

repeat last action

ctrl

y

word count (pre-2007)

alt

t

w

change line spacing

ctrl

m

release ctrl button

alt n

left flush

ctrl

l

c

select the icon that you want

right flush

ctrl

r

centre text

ctrl

e

justify text

ctrl

j

start the spelling & grammar check

F7

close a pop-up window in Word

esc

insert columns in the text

alt

i

increase font size

highlight

ctrl and shift

>

decrease font size

highlight

ctrl and shift

<

ctrl and shift

:

change a to ä (works for any vowel)

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of them also work in Word for Macs. You can assign any combination of keys that you like to any command. In Word 2007 you click on the tiny arrow that appears in the title bar (i.e. where the title of your document is displayed); it is beside a group of icons. Click that once, select ‘more commands’ and then select ‘customise’. You will also find, in all versions of Word, that if you press the alt key you will see either individual letters of the words in the drop-down menus become underlined or, in Word 2007, you will see a letter appear in a little box beside each tab on the ribbon at the top of the screen. While those underlines or letters are visible then pressing the corresponding key will activate the command. For example, in pre2007 versions of word you will see the letter F of File become F when you press the alt key. If you press the f key then the drop-down menu for file will appear. Each command in that drop-down menu will also have a letter underlined, as will each item in the tabs or boxes that those commands activate. In Word 2007 if you press the alt key while the Home ribbon is showing, for example, you will see a letter appear beside the name of each of the major tabs on the ribbon (for example, ). If you press p then it will activate the Page Layout tab. However, unless you know or have programmed keyboard shortcuts for the commands that you use frequently, you will have to rely on your mouse much more in Word 2007 than you have had to do in previous versions.

Importing graphs The simplest way to add any picture, chart or graph to your Microsoft Word document is to click in the image, select ‘copy’, then go to your document and select ‘paste’ at the location where you want to insert the item. You will be able to resize the image by using the mouse to grab the bottom right-hand corner of the image and then dragging it diagonally upwards or downwards. If you resize by dragging the bottom, top or sides of the image then you will distort it. If the image that you want to add to your document is saved in its own individual file – for example, you have a bitmap image that you want to add – then just select ‘insert’ and the appropriate option (e.g. picture, clip art, etc.) and then select the item that you want to add. If you choose the option to insert a chart (i.e. graph) then Word 2007 will open an Excel file that has a spreadsheet template set-up for the type of graph that you chose. Just change the details within that to match your figures and the graph that Word added to your document will change to match. If you have already got a graph saved in Excel then just click anywhere in the white area above the legend and select ‘copy’. Then switch back to your Word document and paste in the graph.

Printing options When you are printing essays or lab reports you will print on one side of the page only but if you are printing your own notes then it is a good idea to fit as much as you can onto a single sheet of paper. This will not save you anything on the cost of printer ink but it will save you paper. If you look at the various options available

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under the print command you will find that you can print up to 16 pages on a single sheet. For a Word document you will probably find that putting any more than two pages on a sheet will result in print that is too tiny to read. You will also notice that you can print odd-numbered pages or even-numbered pages only. If you select one of these you can then turn over the printed pages and print the other pages on the back. Printers will differ as to how you reinsert pages that have been printed on one side so that you can print on the other side. Experiment with a test page before sending your whole document to print. If you ask your computer to print two pages to a sheet and you print on the front and back of the paper, then you can put a total of four pages of type onto a single sheet of paper. That will reduce both your costs of buying paper and of printing if you have to pay per page in your university labs.

Unusual or accented characters You will notice that the final item on the shortcuts table shows you how to change the letter a to ä (it works for all the vowels). Of course you may want to use different characters, such as ç, á, ñ, Σ, δ or Ψ, for example. There is a really useful application on your computer called Character Map; it is usually in the accessories menu but if not have a hunt for it as it will be there somewhere. Save a shortcut to this accessory on your desktop or in your start menu so that you can find it easily in future. Set the font to the one that you normally use in your essays or reports and then when you need to use an accented or non-roman character copy it from Character Map and paste it into your document. You may need to alter the size of the pasted character to match the size of the text in your document.

Fractions If you want to type a fraction in Word, say one-third in numbers (in a results section and not in the main text where you will write one-third in full) then type 1/3, select the 1 and superscript it (see the shortcuts table), select the 3 and subscript it. Just make sure that you had at least one character typed after the 3, even just a dot, or else everything you type after the 3 will also be subscripted!

Searching in all of your files You may have lots of Word documents saved on your computer but want to find a specific point or piece of information. You do not need to open each file and search through it as the computer will do this for you! Open Windows Explorer (if the files are on your hard drive) or insert your USB key (if that’s where the files are), click once on the folder in which your documents are saved, and then hold down the ctrl key and press f. This will bring up a search window. You will see a box on the top right-hand corner of this window and in there you will type the word or phrase that you want to find. The search will show you a list of all the files in that folder that contain the word or phrase. Then you can just open each one separately and search within them (by holding down ctrl and pressing f) until you find what you are looking for. KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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Using Microsoft Excel These days students will tend to use mainly word-processing, presentation and statistics packages when studying psychology and maybe also a references database. SPSS is the most commonly used statistics software for psychology and you will be trained on how to input, code and analyse data and how to produce graphs of your results. As a result, students will rarely use Excel in psychology although it does have a very valuable function. If you are going to be using Excel as part of your classes then you will be trained on it so I am not going to give a tutorial here on how it works. However, I will point out a few useful tips.

Central database There is a quirky bug in SPSS whereby your data is not being saved when you think that it is (it is rare, but it happens) and so I always input all of my data straight into Excel. Then I copy and paste the specific variables that I want for my analysis into SPSS. It may sound time consuming but, trust me, it is really annoying when you have been saving your work all day only to find, when you try to shut down the program, that it was only kidding and your work has not been saved. A beauty of using Excel as your central database is that you can keep all your data for the one project (no matter how many subparts it may have) or for a series of related projects in one single easy-to-manage file – a master file, if you like. This is particularly helpful at postgraduate or postdoctoral level! Your SPSS files, therefore, need only contain the variables that are of interest for the particular analysis that you want to perform today or for one specific study. Sometimes it may be weeks or months before you will return to the details of a study that you have performed; maybe you are going to write it up as a paper or poster (see Chapter 9). If you have loads of variables that relate to different but connected studies then you could find your own dataset hard to follow. You may have to submit your raw data file with a lab report or your final year project (also called an undergraduate thesis or dissertation; see Chapter 8) and if you maintained a master file in Excel but copied only those variables that you needed for the single project, then your SPSS file will be much easier to follow for the reader who is seeing your data for the first time.

Coding variables If you are going to adopt Excel as a database then use a column for each variable (because that is the way it is set up in SPSS) and code variables where relevant. This will make more sense to you when you are learning about statistics but, in a nutshell, here is what I mean. Everything must be coded numerically in SPSS in order to be able to perform statistical analyses (as it does in Excel if you are going to perform calculations there). So gender, for example, may be entered in your database as 1 and 2 instead of female and male; the numbers represent the words and the software can only perform calculations on numbers. At the bottom left-hand corner of an Excel spreadsheet you will see some tabs; there are several layers available to

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your database, different pages if you like. You will be entering your data on the top tab. Click on the second tab and make a note on that page that you have coded gender as 1 = female, 2 = male, or however it was that you coded the variable. When you later import the column of figures into SPSS (if you choose to use Excel in this way; many people will just enter their data directly into their statistics package) you will only have to look at your message on tab 2 to know what the numbers mean; then you can tell SPSS how to recognise those numbers. Be aware, though, there is some sort of bug or conflict in programming code in effect between SPSS and Excel when it comes to understanding dates. Even though you might set them up in the same way in both programs, SPSS may transform the dates or just fail to recognise the variable; it is an infuriating situation. I and others I know who use Excel as a main database have not found any other problems other than the dates issue.

Producing graphs It used to be a recommendation to students that you should produce your graphs in Excel or in Word Graph rather than in SPSS as these were better. The most recent versions of SPSS make it easier to edit and format graphs so this is no longer an issue. If you do want to produce a graph in Excel then hold down the control key (ctrl) and left-click once in the very top cell (the one that automatically has a letter in it) of each of the columns that you want included in the graph. Then select ‘insert’ and click on the type of graph that you want. If you want the graph to show, for example, the mean scores (i.e. average) for each group then you will have to include a column on your spreadsheet that has calculated those scores. Simply type the formula in the first cell in that column, for example =SUM(B1:D1)/3, press enter, then copy the contents of that cell and paste it into all the others in the column (down to the last line of data that you have entered). This copies the adjusted formula (not the answer) into each of the cells, so in the next row it would read =SUM(B2:D2)/3. Don’t worry about this formula; if you are going to have to use Excel for calculations you will be taught how to do so in class.

Using Microsoft PowerPoint Everyone associates PowerPoint with giving presentations. You put information on each slide and you can do all sorts of cool stuff like adding sound effects or video clips or fading letters and more. There is lots more that you can do with it and two of the useful applications for students are below.

Producing posters It often comes as quite a surprise to university students to learn that academics produce posters. They are a valuable way of presenting your research at conferences, both public ones and the private mini-conferences that may be organised specifically for your lab class. Use PowerPoint to design your poster, which must be presented KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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within specific guidelines; these are not collages or gimmicky ways of advertising something. See Chapter 9 for details on how to go about doing this.

Producing charts or other images It is likely that you will want to produce charts or diagrams or other types of images to include with some essays or reports. For example, you may be writing an essay for a social psychology class and want to include one of the models that shows how attitudes and behaviour are linked. Or perhaps you are writing an essay for a neuroscience class and you want to show a diagrammatic model of how certain pathways in the brain are structured. If you draw these models, with textboxes and arrows, in Word then each item is a separate thing and so if you were to insert a line of text somewhere above it then your diagram can become distorted. If you draw your model in PowerPoint you can then copy it into Paint (which comes with all computers with Microsoft operating systems) or any other drawing package, save it as a picture, and then paste the picture into your Word document. You can easily resize the image in Word, by dragging the bottom right-hand corner diagonally (so as not to distort the image).

Printing Another useful thing that you should know about PowerPoint is that you can print multiple slides on a single sheet of paper. This may sound obvious to someone who is very familiar with the software but many students will have no prior experience of using PowerPoint and so do not realise that this facility exists. These days many lecturers will make a copy of their PowerPoint presentation available to students some time after a lecture (see Chapter 2 for additional information). You may wish to print out a copy so that you can add your own notes beside each slide, but if you just select ‘print’ and press OK then it will print a single slide on a single sheet; thus a 40-slide lecture would use up 40 pages and you may have to pay to print each page! Here’s what you can do instead: – – – – – –

select ‘print’ under ‘print what’ change ‘slides’ to ‘handout’ this will now bring more options to the front and you will see that it is set to print six slides to a page; you can change this if you select ‘scale to fit paper’ and then the slides may appear a little larger on your printed page than they would have otherwise have done to make sure that it is set to print A4 and not letter (as the default setting may be), click on ‘properties’, ‘layout’, and ‘advanced’, and change the paper size if needed as with Word, you can select to print odd pages and then even pages, so that you can print on both sides of the paper.

Using Adobe software You are probably already familiar with Adobe Reader as any document that you may have come across that is saved in a pdf format will open using that software.

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You can save these files under any name that you like but many people are unaware of how easy it is to search through these documents. If you hold down the ctrl key and press f then a search box at the top of the screen will be highlighted. Type your search terms in there – this could be a single term or name, anything – and then press enter. The document could be thousands of pages long yet in a few seconds it will let you know if the term is contained anywhere within it. If it finds the term but you want to continue the search just press enter and it will move on to find the next occurrence of the search term.

Searching in all of your files You may have lots of pdf documents saved on your computer but want to find a specific point or piece of information. As with Word documents, you do not need to open each file and search through it as the computer will do this for you! Just perform the search the same way.

Editing pdf documents Adobe Reader is free to download and use but, as its name suggests, you can only read documents; you cannot edit them. If you prefer to keep all of your files on a computer rather than printing out journal articles, which can really build up over the course of your degree, then you may want to be able to highlight passages or add notes or comments onto the pdf files. You have a choice here as to what you can do. You can open the file, select all (i.e. hold down ctrl and press a), copy (wait until the progress bar has gone the whole way across), and then paste the contents into a blank Word document. This will eliminate formatting and you may not get any tables and graphs that were in the document but you will have the text. If you want to be able to highlight and make notes on the pdf file in its published format then you will need to buy a copy of the Adobe Acrobat software. You should try the 30-day free trial before making a final decision as to whether or not you want to buy any software package but Acrobat is excellent. It has a wide variety of tools that allow you to make all sorts of additions and edits to pdf files, from highlighting text to adding notes and tags.

Using Moodle, Blackboard (aka WebCT), turnitin.com If you are going to be using Moodle, Blackboard (WebCT) or anti-plagiarism software such as turnitin.com (see Chapter 4 to find out what we mean by plagiarism) then you will be given full training on this in your classes. I am not going to give you a tutorial on these here but I will talk briefly about what these are and why we use them.

Virtual learning environments Moodle and Blackboard are two very popular examples of a virtual learning environment (VLE); there are others too and even Second Life is now being used by KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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some universities as a form of VLE. If you are a full-time day student then you may never encounter any of these excellent teaching tools, although some departments do use them as a supplement. If you are studying via distance education then you may find that you will be spending quite a lot of time online. These tools have a variety of uses. They are effectively private and interactive websites where course materials, assignments, and even actual classes may be available. There may be a general chat room facility set up, discussion forums for specific aspects of your course or for individual assignments, and possibly lots of resources, such as PowerPoint slides, glossaries, links to websites, podcasts, text documents, diagrams, databases, journal articles and more. You may also be allowed to submit your assignments through the VLE, which can then be scanned to detect plagiarism (not by you though), or you may have to take part in discussions or other tasks in order to obtain a course credit. Departments may choose this forum to pass on timetable updates, exam schedules, and other types of information, so if your class or department uses a VLE then make sure that you log in regularly to check for new additions or information. One of my favourite features in Moodle is the glossaries. For example, you might mention the term ‘correlation’ in a message that you post on one of the discussion fora and then notice that it appears as correlation. This means that this term is included as an entry in a glossary on the site and if you click on the highlighted word you are brought to the glossary entry. How cool is that?!

turnitin.com More and more universities are subscribing to websites such as turnitin.com and you may be required to upload a copy of your essays and lab reports to a file that has been set up specifically for your class. You will be shown how to register on the site and you should make a note of your username (usually your email address) and password (of your choice). Your teacher will give you a code and password that represent her/his class and you must use these to ‘register’ for their class. You can then save a copy of your finished essay or report into the folder that has been opened for that assignment (you will be asked to insert your password). The software behind the site then examines your document against all published articles, websites, any essays that have ever been submitted on the site, and also books. It will produce a report for your lecturer and this shows the percentage of your submission that matches other sources. Many of these matches will be completely innocent and lecturers who use the system will know how to recognise this. If your assignment produces a score of under 5 per cent it will often not get a second glance as far as potential penalties for plagiarism are concerned. However, if there is a larger proportion of your assignment that matches other sources you may be penalised and if that proportion is high enough (here the cut-off will vary) then you may fail. Plagiarism is a form of cheating. Do not upload your assignment for one class into a different lecturer’s online class or you may find that you get no credit for the assignment as you failed to submit it correctly and on time.

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Some other useful resources EndNote, ProCite and other reference databases If you have access to reference database software then avail yourself of any opportunity that your university provides for training on them. Your department may not offer any instruction on their use but the library or IT services may do so. Alternatively, you can download the software, usually through your university’s library site, and the instruction manual and try to figure them out yourself. There may be one or more postgraduate students who are willing to give you some guidance on them and it is possible that if several students place a request with their department then a special class or tutorial may be arranged. I am not going to provide a tutorial here on how to use them but if you consult the final section of Chapter 2 you will find brief instructions on how to add citations from library databases into your reference database. So what are these databases? When you are making notes (see Chapter 2), writing essays (see Chapter 4) or reports (see Chapter 8) you must provide citations for every source that you mention or use. You may feel that you are giving your ideas and opinions but what you are doing, except in rare cases, is giving your explanation and interpretation of what other people have done and said and how these points, ideas, and arguments support or refute your position. If you look at the back of this book then you will see what a references section looks like; there are some guidelines on how to write your references provided in Chapter 4. Every time you make a single note from any source that you use then add the citation, in full. Do this from Day One! You should then compile these citations in a database. If you can use EndNote, ProCite or similar software then these will add a link to Microsoft Word and you will be able to get the database to generate the references section of your essays and reports; it’s a great time-saving device. You can also add links to the pdf version of the journal article that you have included in your database so that when you want to consult it again you can just click on that link and it will bring you there. If you do not have access to any of the databases then create your own. Create a Word document and type in your references in the APA format (see Chapter 4). You might decide to create a number of large tables in your document, one for each broad topic, and then paste the individual references into the appropriate table. Then all you have to do when using any of them in your assignments is to copy and paste them from one document to the other.

Online survey tools Research design is discussed in Chapter 7 so I will make just a brief note here on the use of online survey tools; www.surveymonkey.com is one popular example. These tools allow you to put your research questionnaire on the web so that users can respond anonymously. The data will be collated by the site and you can then copy this into SPSS for analysis. Each of these online tools has its own instruction manual and also terms and conditions and you will have to pay to use some of them KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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or features in others. One of the reasons why surveymonkey is so popular is that you can set up a basic questionnaire for free. However, this free access places restrictions on the number of items that you can include in your questionnaire and the number of participants who will be allowed to respond. You may find that the free version of these tools will not allow you sufficient access to meet the requirements of your larger undergraduate projects. Your questionnaire will also have had to have been approved by your supervisor and your department’s ethics committee. Another concern is that you may not be able to target the specific population or demographic that you need for your study; if it’s online then anybody anywhere can respond. Also, you are relying on the honesty of your participants; how do you know that they have not lied or that one person has not answered your questionnaire several times using different demographic details and answers? When it is time for you to start thinking about the design of your individual research project in your final year then check out which sites are active and what restrictions, access or costs issues need to be considered.

Summary People who have been using the various features of computer systems and software packages for quite some time will often forget that novices will not know these things and so instruction or tips may not be provided. Often the best way to learn how to use software is to play with it, try the different functions, and then see what happens – making a note of what works. You will not damage the computer by doing this. This chapter has provided a series of tips and shortcuts for handling computers and their software. Providing detailed tutorials on these is beyond the scope of this book but there are many excellent online tutorials available and many self-help manuals that can provide detailed and step-by-step instructions, so make sure that you have a look at some of them if you want further information on any of these topics.

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2

NOTE MAKING AND STUDY TIPS

Aims This chapter focuses on how to make notes and how to use these to aid your study. You may use a slightly different approach depending on whether you are in a lecture, studying from books and journal articles, or have a disability. You may modify your approach based on your particular learning style and there are also additional factors to consider if you are doing your degree via distance education as many of the situations and cues available to full-time and part-time students are not there for you. By the end of this chapter you should know: • • • • • •

how to make notes (rather than take notes) from various sources how to condense your notes to form a valuable study aid how to identify and make best use of your particular learning style some of the factors that influence your motivation some additional tips for studying via distance education how to search for psychology articles online.

What is expected at university? I am sure that you already know that university is very different from secondary school and in many ways. Classes can be considerably bigger and you might find yourself in a lecture hall with anywhere between 20 to 500 other students, depending on the subject. There is usually little or no individual attention from teaching staff and you could complete your degree studies with some of your lecturers not even knowing your name or realising that you are a student in their department. Some staff may have designated hours in which you can come and talk to them, usually by appointment only, but there is considerably more work involved in being a university lecturer than you may be aware of and so many will not have the time to deal with students outside of class contact hours. You might have the chance to work in small teaching groups of two to 12 students and one staff member, depending on the university in which you are studying, but this may be for just an hour every two weeks. You may find that your lecture, tutorial and lab timetable contains very few class contact hours and that you may even have one or two days in a week

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on which you do not have any classes at all. But please do not make the mistake of thinking that you have little work to do and tons of free time. For every hour of class time that is scheduled you will have to do several hours of independent study and work. Take this into consideration if you are looking for a part-time job during the academic year, as ‘I had to work’ is usually not regarded as a valid excuse for failure to submit work on time or to prepare material for a tutorial. You should also not look for part-time work until after the first couple of weeks of the academic term as tutorials may not be scheduled until then and some class times may change. When it comes to studying you may find that setting up and working in a small study group (no more than six people) helps you or you may prefer to work alone; this is entirely up to you. What you should not forget, however, is that at university you are pretty much on your own when it comes to studying and learning. Guidelines always suggest that you study for several hours every day though the reality is that this is not always possible. It is important that you do your best to keep up with the work so that you will not fall behind or find yourself under greater pressure when it comes to exam time. If an hour or two a day is enough for you to manage this then that is fine, but you may find that an average of 4–6 hours a day will be necessary. Pace yourself and try to make your study time as effective as possible; quality is better than quantity. All too often our study techniques are inefficient and we spend too much time on tasks that are not particularly valuable or we allow ourselves to drift easily into daydreaming. If you follow the guidelines presented here then you may find that you can cover a lot of work in a shorter period of time than you may have required before now. You may be lucky enough to have a good class or set of tutorials on study and essay skills, but is also possible that the teaching in that area may consist of just a handout with instructions of ‘This is self-explanatory so off you go’. In my first undergraduate year everyone was in the dark as there was no guidance whatsoever on essay writing or study skills and the phrase ‘critical evaluation’ never cropped up. A handout with a spider diagram of study plans or an essay structure, which is what I received in my second year, may provide a picture of what you are advised to do but the only way to learn that task is through practical experience with feedback. At university you are expected to organise your own study time, and it is your own responsibility to turn up for class, to do your assignments, to prepare for exams, and to learn. Lecturers and tutors will facilitate this by giving classes and advising on reading lists, but while some will give further assistance to students it is not their job to work with you on a one-to-one level. It is important, therefore, that you adopt a study method that suits you and that works well for you and a major part of this is in developing a good note-making system.

‘Do we have to take notes in this class?’ During my first year of teaching a student arrived one day about 10 minutes after the class had started. Rather than slink in quietly and take a seat at the back of the room she made a rather noisy entrance, flopped into a seat in the front of the room

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and took a couple of minutes to get herself organised. After another few minutes had passed she put up her hand and asked ‘Do we have to take notes in this class?’ As I politely indicated that morning, it is not a requirement that you ever take notes in class as this is something that is entirely up to you. Many people do like to take notes, or will feel obliged to do so, while others will prefer to sit quietly and listen closely to what is being said and then work later from the slides and required readings. However, it is a very good idea that you do make notes at your lectures and classes as you will not remember most of what is said, no matter how good a memory you think you have. That student of many years ago chose to put her head down and go to sleep, which made me wonder why she had bothered to come at all. This was not a good first impression to make and not how you want your lecturers to recognise or remember you. Making notes during lectures has several benefits: – – – –

it makes you pay attention to what is going on it will help you to remember aspects of the lecture when you go back through them later that day the notes will be written down in the order in which the points were raised in the lecture so there will be a structure that will guide you in your reading you will have made a head-start on compiling your notes when you sit down to study the topic yourself.

Note making versus note taking You may wonder what the difference is between note making and note taking or be surprised that I’m saying that there is a difference between the two terms. The major difference is that note making is an active process while note taking is a passive one. You have to think and understand if you are going to engage in note making as you are identifying and making note of the key points. This helps you to learn the material more quickly and also to remember it better. As a result, a good set of notes can reduce the study time needed in preparation for exams. However, if you are just note taking then little thought or understanding is required as you are just copying stuff down as it is. You may think that you’ll just write it down now and probably understand it later on in the year but quite often it doesn’t work that way. Instead you will look back at your notes later in the year and then realise that either you still do not understand what it was all about, that you have little or no recollection of having written any of it, or that you cannot find the information that you want. You may already have developed an effective note-making strategy, depending on the subjects you have studied in the past. If you have done so then congratulations, you are likely to adapt quickly to studying and working at university. You are used to thinking about the material that you are hearing or reading, identifying the key points and sources, and then jotting them down in your own words and with the appropriate citations added. Your notes will probably be in a clear format that you can follow easily, they are likely to be well-structured and well-organised, thereby making it easy to find the information that you are looking for at a later date. Good notes will also enable you to identify, further on in the year, those extra points of KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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material that you could include on a topic in order to develop your knowledge and perform better in the exams. If your method of study has involved note taking then you should modify it for university. The time to start learning the material that is in your notes is while you are making them. But if you are just taking down information without thinking about it and without making a concerted effort to understand and remember it, then you are not engaging actively with the content. I know that when you are new to a subject you may feel that you do not know enough yet to determine what is important and what is not. After all, the person who wrote the book that you are studying for your class must have felt that all of the information was of sufficient importance to be included. Indeed, this is true. However, you will not be writing a book for your classes but essays (see Chapter 4), reports (see Chapter 8) and exam answers (see Chapter 6). These will typically be in the region of 1000 to 5000 words and so you will need to be able to get straight to the point. If you have identified the key points in your reading and made notes on them then you will be more likely to remember the material the next time you view it. I will talk about how to do this below. It is also a very good idea that you organise your notes and that you keep them for future years as material that you covered in first year will crop up again in subsequent years of your degree. After that you may be tutoring as a postgraduate student and being able to refer back to your undergraduate notes can be a great help. All too often I hear of students throwing out all their notes and selling their books at the end of each year and that is a pity. I understand that if you need the money you may need to sell your books but if you can hold on to them then do so, at least until you finish your degree. You will often find them a handy resource or refresher course when taking more advanced modules later in your degree and also a valuable aid if you become a tutor as a postgraduate.

Lectures and classes It is essential that you attend your scheduled lectures and classes as these will highlight the key points to be considered in the topics that are being presented and they will also offer guidance as to some of the academic sources you can read for further information. Individual lecturers might also give hints as to the topics that may come up on the exams or stress a specific angle that you should consider. If you do not attend the class then you will miss this. Yes, many lecturers do put up a copy of their slides on the local university network, if this facility is available in your university, but you should not try to rely on these. Many of the slides will contain just brief bullet points, some of which are just a single word or term; they are very brief notes. However, unless you know the context into which they can be placed, what the different terms mean, and have enough information so you could talk briefly about each one if asked to do so, then just the lecturer’s bullet points will not be sufficient to work from as your only lecture notes. If you were not at the lecture you will miss this and as everyone has their own way of making notes and often their own shorthand style of writing at speed (abbreviate words, don’t write them in full),

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you should not rely on using a classmate’s notes. Can you be sure that they did not miss key information, that they took stuff down correctly, or that you will even be able to read what they wrote? If the slides are to be made available to students this will usually be in the hours or days after the lecture. Some lecturers will make their slides available in advance but many will not. This may be to discourage students from making the mistake of thinking that once they have the slides they do not need to attend the lecture, but it may also be because the lecturer is finishing or amending the slides until the night before the class. Psychology is a dynamic subject and a good lecturer will always make sure that their lectures are up to date. If you are dyslexic, legally blind, or have another disability then you may be entitled to receive a copy of the slides before the class, even if they are not being made generally available until afterwards. Talk to your disability services contact as well as the lecturer. If you are to receive an advance copy then it is most likely that the slides (usually a PowerPoint presentation) will be emailed to you so that you can print them out. If you are just trying to write down everything that the lecturer says or has on their slides then you are taking notes rather than making notes. This is a passive process in which you can almost engage in automatic pilot mode. Why? It does not require thought and indeed it is possible to drift off slightly into daydreaming mode while doing this. Yes you will have to be listening to what the lecturer is saying if you are going to write it down, but if you are worried about what word follows the previous one then you are not actively listening to the content and context of what is being said. If you are not actively thinking about what it is that you are doing then you may find yourself looking back at your notes and asking yourself ‘What on earth is all this about?’ Many students will find that in first year, or even in all the years of their degree, they feel that they have to write everything down, despite knowing the difference between making and taking notes. It requires a certain degree of confidence to listen carefully and just jot down key points and key ideas, noting any references or citations that were mentioned in the lecture. A lot of the information will be on the slides, in some form or other, but many lecturers will also include a lot more information in their talk than appears on the screen. If you have a question during the lecture you should make a note of it but also wait – do not interrupt the speaker! The answer may be on the next slide or about to be presented in the next few minutes. Many lecturers will pause at various points during the class to ask if there are any questions on one part before moving on to the next but others will only take questions at the end of the class; these times are when you should speak up. You may ask yourself ‘What is the harm in asking a question in a class?’ However, often it is not just one question as other students will take the opportunity to jump in with their queries too, often ones that would have been answered by just waiting for a few more minutes. If one question triggers a flood or if one or more people keep interrupting every few minutes then there may not be time to complete the lecture. Unlike in school we do not pick up where we left off at the next class, which may not be for another week. Instead we just move on to the next topic as time is limited and there is a considerable amount of information KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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to be covered. If it’s been covered in the slides, even if interruptions prevented the material from being discussed in class, then it still has the potential to appear on the exam, along with any recommended or required readings.

Writing notes in class So how would you go about making notes at a lecture? The first thing to remember is that there will be at least one chapter of the required textbook that is associated with the class so all the detail that you need to get you started will be in that. You will usually know in advance what topic is to be covered in the lecture so it is a good idea to have read the chapter before attending. The lecturer will show slides and if you are going to be able to get a copy of them later then there is no point in writing down anything that is on them. Instead you can jot down the gist of what that lecturer said while slide 1 was up, then slide 2, slide 3 and so on. As I’ve already said, there will often be information that the lecturer will give that is not on the slides. So if you listen to her/him and note what they stressed or what was said that was not on the slide, then you have obtained extra detail that you would otherwise have missed. This might have been merely a digression but it could also have been something very important, an additional reading or way of thinking about the topic or perhaps a hint that this particular topic would make a nice exam question and if it was to appear on the paper in May then here is an example of what might be asked. If a lecturer does give such a hint they are not giving you the actual exam question so do not make a fuss because it did not appear on the paper. However, some lecturers will do this to stimulate your thinking as to how you might approach a topic. I have often done this in lectures, occasionally offering two or three different suggestions as to how a topic might be approached in an exam (I will not put these on slides so if you’re not there you miss out), and I have noticed three different ways in which students respond. Some are so focused on writing down what is on the slides that they probably did not hear me; certainly they show no sign of having heard what I said. Others nod and smile but do not write anything down; most of them are unlikely to remember it later. Then there is the third group who nod and smile while making a note of what I have said and mark it NB or highlight it or make some other notation in the margin. Some of that latter group have commented, after their exams, that they found the suggested possible questions given during the lectures to have been very useful when they were studying the topic later. To summarise, here is the suggested approach to note making in lectures and classes, presuming that you will have access to a copy of the slides afterwards: – – – – –

write down the name of the topic and the date (for ease of filing) note the chapter(s) associated with the topic speed-read each slide as it is projected to get a gist of the key terms do not copy down what is on the slides as you will have them later listen carefully to what the lecturer is saying and associate it with each individual slide. For example, you could write (1), to indicate that this was the first slide, and then jot down a few key points that the lecturer made.

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Ideally you should review your lecture notes later the same day while the class is still fairly fresh in your mind. Go through each slide and read the associated piece of the chapter in your textbook. Then produce an expanded set of notes based on the combination of lecture notes, slides and textbook. Some people like to draw a line down the centre of the page while making notes in a lecture, writing on one side of the line only and then using the space on the other side to add in the additional info later. My personal preference was always to redo the notes later and type them up. I would do this because my handwriting is quite large and I would find it very messy and unclear if I tried to squash all the extra material into such a small space. By typing up the combined notes later it also meant that I could print out multiple copies so that I could easily add the notes from one lecture to the file for another class that touched on the same topic. Another benefit to having typed up the notes was that I could easily add in extra information at any time without having to squash it in somewhere or draw arrows leading to boxes or having to rewrite the whole page or tack it on out of sequence. Only you can know what will work for you but do give it some thought and see if you can improve on the method that you have been using up to now.

Recording lectures Some people like to record a lecture so that they can listen to it again later but if you are considering doing this then be honest with yourself: are you really going to sit down somewhere and listen to the whole thing again and make notes this time around? Where would you plan on doing this? You cannot do it in the library as you will be disturbing other readers and many university libraries have strict policies about the use of mp3 players or other devices. By the time that you get home for the evening you are likely to be tired or have a lot of reading to do or maybe an essay to finish, so are you really going to take the time to replay the lecture? If you are thinking about recording the lecture in order that you can make better notes later then I would recommend against it as your time would be better spent reading the textbooks and the additional academic sources that will further your knowledge of the topic. If you are planning to record lectures because you have a disability that makes it difficult for you either to get to the lectures or to be able to make notes during them, then by all means record the class but you should also have somebody make notes for you. If you contact your university’s disability services then they can usually arrange this. But whatever your reason for choosing to record the class it is important that you ask the lecturer’s permission to do so; most will not have a problem with this. Some universities now offer podcasts of lectures but you should not presume that your classes will be included in this, or if they are, then you should not rely on these instead of going to the lecture. These are useful if you missed the class because you genuinely could not be there but they are not a reason not to attend. Indeed if nobody was to turn up for the class because they all decided to download the podcast later, then there would be no class and everyone loses. By all means do make use of the podcast system if it is available to you but, as I asked with regard to KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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recording of the class, are you really going to have the time, or be able to take the time, to listen to it by yourself and make your notes then?

Other methods – if you cannot write for the duration Most people will choose to write their notes by hand in a lecture and, indeed, most students will do this automatically. But not everybody is able to write notes during class, and I do not mean that they just do not know how to do so. There are many students who have disabilities, visible or hidden, that make it physically difficult or impossible to scribble notes for the duration of a lecture. Maybe you have arthritis or carpal tunnel, for example, or you have another type of deformation or injury to the structure of your hand or fingers that makes it difficult for you to hold a pen or to write for extended periods. Perhaps your writing hand is in plaster or you have a prosthesis and you are not very adept at writing with your other hand. Or maybe you’ve had an accident and broken both of your arms; this has happened! If this is something that is permanent or is going to be problematic by exam time, then do contact your university’s disability services immediately to arrange exam accommodations or any assistance that may be available to help you with lectures or in libraries on campus. If the problem is not something that will require assistance in lectures, even though you may require accommodations for exams, then there are some strategies that you can try for making notes in lectures. There may be other ideas that you can think of, or your university’s disability services may have some alternatives for you, but these are ones that I and others I know have tried and tested. –

–

–

Speak to your lecturers before your first class with them. Tell them that you have a difficulty and ask if you may have a copy of their slides in advance, even on the morning of the lecture (in case they are editing or finalising them the night before). Jot down bullet points on the printed copy of the slides. Bring your copy of the textbook with you, turn to the chapter that is associated with the lecture, and highlight the terms or points that the lecturer covers in the class. Jot down any terms that appear to be extra, or that you cannot find at that moment, and also note any suggestions that the lecturer may make about additional reading or potential exam questions. If you have a laptop bring it with you but make sure that the battery is fully charged (there may not be any power sockets available to you) and that you have the volume muted; bleeps, boings, quacks and other noises will not be appreciated during the lecture. It is also extremely rude if you surf the web or check your email during class and it is most definitely not appreciated if you surf in order to find ‘helpful bits and pieces’ to share with the lecturer during the class or to find the answers to questions that are posed to stimulate thought before the next point is made! So if you are going to use a laptop in a lecture it must be quiet and used only for typing your notes. If you have a desktop computer at home or in your accommodation but you do not have a laptop then there is a comparatively inexpensive alternative. Get a PDA, for example a Palm Vx or more recent model (new or secondhand), for which word processing software and a separate qwerty keyboard are available (they usually have to be bought separately). Make sure that your PDA is fully charged, attach it to the keyboard, and hey presto – a cheap laptop that folds up and fits in your pocket! When you get home you can synchronise your PDA with your computer and it will copy all of your notes on to the desktop. Sometimes this software will

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also include a PDF reader and so you can download journal articles or book chapters onto your desktop, save them onto your PDA, and then take them with you to read anywhere – very handy if you are not able to carry books or bundles of articles around with you. Some mobile phones will also have these functions but the tiny keys make it difficult to build up speed (particularly if you have a problem with your hands) and, also, you will have to sit at the front of the lecture hall and let the lecturer know what you are doing so that neither s/he or your classmates think that you are just being rude and texting in class. Another strategy that minimises the strain on your hands is to use only bullet points. Just listing them in the order in which they cropped up can lead to confusion when you read back over them later, as they will lack context and they may create the false impression of there being a linear dimension to the material. However, if you use something like a spider diagram/mind map/flow chart type of structure it will help. This does not have to be in any particular formal style, just whatever helps you. Some students to whom I have spoken have said that they prefer to use their own structure, as applying the more formal styles leave them trying to remember how to lay them out rather than concentrating on the content of the lecture. You might simply put a heading at the top of the page and then create a box around each group of terms or points that related to a slide but were not on it, effectively making up a second batch of slides. Or you might choose to put the name of the topic in a circle in the middle of the page and draw lines from this to other bubbles in which you will put key terms, citations or points or headings, with more bubbles extending from them. This way, when the lecturer mentions something that applies to a point that was made earlier in the lecture, you can just add it to that box or bubble. This type of approach can also be very effective as a revision tool for exams as you can condense a lot of information into a single sheet (see the NETTACT approach below).

Books and journals There will almost certainly be a specific textbook that you will be expected to work from for each subject and this will be an excellent place for you to begin your study. But introductory textbooks are only the starting point; unlike like many school subjects they do not represent the sum total of what you are supposed to know. Read similar chapters from other textbooks (this also helps you to become more familiar with the basics while not having to reread the same chapter over and over, which can get rather boring or lead to a false sense of knowing the material when you are only recognising that you have read it before) and also some journal articles so that you can broaden your knowledge. There is a lot of reading that we are supposed to do as students and sometimes we may feel that time is of the essence so we should just get stuck in to writing notes from page one of the document. However, arguably the most effective way to study a chapter or article is to use what Rowntree (1976) called the SQ3R approach. The steps are as follows: 1 Survey: Skim through the chapter or article to get a sense of what it is about. Do not write anything down at this stage. Look at headings, the introduction (which may include the stated aims or findings), and the summary. If the chapter has glossary items at the end of it then have a look at these to get an idea of the terminology that is going to appear. 2 Question: Ask yourself some questions about the document and jot these down. What do you think it is going to be about? Does it sound like it is going to be useful or relevant to what you

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are supposed to be studying? What sort of things might it talk about? What questions pop into your mind when you look at the title, headings, introduction and glossary? 3 Read: Read through the document, quickly but attentively, but do not write anything. You want to get a sense of what it is about and you may decide to read it through two or three times. 4 Recall: Jot down what you can remember. What were the key points or arguments that were presented in the chapter and how were they demonstrated? Were there any major studies, models or theories discussed? Were there any major figures in psychology discussed? Did the same author crop up several times in the citations? 6 Review: Repeat the first three steps to make sure that you have not left out anything important and that you have recalled the material correctly. It is at this stage that you can tidy up your notes or put a final structure on them.

It is very important that you add citations to your notes. What sources did you use? What book or article made the statement or argued the point? Whose theory or model is it? You may have written your notes in your own words but these are not your own ideas; you are merely noting your understanding or somebody else’s work and you must credit that work. If you have included a direct quotation from a source in your notes then you must also make a note of the page number from which it came. For example, if you made a note that I said ‘It is very important that you add citations to your notes’ you would have to make a note that this quotation came from McGee, S. (2010). Key Research and Study Skills in Psychology. London: SAGE. page 31. If using this citation in an essay or report you would put the quotation between inverted commas, put (McGee, 2010, p. 31) in the main body of the text and the full citation in the references section at the end of your document. If you do not provide full citations in your assignments then you may find yourself being penalised for plagiarism and that could lead to a fail grade. See Chapter 4 for details on how you should lay out your references and for information about plagiarism.

The 6 W’s model Many students have expressed their concern that they do not know how to identify what is important to include in their notes and what information they could leave out. You will find that avoiding the trap of getting bogged down under the tyranny of information becomes an easier decision to make as you move into the later stages of your degree. However, I always give the following tip as a quick guide to help students develop that skill; I call it The 6 W’s. Ask yourself these six questions and seek quick answers to them every time you want to make notes, analyse an academic source (see Chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion), study, or write an essay, lab report or exam answer. – – – –

WHOSE: theory, model, approach, or research are you examining? WHAT: is it about, what does it say, what does it mean, suggest, or imply? WHEN: was the theory, model or approach developed, when was the research conducted? WHERE: was the work developed, conducted, and/or published?

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WHICH: methods were employed in recruiting participants, in designing the model, questionnaire(s) or study, in conducting the work, and in analysing the data? WHY: is this theory, model, approach, or research important and why have other academics commented on it or used it in their own work?

Condensing your notes If you have been making notes throughout the year then you will find that by the time it comes to the exams you have a lot of paper to go through. You might decide to prepare six topics for the exam on one subject but have got about a lever-arch folder’s worth of notes. Some of the information contained within this folder will be ‘old news’ at this stage of the year, things that you wrote down as you encountered them for the first time but which are now redundant because you have become so familiar with these. If you were really enthusiastic and read loads of articles and books then you might have a great deal of information on some points but you will not be able to cover it all in the exam. You may have to be selective and put aside some of the details that you have gathered but with practice you can condense all of your information so that you have just a single A4 page for each topic; a good friend of mine can condense a topic onto a single small filing card! You may already be familiar with this strategy or perhaps you are thinking wow, there’s no way I could condense a whole folder down into a few pages! The process of doing this may take you anything from several hours to a few weeks to complete, depending on the amount of information that you have collected and how much of it you already know. Here is my suggestion as to how you can go about doing condensing

Theme 1: *point 1 *point 2 *point 3 *point 4 *point 5 *citation 1, citation 2, citatiion 3, citation 4

Theme 2: *point 1 *point 2 *point 3 *point 4 *point 5 *citation 1, citation 2, citatiion 3, citation 4

Theme 3: *point 1 *point 2 *point 3 *point 4 *point 5 *citation 1, citation 2, citatiion 3, citation 4

Theme 4: *point 1 *point 2 *point 3 *point 4 *point 5 *citation 1, citation 2, citatiion 3, citation 4

Name of the topic

Theme 5: *point 1 *point 2 *point 3 *point 4 *point 5 *citation 1, citation 2, citatiion 3, citation 4

Theme 6: *point 1 *point 2 *point 3 *point 4 *point 5 *citation 1, citation 2, citatiion 3, citation 4

Figure 2.1 This shows how your final one-page study sheet might be structured if working with the NETTACT approach (you would have one of these sheets for each topic that you plan to cover for the exams) KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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your notes to a single page per topic and then how to make use of this valuable study aid (the NETTACT approach):

Box 2.1:

The NETTACT approach

1 Notes: Collate all your notes on a single topic. 2 Exam papers: Collate all recent exam questions on that topic from both main exams and the repeat papers (also called supplemental exams). 3 Themes in the exams: Identify the themes (contexts, buzz words) that appear in the past questions and how these themes are examined (see Chapter 6). 4 Themes in the course: Go back to your lecture notes on the topic and the chapter in the main textbook and identify the themes that were covered and, if applicable, the angle that was taken or stressed in discussing them (particularly important with regard to the lecture notes!). 5 Association of ideas: Go back through your notes and associate the points, studies, citations, etc. with each of the individual themes. Make new and brief notes (bullet points) with each theme on a separate page. If you find that you have very little to put on any page then do the additional research now! 6 Chart your notes: Take a single sheet of paper and put the name of the main topic in a circle in the middle. If you identified six different themes, for example, then draw six lines extending from the circle and put a box at the end of each line (see Figure 2.1). In this box write the name of the theme and, very briefly, add the key points that relate to it and in an order that would be appropriate for answering an essay question on the topic. For studies just put in the citation and no other details; these are in your longer thematic notes. 7 Talk about them: This chart is your study page and you should take a few minutes, on a frequent basis or every day during the exam season, to go over the sheet and see if you can talk about each one of the bullet points that you have written there. What do they mean? How do they relate to the theme? How would you define the key terms? What are the theories or models about? How do they look (if they have diagrams in your original notes)? What are the studies you have cited here actually about? What are the key arguments and supporting evidence? If you do this frequently then you will become very familiar with the content and while you are talking about the various points (alone and either out loud or to yourself) you may find that ideas, practical applications, links to other topics on your courses, or a sudden understanding of something that was a little hazy may all come to you. If so you can make the necessary addition to your study page. Whenever you get stuck then refer back to your thematic notes but the idea is that you are engaging in active processing of the material and with as few cues as possible; this helps with recall in the exam. You may also find in the exam that you can almost visualise your study sheet and you might decide, after breaking down the exam question (see Chapter 6), to jot down what you can remember of the relevant part of your chart as rough work.

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Learning styles There are many different theories of learning and models of the different ways in which people learn, but to go into them here would be an unnecessary digression as the focus of this book is on giving you tips on how to do stuff in a practical way rather than presenting an overview of the various academic theories that try to explain what it is that you are doing. In a nutshell, there are four basic styles by which we study and learn and different people will be more effective at different ones. These styles are by seeing, hearing, reading and writing, and doing, or as described by Fleming and Mills (1992), these are visual, aural, read/write, and kinaesthetic (VARK).

Think about this for a moment. Which do you find the easiest approach to learning how to do something? Is it by seeing how it’s done, hearing about how it’s done, reading and writing about it, or by actually doing it?

If you think about this you will probably find that the answer is that it depends on the situation. For some tasks we need to see something being done in order to be able to do it ourselves. For other tasks it is enough to hear the information, maybe once or maybe many times, and we will have acquired the knowledge. Many tasks, however, require practice and direct hands-on experience to be able to master them but often we will use a combination of all three. Writing essays, analysing journal articles, and writing reports are three essential academic skills that almost always require the kinaesthetic approach; practice makes perfect. Well, at least practice makes for better performance.

Visual Material that is presented visually will include symbols, pictures, charts, graphs, and any other non-verbal visual techniques. My training on essay writing did not happen until the second year of my degree course and it was presented as a one-page handout that contained a diagram resembling a flow-chart and the verbal instruction ‘That’s all you need to know, just follow that and you’ll be fine’. Somebody who has a very visual style of learning may have found this limited training to have been extremely effective. Even so, the likelihood is that even highly visual learners will need some more instruction than this for some tasks. You may see planes flying every day of the week but not have worked out how it is that they stay in the air. We tend to use a mixture of all four styles of learning to master some tasks and so combining elements of all of them can be effective as both a teaching tool and a study methodology. In my experience as a professional writer, student and teacher, written analyses and lab reports are two of the skills that most people seem to find require a combination of the read/write and kinaesthetic approaches to be able to go beyond the basics. When it comes to something like setting up a computer or KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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D.I.Y. then a visual approach may be very effective, as you may find that it helps to be able to see how something is done rather than to hear about it or to try to figure it out on your own. If you can learn best through use of a visual style then you will probably find that it is easy to follow the various models that come up in psychology. You may also find it helpful, therefore, to apply colour or diagrammatic structures to your notes and so might use spider diagrams, mind mapping, flow charts or the NETTACT approach. You may even find that you can almost visualise where something is in your notes or a book as you try to recall the information, right down to the fact that the point you want is on the lower right-hand corner of page 17, beside the photograph of the child playing with the ball. If you can do this then make use of it and add visual components to your note making and studying. One visual technique that some students find to be particularly helpful is the ancient Method of Loci approach. This is where you choose a location, say a building that you know well, and then place the key pieces of information in specific places within it. For example, you might place the key components of a particular academic model spread out on the dining room table so that when you visualise that table you can also visualise the information sitting on top of it.

Aural/auditory Now that you are at university you may have had to move to a new town or city. Have you managed to find out where everything is yet? Have you succeeded in finding your way around the campus? If so, then how? Did you find your way by wandering around looking at road signs, street names and maps, and trying to build up a visual impression of the area, i.e. by applying a visual style of learning, or did you just ask for directions? Some people find that they will remember something much better if they can hear it being spoken aloud than if they just rely on looking or reading. If this is the case for you then you probably use a more auditory style of learning. Of course, as I’ve said, you probably use all three styles in different situations or even a combination of the three in any one setting. However, just as some people find that they cannot learn something through hearing it alone and that they must see it or do it, others will find that they absolutely must hear it aloud to be able to remember the information. If you have a predominately auditory style then you may find that you will remember much more of what was actually said in a lecture than will other students who were more focused on reading the slides and making notes. You may find that the process of making notes in class is distracting and that you will learn more by listening intently and then making your notes later; I have come across several students who do this. You may also find it helpful to download podcasts of lectures, both from your own university and from other universities, or to record yourself reading the textbook, notes or articles and then to play them back from time to time. You might find that the more times you hear something the more likely you are to remember it, but that you could read something 100 times and never be able

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to recall it as accurately. If this is you then you might also find that it helps to associate sounds with information, for example you might find it helpful to play a particular song or piece of music while studying the chapter on attitudes and then to imagine this tune playing when trying to recall the details. Just don’t start singing, whistling or humming in the exam!

Read/write When I started in my first job I was handed a bunch of articles in a very particular format from a specialised field and told ‘Read through those – that’s what you’ll be doing’. So ended my training-up on a task that was to form a major part of my job. My early attempts were rather stylised but with practice I found that I could inject my own flair into the required format. When I started university my training on writing lab reports was to sit in a room with about a dozen of my classmates and have someone fire a bunch of lab reports across the table and say ‘Have a look through those – you’ll have to write reports like that’. I noted the section headings but that was not enough to enable me to pick up on the nuances of report writing and to obtain first class honours on them (see Chapter 6). Many tasks can be learned quite well by utilising a read/write approach only, but to take some of them to the next level of expertise, for example essay writing, many of us will require the use of other styles too. A large proportion of the people in academia will have an effective read/write style of learning, a preference for dealing with information that is in the printed word. If you have a mainly read/write learning style, on some or all types of tasks, then you may find it helpful to rewrite your notes many times, to write lots of sample essays or rough outlines to past and sample exam questions. You may find that your lectures or books on statistics are very confusing and that you can only come to grips with the material by doing the tests over and over again. If this is you then perhaps you should not submit the first finalised draft of your essays or reports but should aim to have those ready several days in advance so that you can fine-tune or even redo them. I know that many of us announce our good intentions of doing this anyway yet still manage to leave it until the last possible moment.

Kinaesthetic Practice, practice, practice. For many tasks in life we will learn through doing, whether it is a child learning how to tie a shoelace, a student learning how to write an academic essay, or a pilot learning to fly a jet. There are many tasks for which looking at diagrams, reading about how they are done, watching someone else doing them, or simply listening to the instructions will get us no further than a low to moderate level of performance. Many of these tasks are things that appear deceptively easy when we see them being performed or hear about what is involved. Yet when we try to do them ourselves we realise that there is so much more involved. Perhaps there are eye–hand co-ordination skills or cognitive skills or muscle development KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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required but which we do not yet possess. In all my years of teaching I have only encountered about three students who were able to produce a first-class essay at their first attempt, having just heard about how to do it and then followed my handouts (a combination of aural and read/write styles). For others learning to write a first-class essay was a process that required practice and the development of their skills through writing more and more essays and paying close attention to the feedback they received. The students who nailed it on the first attempt may have had extensive experience and practice of essay-writing before coming to study psychology at university although I know that for at least one of them this was not so; her aural and read/write learning skills were sufficiently good to produce the desired result in a single try. For most of us, however, we will develop our expertise at writing reports, analysing academic sources (see Chapter 3) and writing essays mostly through a combination of the aural, read/write, and kinaesthetic approaches.

Motivation You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. It’s a cliché but it is very true and it also applies to studying. You have probably chosen to study psychology because it is something in which you have a great deal of interest so working up the motivation to study should be easy. Right? Not necessarily. Having a strong interest in the subject matter is a great place to start but we all have lots of other things going on in our lives that can divert or reduce our motivation. There are lots of academic theories about the subject of motivation but while they may be interesting they are not going to spur you into action when you really don’t feel like writing that essay. What you need to do is to identify the things in your life that increase and decrease your motivation levels and then figure out how you can use that selfknowledge.

Think about this for a moment. What affects your motivation? Make a list of the things that improve and reduce your motivation and see if you can come up with any ideas about how to use this self-knowledge.

The following are some examples of things that students have identified as being likely to affect their motivation at any particular time. Some may be seemingly insurmountable hurdles but if we cannot get over these obstacles maybe we can find a way to go around them. Decreased motivation: – – – –

tiredness fear of failure fear of success low self-esteem or confidence

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– – – – – – – – – – – – – –

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dislike of the task or subject dislike of the lecturer or tutor not really understanding the task or subject feeling overwhelmed by the workload feeling like we’re missing out on something fun background noise (e.g. noisy neighbours or children) too hot or too cold lack of a sense of time pressure stress depression hormonal fluctuations illness pain relationship difficulties.

Increased motivation: – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

good mood positive mental attitude fear of failure desire for success sense of achievement high self-esteem or confidence liking for the task or subject liking for the lecturer or tutor anticipation of a reward when it’s finished desire to beat a fellow classmate music a sense of time pressure relaxed exercise talking to a friend chocolate.

Decreased motivation hits us all at some time or another and sometimes it can be so strong that it is almost paralysing. You feel as though you can’t do anything and that you are ambivalent about the task that has to be done; you really want to get it finished but at the same time you never want to look at it again. There are many factors that can reduce motivation and some of them are things that we just have to ride out. Most of them, however, are things that make us procrastinate about doing something and we can deal with this if we want to. The trick can be to find something that will boost your mood and also, though not necessarily, your motivation for the undesired task. Maybe sitting in a particular chair helps you or listening to a particular piece of music. Maybe burning incense or scented candles works for you, or perhaps wearing a particular item of clothing, going for a run, or watching a favourite television programme. Promise yourself a reward for when you finish the task. Do what works for you, even if you have no idea as to why it is that it helps; the why is not important. KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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Distance education Most guides to studying are written with the apparent assumption that all students are full-time, or perhaps part-time night students, who attend regular lectures and have easy access to a variety of facilities, including libraries or computer labs. But there are also thousands of students who are working on their qualifications via distance education and this presents different challenges. A distance education student does not have lectures, coffee breaks with classmates, long hours to spend in the university library, lecturers and postgraduates to consult whenever they feel like it, and the luxury of being just a student. If you are taking your degree in this way, perhaps through the Open University or through Oscail, then your experience of being a university student will be very different to that of someone studying on a full-time basis or at night. The course book provided to you is your course of lectures and the tutor to whom you are assigned is your major contact, albeit via email. You will have a series of face-to-face tutorials for each module that you take but you may not be able to get to them. Many students find that they cannot get to the tutorials as they may live hours away and might have to arrange for a babysitter on top of the financial cost of the petrol, buses, trains, taxis or even the air-fare needed to get there. There may not be a library of any sort in your area and you may not have a quiet place in which to study. However, from personal experience of distance education, both as the tutor and as a student, I can offer the following advice, on top of all the rest that is provided throughout the book.

Acquiring reading materials Don’t worry if there is no library in your area as quite likely it will not have most of the psychology books that you need anyway. You can order the core textbooks that you require from www.thebookdepository.co.uk or www.amazon.co.uk or similar websites. You may be able to find some of them via eBay or in secondhand bookshops in the nearest university town, or you might find that students who have already completed the modules you are taking are willing to sell you their books. Most of your additional reading should be in journal articles and you can access these from the comfort of your own home. The university with which you are registered will have a subscription to online journals (see below) and you will have been given a username and password that allow you to access these. You can download them, save them onto your computer, or print them out; it’s up to you.

Working with the course units If your best learning style is visual then you will find it fairly easy to work from these and you will also have the benefit of being able to go through your lectures as often as you like, which other students can’t. If your learning style is auditory then record yourself (or someone else) reading the units and listen to them whenever you have the chance. I have spoken to several distance education students who did

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this anyway so that they could listen to the unit (i.e. lecture) on an mp3 player while doing the housework or on their lunch break or while commuting. You may or may not be given a timeline for progressing through the units so at the start of the year you should survey what is being covered and what is required in the TMAs (tutor marked assignments). Usually you will start at unit 1 and work your way through, doing one or two units a week, but you may have to change the order to suit the assignments. Of course you are free to leave out some units or to study them in whatever order you like, which a full-time or night student can’t do; the lecturers determine the sequence for them.

Contact with other students You will have to have a computer and internet access for each of your various modules so take this a step further. You will be able to contact other students via online learning environments such as WebCT or Moodle; distance education courses usually have these set up so that they can pass on information easily and quickly to the students and tutors. These are like private websites with built in chat rooms so you can ‘meet’ some of your classmates even if you can never make it to a tutorial. Make use of this facility, if it is provided, as there is often someone currently online who will have the answer to your query. Join a social networking site such as Facebook, Twitter or MySpace and see if there is a support group there for fellow distance education students. There are many internet telephone services such as Skype, which are free-to-use (so long as you call other users of the same service) and freeto-download. These are a great way to make contact and keep in touch and also to enjoy virtual coffee breaks during which you can talk to someone rather than just type (though that option is there too, complete with cool emoticons). All you need to do is to download and install the software; it is best if you have a good broadband connection. If your computer has a built-in microphone then you don’t need any headphones; just make sure that you have the volume turned up. If you don’t have a built-in microphone then you will need headphones or a handset that are specifically designed for using with these services. Sometimes these are much cheaper if you source them through eBay rather than from a computer or electrical goods store, so do shop around.

Virtual study groups Having contacted classmates through a VLE such as WebCT or Moodle you can suggest setting up a virtual study group which can meet via Skype or any of the other online telephone services. Just make sure that everyone is using the same service and then the calls are free, no matter how many hours you spend connected. As with any study group, try to keep the numbers small. If you each have a webcam and a good broadband connection then you will be able to see each other and even use the camera to show each other what you are working on. You can also send and receive files instantly and so easily share or compare notes. Sometimes it is

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helpful just to be connected to a fellow student, even if you are both working quietly and neither of you is actually talking (remember that it’s free to use!). Just knowing that there is somebody else there, to whom you can talk if you like, can be a comfort and even a motivational source.

Making a quiet place Full-time students can usually go to the library or find an empty classroom if they want a reasonably quiet place in which to study, but if you are studying via distance education then you may find that there is no quiet place near you. You may be working at home, with or without children, or you may be working full-time and spending time commuting every day. However, so long as you don’t run the risk of missing your stop or of not hearing something important, you can create a quiet place anywhere by buying a pair of industrial strength ear protectors. You can usually find them in any hardware store, particularly the larger ones, and as they are designed for use with noisy equipment you will find that they eliminate most of the background noise that is distracting you from your work. And if you are using them in a public place, for example on a train or in a coffee shop, you will find that people will not disturb or interrupt you as they seem to assume that you are listening to music and so probably won’t hear them anyway. It may take a while to get used to them as they can feel a little uncomfortable if you are not used to wearing headphones (they tend to be tighter than regular headphones) but you will adapt and they really do eliminate most of the background noise.

What are the main journal databases? Chapter 3 focuses on evaluating academic literature and you should apply those guidelines when trying to evaluate the merit of internet sources too. Although you may be used to searching for information using general search engines such as Google, Yahoo or AltaVista, most of the information that is freely available on the internet is not suitable for use at university. Anybody can put anything on the web and so there is no guarantee that the content is accurate. When lecturers or tutors tell you to access articles online they do not mean that you should search the web or that you must browse through Wikipedia (never use that site for your essays as anybody can put information on it and it may not be accurate!). Instead what they are talking about are the online databases of academic journal articles that can be accessed through your university’s library website. Your university will subscribe to some of these databases and this allows you to access and download articles for free. You should never have to pay for a journal article while you are an undergraduate. If you go on to do a master’s or a doctorate you may find that there are some articles that you need but these are not available through your university; this would require that you go to another university library that does have access, that you contact the authors and ask them if you may have a copy, or that you buy a copy.

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Different universities will have different subscriptions and while they may have access to some or all of the same databases, they may not have purchased access to the entire content of those databases. This means that some of the content described below may not be available to you, or it might all be available. To access any of these you will need to have a valid username and password, issued by your university. You may only have access while using a university computer or your library may have set up a facility whereby you can access the databases from anywhere in the world, so long as you have the valid username and password. There are thousands of databases but I am only going to comment on some of the ones that you would access for full-text journal articles in psychology.

Academic Search Premier/PsycARTICLES/PsycINFO Academic Search Premier, PsycARTICLES and PsycINFO contain articles on every area of psychology and they are usually the first place to search. They are EBSCOhost databases that can be accessed separately or together and that give you the option to perform a variety of searches, from basic to advanced. You can search for articles by author, topic, keywords, year, and other parameters. They contain a wide variety of article types but I would recommend that you select the options for ‘full text’ and ‘scholarly (peer reviewed) journals’. That way the links that it brings up will all be documents that you can read and download and which have been deemed to be of a suitably high standard. If you click on ‘choose databases’ then you can perform the search across a variety of the EBSCOhost databases at the same time. For example, you might have initially entered the Academic Search Premier database but selected ‘choose databases’ and added both PsycARTICLES and PsycINFO to your search. It is almost certain that your university will have a subscription to at least one of these three databases, if not all three. When you perform a search it will bring up a list of links to articles. You will see an option to ‘add to folder’. If you are trying to find several articles on a topic you can use this to filter the overall results of the search. Place the articles that may be useful into a virtual folder, using that option, and then you can view all those articles later, so long as you did not log out! You may see a link that says ‘cited references’ followed by a number in brackets. This is the list of all the sources that the paper has cited and if you click on that then you can access each of those articles too. If you see a link that says ‘PDF full text’ then this means that you can download the article directly and that the entire article is there for you to read. If this PDF link is not present then you may see a link that tells you to check your university’s e-journals. This means that only the abstract is available in this database but that you may be able to find the whole article by looking for the journal in a different database (see below). Another link that you may see under the title of the article is ‘linked full text’. If you click on this then it bring you to another site that may contain a link to the PDF file. To download the citations to a database such as EndNote or ProCite, add the articles you want to the folder, select ‘view folder’, select the ones you want to export, then click on the export icon (a white page with a green arrow on it), choose your database and press ‘save’. KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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SAGE Journals Online This database contains the journals published by SAGE and it is another very valuable resource for psychology students; you will use it a lot if you have access to it. You can do quick searches or more advanced searches and there is the option to go through the whole database or just the content that is open to you. If you want to select a number of articles for looking at later (again, so long as you do not log out) then click on ‘check item’. The links that you may see under the name of the journal article include abstract, Full Text (PDF), References, Table of Contents and MatchMaker. The first few of these are self-explanatory; they are the links that will bring you to that detail. MatchMaker may sound intriguing and it is a very valuable tool that will group together articles that are related or on a similar topic. If you are using a references database such as EndNote then click ‘check item’ for the articles you want, select ‘add to my marked citations’, select ‘Email/Download/Save/Print My Marked Citations’ and press GO, then make sure that the correct type of computer is selected (PC is the default setting), press ‘EXPORT/DOWNLOAD to Citation Manager’ and choose your database.

Science Direct This is another excellent database for psychology articles in all areas but where you will find it to be of most value is when hunting for articles for your classes on neuroscience or animal behaviour. You can simply browse if you like but if you click on ‘search’ you can select options to perform a quick, advanced or expert search, to examine only journals or maybe books (or both), to pick a specific year or range of years or to pick a specific broad area, for example Arts and Humanities. The links that you will see under each article include preview, PDF, related articles and supplementary content. The first three are self-explanatory while the latter may include links to data, video clips or other materials. Again, if you are using EndNote, ProCite or similar tools then you will be able to transfer the citation to your database by clicking on ‘export citation’ and selecting the appropriate option. You will, of course, have to add the actual PDF file manually as exporting the citation only does what it says on the tin. These are some of the main databases that will be available in most universities but there are, of course, others so check your university’s library website to see which journal databases are available to you. These include Blackwell Synergy, Cambridge Journals Online, InformaWorld, JSTOR, Oxford Journals Online, Project Muse, SpringerLink, SwetsWise, Taylor & Francis Journals, Wiley Interscience and Wilson OmniFile Full Text, but you should also check out some of the medical and nursing journals from time to time. You will find that all of these are similar in style and in the types of searches that you can perform. In any of these databases you may find a note that says to check your university’s e-journals. In addition to database subscriptions your university may also have subscriptions to individual journals and, if so, then you will be able to go directly to these and search them for what you

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want. The link to the e-journals to which your university has a subscription will also appear on their library website. Browse these too as there may be entire journals available that focus on the specific subject that you are studying. If you do find an article in one of these journals and it says that there is a one-year embargo (i.e. your university’s subscription means that you cannot access any article published by the journal in the past 12 months) then go to the databases and see if the same journal is there, without an embargo.

Summary Note making is a very valuable skill. It may take time and practice to master it but if you keep trying you will find the approach that suits you. Good note-making strategies can save you time, increase the amount of information that you can cover and remember, and serve as a great study aid when it comes to preparing for exams. Your strategy may vary based on whether you are making notes in a lecture or studying from books or journal articles. You may also make modifications based on your motivation levels, on any physical or sensory difficulties that you have, or on whether you are taking your degree via distance education. Work from a variety of sources and in addition to studying the core textbooks try to read plenty of journal articles. These are freely available through the online databases to which your university subscribes.

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3

EVALUATING ACADEMIC LITERATURE

Aims This chapter focuses on ways in which you can evaluate the strength and usefulness of academic literature. This is usually in the form of journal articles though the same principles will also apply to evaluating books or chapters in single or multi-authored books. By the end of this chapter you should know why it is important: • • • •

to to to to

consider who wrote it and where and when it was published know how it was done and argued identify whether or not the stated aims of the work were achieved know how their findings compare or contrast to those of other researchers.

What is expected at university? For the subjects that we took in school we usually worked solely from one or more set textbooks. Depending on the subject, we may also have used study guides or other published notes or we may have consulted additional books or even internet sources. Some subjects encouraged us to think for ourselves and to base our essays and exam answers on what we thought about a topic. However, many subjects and even some teachers required that we just accept the facts or the interpretation as it was given to us; the poet may have written about a lost cow but he was speaking in code about his love for his country so just accept it. Secondary school education gives us the basic skills needed to be able to handle university education, but relying solely on those skills rather than taking them to the next level will not be sufficient to obtain good honours grades at university level. As we saw in the previous chapter, good note-taking skills are essential, particularly given the often considerable amount of material that has to be read, analysed, and processed. Unlike some school subjects, good grades at this level are not award ed for how much information or how many facts about something you can remember or list. Indeed this is a common mistake that many undergraduates make in their first year. Enthusiasm for subjects can lead us to read lots and lots of material about a topic that we then feel we must squeeze into an essay or exam just to show how much work we have done. If we use that approach what we may end up

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submitting is a somewhat disorganised and descriptive answer that never really tackles the specific and often narrowly set question. All that work for a disappointing grade and, depending on the availability and/or quality of tutor or lecturer feedback, we are left without an understanding of what went wrong. I have known quite a few students who interpreted disappointing results as representing a lack of aptitude for studying psychology when, in fact, all that was wrong was their approach. Good honours grades, as we will see in the next chapter, are largely dependent on the strength of your analysis of the material that you have reviewed and on how you apply that analysis to the question posed in the essay, exam or lab report. So what does that mean? The material that you will be analysing in psychology will usually be research findings and while some of this will have been described or mentioned in your textbooks, you will be expected to work from journal articles too, particularly in the senior years of your undergraduate degree. So what do we have to analyse? We want to understand what it is that the study did and what it found. What are the implications of those findings and how do they compare or contrast to what other researchers have found? But won’t that be clear from just reading the abstract (summary of the paper)? Not necessarily. By reading or even skimming through a paper you may get either the gist or the details of a piece of research but stating that finding in your notes, essay or exam is just commenting on its existence. Stating that Tom and Jerry (2000) found that A was predictive of B whenever C was also present is just making a statement. You want to ask yourself why this finding is important, what it tells us, and how this matches with or differs from what other researchers have found. To analyse a paper requires close reading and that you at least consider each of several questions about the piece: – – – – – – –

who wrote the paper or book? where and when was the work published? what methods were used? have the stated aims of the work been achieved? what type(s) of evidence do(es) the author(s) present? how do these findings compare to or contrast with what other researchers have found? how have other academics responded to the paper or book?

These questions are an elaboration of The 6 W’s (see Chapter 2), as often you have to delve more deeply into assessing a journal article than you would when studying a book chapter or class notes. Fairly common reactions by students when they are told this are: ‘I’m only a beginner at this subject so how can I judge how good a piece of research is?’, ‘Oh gosh, I can’t do all that!’, ‘But why would it be published in a journal if it’s wrong?’, ‘If it’s published in a journal does that not necessarily imply that it’s a good paper?’. Firstly, yes you can do this. Like everything you do it is something that has to be learned and once you do learn how to do it, and get sufficient practice at it, then you will be able to perform these tasks almost without thinking about them; they will become second nature. Of course if you are in the first or second year of your degree, or if you are in the early stages of doing KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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your degree in part-time modules, then you will be inexperienced in a subject. You will not be expected to know everything but you will be expected to be familiar with the basics of a topic and some material beyond that level. There will be a lot of reading required and this is partly why you will find that your lecture timetable, for a full-time psychology degree, appears to be very light. Obviously you do not have to do lots of extra reading just to be able to analyse a single journal article. But if you organise your notes from your readings you will notice similarities and differences in what various papers have to say. This will help you not only to broaden your knowledge but also to be able to think critically about the topic. Secondly, you may find it surprising but there are some journal articles published that would not score particularly highly if they had been submitted as a senior undergraduate lab report in some universities and, indeed, some university courses in psychology offer a class that focuses on analysing the weaknesses of some of these published papers. Don’t get me wrong, the vast majority of published, peer-reviewed papers (i.e. assessed by experts in the area to determine whether or not it is suitable for publication in a specific journal) are of an exceptionally high standard. However, as with so much in life, standards can vary. When you study statistics you will come across the term ‘normal distribution’ and see how this can be represented graphically by a bell-shaped curve on a graph. Most will fall somewhere in the middle but you will find some that are very good and some that are rather weak. Why this happens in journals is open to speculation, but what is important is that you are aware that not every published article is perfectly presented. There may be important details left out (see Chapter 8 on report writing), the stated aims may not have been met, the title may be somewhat misleading, aspects of the design of the study may not have been entirely appropriate, the statistical analyses applied may not have been appropriate (see Russell, 2002, for an interesting discussion on the use and misuse of factor analysis in psychology) and/or the interpretation of the findings may be open to discussion or to alternative explanation. Does this mean that all published material should be treated with scepticism? No, of course not. You should just be aware that not every academic article is perfect. Your lecturers and tutors may recommend specific readings as being particularly useful but you should read these, and all the other papers that you choose yourself, with an objective and critical eye. So let’s look at each of those seven questions identified above.

Who wrote the paper or book? Think about this for a moment. Why might this be an important question to ask? Does it matter who wrote it?

If a book or journal article has been written by an expert on the subject and is published by a leading publisher then the material contained within it is likely to be of a very high standard. Depending on the subject matter it may be a difficult

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text for a beginner or even a senior undergraduate to read, but so long as it is written in a clear style at least part of the work should be accessible to all university readers. In this century anybody can write or publish articles about any topic, thanks to the ease with which anyone can set up their own website or blog. Some of that freely-available material may be very good but much of it will not be of a standard suitable for third-level education. Knowing who has written the text is important, therefore, to give a guide as to the accuracy and usefulness of the material for university readers. If you are just starting out in psychology then you are unlikely to be able to recognise the names of well-known researchers or authors in the field. However, as you take more classes and read more material on the subject you will become familiar with the important thinkers and writers in the different branches of psychology. Browsing through the shelves in your university library is another way to become familiar with the names of some of the best-known thinkers and writers in a subject area. Some academics become strongly associated with specific areas and you can usually take it for granted that the work they publish on their specialist topic will be of a very high standard. Even so, you should not be afraid to read this with a critical eye. You will find the name(s) of the author(s) at the front of every paper and book published for psychology. If you are looking at a book and it has multiple authors then it is likely that each of them contributed different chapters; this may be indicated clearly or it might not be mentioned at all. If the book has been written by lecturers or researchers who are attached to a university or university and/or the book has been published by a university institution or a well-known academic publisher, then the material contained within it is probably of a high standard. You will notice that pretty much all of your course textbooks fall into this category. The person, or people, who wrote the book will almost certainly have considerable experience in the area about which they have written and so you can be confident that what they have to say is both accurate and useful. If there is no mention of either the writer or the publisher having any direct connection with academia then check to see what else they have published and what type of texts the company usually distributes. This may be the writer’s first or only book so you could check their name in an academic database, such as Web of Science (for example), if they have published any journal articles. Maybe the author has a master’s or a PhD but no connection to any university or universities and has published their work through a general publisher rather than an academic one. If so you might be able to find out the area in which they got their qualifications. If s/he has a master’s in child psychology, for example, and is writing non-academic books in that area then s/he is probably suitably knowledgeable to write such a work. However, if the author’s qualifications are, say, in electronic engineering and s/he is writing a book on child psychology then this source may not be as useful as one by a qualified academic in the area. A lot of journal articles will have been written by a single person, including a number of those who have several names on the front page. The second, third, fourth, or subsequent authors listed may have consulted on the paper and been named in acknowledgement of their advice or editing, for example, or they may KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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have been just as involved in the research and writing of the work as was the first-named author. If you want to contact the authors of a journal article to talk to them about their research paper then you will find that it is usually the first-named author who is given as the person to contact. Keep in mind that some academics will not respond to queries or comments from students from universities other than their own – they are usually very busy – so don’t email them unless you have done some research on your question and failed to come up with the answer. Each author, on a multi-authored paper, may be in the same university department or they may come from different places; their affiliation will be identified on the front page. If you want to learn about the authors, and to find out about their areas of work and expertise, you can search for other papers they have written, for example by using the different journal databases, or you can look them up through their university or university’s website. Be aware that while some academics will have their names on a lot of papers in an area, the comparative lack of publications on a topic does not necessarily mean that another researcher or academic will not have good knowledge of the same area. So do not dismiss the potential value of a book or journal article just because the writer does not appear to have published as much material as others have done. Some authors will have many years’ experience working in an area yet may publish very little, or their work might be published in sources to which you do not have access.

When and where was the work published?

Think about this for a moment. Why might this be an important question to ask yourself about any book or journal article that you are about to read? Does it really matter when and where something was written or when and where a study was conducted? Why?

The first thing that I do with a novel, after scanning the back cover to see what it’s about, is to look at the year of publication. This gives me an idea of the level of everyday technology to expect in the story, unless it’s a historical novel or a science fiction story. Was it written recently (and set in that timeframe)? Was it written or based in a pre-internet, pre-mobile phone, pre-DNA testing time period? Knowing this before reading the main text will give me an expectation of the limits, or lack thereof, that the story can go to and of what I can expect of the chief protagonist. In the same way, knowing where or when an academic text was published or written can be a valuable piece of information. Has our knowledge of the phenomenon being discussed in the text moved forward since it was published? Have the diagnostic criteria or categories applied to the disorder being discussed changed since a paper or book was published? Has the theoretical model on which a paper was based been extended or otherwise modified, or even rejected, since it was published? Maybe the approach or theory on which it was based is now no longer regarded as being a good one.

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If a paper or book was written in the past five years then these concerns may not be an issue. However, if the literature that you are reviewing is in a particularly dynamic areas, such as neuroscience, then you should also consult more recent material, just in case there has been a key development. You can refer to anything published within the past five years as being recent and it is always a good idea to use mostly recent sources. So does this mean I should not use anything that was published more than five years ago? But my lecturer spent the entire class talking about studies from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s – is he out of date? Questions like these are a common response by students to the recommendation to work mainly from recent sources and the answer to both is no, unless, of course, the lecturer is using out of date material because s/he just did not bother to update their course – but that rarely happens. Of course you will need to use older sources and most will still be absolutely correct in what they say. However, it is always a good idea to have the most up-to-date information. This is why some lecturers will ask students to work from the brand new edition of a textbook, even though the previous one may have been published only two years earlier. If it’s an Introduction to Psychology textbook there will be little that is different other than the addition of some more recently published citations. If it is a neuroscience textbook, however, there may be some completely different content due to advances that have been made in this area. If it is an abnormal psychology textbook there may have been some changes made to diagnostic criteria or categories. This happened in 1994 and again in 2000 with the new versions of the manual that details all the current psychological disorders with their symptoms, diagnostic criteria, subcategories and other information; those dates coincide with the publication of the DSM-IV and the DSM-IV-TR. So if you read a paper on schizophrenia, for example, be sure that it was published after 2000 and that it is based on the diagnostic criteria and categories of the DSM-IV-TR and not the different ones that were in the DSM-IV. Clearly when an article or book was written can be very important in assessing its potential value or relevance to your study. Where the work was done can also be an important point to consider in your analysis and, indeed, it can also give you an angle to examine in your thinking and in your essays. Our country represents a wide range of different cultures, each of which has its own attitudes, beliefs, customs, traditions, expectations and outlook on different aspects of life. Though there are increasing numbers of psychology textbooks written and produced in Western Europe, many on reading lists, in university libraries, and in bookstores will have been created in North America. Journal articles may have been written in any country of the world and published in that country or in another. Each will, in some respect, reflect the culture in which it was done and whether or not this may prove of interest will depend on the area or phenomenon being investigated. Neuroscience, for example, examines the functional anatomy of the brain, so where a study was conducted is less likely to be a potential issue of interest that it might be in other areas of psychology. Yes, there may be some potential issues relating to the impact of race, genetics, and environmental factors, but any such issues would KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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be well beyond the scope of an undergraduate degree in psychology. The cultural setting in which the work was done may be an important consideration if the area is that of social psychology, for example. In a nutshell, this field in psychology looks at all aspects of social behaviour.

Think about this for a moment. Why might it be important to consider the country in which a book or article was written or a piece of research was conducted?

Was the study conducted in a culture that is similar to mine or does it reflect attitudes, experiences, beliefs, etc. of a different culture? Can I relate to these findings? Is there any reason to think that they may not be generalisable to my culture? Might a similar study conducted here produce the same results or different ones? Why? Many students have raised these issues when studying social psychology and other areas of psychology too. They note that much of the research, particularly the famous studies of earlier decades, was often conducted within cultural belief systems that do not match our society today or by using students attending Ivy League universities in America and they ask ‘How can the attitudes and experiences from these cultures or of mostly wealthy teenagers from North America, who are participating in these studies to earn a course credit, reflect the responses or attitudes of adults living in Western Europe, particularly those from the lower- to middle-class socioeconomic groups, or people with varying levels of intelligence, education or opportunities’? There is no simple answer to this and while there is a presumption of a degree of generalisability of results from these studies to the human population as a whole, the issue of cultural differences, as well as cultural similarities, should be considered. What you should also keep in mind is that none of these studies, nor any work in the social sciences, prove anything; they merely lend support to or refute hypotheses or research questions (see Chapter 7). If you really do feel that the results of a study you are reviewing would not hold up here then you are, of course, permitted to express your doubts. However, in the absence of verifiable results from a relevant study, you should not be dogmatic about your belief. You may be right but you could be wrong and you should always have evidence to present to support your position. Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I and a small group of classmates replicated a study whose results we were absolutely positive would not hold up in this part of the world. Our study was done as part of a lab class, so it was supervised, and to our considerable surprise we found exactly what the original paper had found. The point here is that you should not be afraid to question the applicability of research findings from one country or culture to another. Whether you are right or wrong, whether you find results that support or refute your position, you will have learned something. Also, you will have thought critically about the paper or issue rather than just accepting someone else’s findings at face value.

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What methods were used? Think about this for a moment. Why might it be important to consider how a study was done? Does it matter what methods were used? Does it matter how the study was designed or carried out? Does it matter what sort of analysis was done on the data? Why would these be important issues to consider?

How the study was done is an important question to consider when examining any journal article or any section of a book that talks about the findings of research papers. This can be a difficult one for first- or second-year undergraduates to assess as quite often the methods and results sections of articles may appear to be incomprehensible. Research design and statistics are an unavoidable part of psychology but they need not be the monsters that they sometimes appear to be (see Chapter 7). If you are a full-time student in psychology then you will cover research design and statistics in your first and second undergraduate years. If you are doing psychology with another subject, are a part-time student, just taking psychology classes to make up credits (or for interest), or taking your psychology classes via distance education, then your exposure to teaching and practical experience in research design and statistics may be more sporadic. Don’t panic! No matter where you are in your training you will still be able to perform at least a cursory examination of the methods that were used in the study presented in the journal article you are about to read. So, what questions will you ask yourself if examining the methods used in a paper? You are looking at how the study was done so you will be interested in how the study was designed, how the participants were recruited, who those participants were, what tests, situations or questionnaires were used, how the data were processed, how the results have been presented, and how the issue of ethics in psychological research was handled. This may sound like a lot of work but finding the answers to these questions will usually take only a minute or two, if the paper has been written clearly. You are identifying the structure of the study and the central questions that it sought to answer whenever you are looking at research design from the point of view of examining a published paper. Research design as a process for structuring your own study or experiment will be a more detailed process and covered in your statistics classes. What was the hypothesis or research question under investigation? Is the study presented in the journal article a questionnaire study? Is it comparing two different groups? Is there a control group? Is it comparing how participants in one or more groups score on different attempts at the same test (maybe a beforeand-after situation)? Are there any distraction tasks being used or any active substances being given to participants? Is everyone doing the same test or experiencing the same test circumstances? Are there any exclusionary items that might restrict or limit the type or number of possible participants? Each of these is an example of an important question to consider, both in your own research and when reviewing the work of others. It is a list of suggested questions and not a comprehensive list of KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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all possible questions. You may be looking at studies that used only a particular type of design or trying to find out how studies are done in a particular area, for example, so you would then focus only on papers that match your search criteria. Every write-up, whether your own lab report or a paper published in a top journal, should include enough relevant detail to be able to answer these questions and so that you, or someone else, could replicate the study. Having looked at the design you now need to examine the participants in the study. Some older papers and books, will refer to subjects instead of participants but you should not do so. ‘Participants’ has been the correct term, when referring to humans, for a long time now and that is the only one you should use. So what will you want to know about them? The number of people who took part in the study is an obvious place to start. Is there an ideal number of participants, you may ask? How many is too few? That depends on the type of study being conducted and on the type of analysis that will be performed. If you are using a qualitative methodology (see Chapter 7) or doing any of certain types of studies with clinical groups then a dozen or even fewer participants may be sufficient. However, if you are conducting a study that will be analysed with inferential statistics then you will need a lot more participants than that. Some statistical tests can require greater numbers of scores than others to produce fairly reliable results, but the general rule of thumb often given to undergraduates is that you should have at least 100 participants in your study. Why? One reason is that you will probably be breaking that group down into smaller groups, for example by comparing the scores of men and women, or of different age groups. This means that your initial group of 100 is being broken down into smaller groups and smaller numbers of scores being analysed can make the results less reliable. You will also want to know the age and gender breakdown of the participants in the study and that information should be provided in the abstract, methods, and results sections. Is it a young group or is it a study that was done with older people? Was there a wide range of ages represented? Was the study done with men or women or a mix of both genders? These questions may be of particular importance depending on the subject matter of the study. For example, age and gender might be important if the study was looking at aggression, or attitudes towards something, or cognitive faculties, or depression, or any of a large number of other possible topics. How these participants were recruited will also be important. Are they a clinical population who were inpatients in a hospital, for example, or were they recruited through advertisements placed in local or national newspapers, or were they university students who were taking part in return for a course credit? There are many ways in which participants can be recruited (see Chapter 7) and the approach chosen can have implications for the design, the methods used, the type of analysis that can be applied to the data, and for both the interpretation and generalisability of the results. Now that you know how the study was structured and who the participants were, you will want to know what tests, questionnaires, or situations were used. Maybe a well-known questionnaire was used, either by itself or in conjunction with one or more additional instruments. Maybe the study produced and tested a new questionnaire

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or a modified version of a previously-published one. Maybe the participants were interviewed, either singly or in a group, or maybe they were simply asked to perform some task, either on a computer or by hand. Perhaps some aspect of the physical environment, for example the light level, was being manipulated by the researcher to see how that might affect performance. Knowing what was done, how it was done, and with whom, will give you a good idea of the steps you would need to take to be able to replicate the study. Knowing these things will also give you an idea of what statistical or qualitative analyses were performed before you even look at the results section, after you have learned about that subject of course. If you are only starting to learn about statistics and research methods or you are still a bit confused by them, then sometimes you can use journal articles as a sort of self-test or teaching tool. One of the most important things to know in using statistics is what test to choose. If you use the wrong test or one that it is inappropriate for the data that you have collected or the questions that you are asking, then your results may have little value. It is true that many journal articles will use complex statistical analyses – sometimes unnecessarily complex – and that they will not necessarily state which tests they performed, particularly in the case of bivariate statistics (see Chapter 7). However, as you learn about statistics you will also learn how to recognise from a write-up what tests were performed. So, look at the methods employed in the published study and break them down into a series of questions. For example, they compared the average scores of Group A and Group B on the questionnaire so which statistical test would that involve? Try to answer that question and then check the results section of the paper to find the answer. Reading journal articles, therefore, can help you to learn more about statistics as well as about the topic about which the paper was written and also about the methods employed in doing research on that topic. As you review the results section you should do so with a critical eye, just as you would do with any other part of the paper. If you have little or no statistical experience you will find this very difficult to do but as you learn more about the use and misuse of statistics this will become easier. Were the tests used appropriate in this case? Is it clear what tests have been used? Are there any other questions that could have been investigated in the data? If there are questions that you think should have been asked in the study then what are these, how would they have been asked in the analysis and to what benefit do you think that would have been? Why do you think that they were omitted? Would simpler tests have been sufficient rather than the more complex ones that were done? While the statistical analysis presented in most journal articles would have been appropriate and complete, there will still be times when you find papers in which inappropriate tests have been done. For example, a researcher may have used parametric tests at a time when non-parametric equivalents would have been more appropriate. Don’t worry about what that means right now; as you learn about statistics that point will make sense to you (see Chapter 7). Russell’s (2002) paper on the use and misuse of factor analysis (a specific type of statistical test) in psychology is particularly interesting in this regard. There are a lot of technical issues and terms discussed in that paper, which may be beyond your KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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current knowledge level in statistics, but there is still much of the paper that you could follow, even if you are just starting out in psychology.

Have the stated aims of the work been achieved? Think about this for a moment. Why is this an important question? How might you go about answering it?

This may seem like a rather odd question to ask; surely if the paper has been published then it must have achieved its stated aims! Most of the time this will be true but occasionally you will find a paper that does not appear to do so. The title, abstract, or stated research question or hypothesis may indicate or suggest one thing but the discussion of the results may suggest another. Or maybe the whole paper is consistent in what were its stated aims yet you are not convinced that the authors have presented a sufficiently compelling argument to justify their position or claim (we will look at how to form an academic argument in Chapter 4). Maybe you can see an alternative interpretation of the findings or perhaps there is something about the design or methods or reasoning that you feel is deficient. Maybe you are a mature student who has worked in a particular specialised field and whose knowledge and expertise from that area enable you to see a flaw in the psychology researcher’s study that tried to examine some phenomenon in your area of speciality; this does happen. I once attended a presentation of a study that had chosen a legal scenario as its subject matter and was surprised to find that the postdoctoral researcher had not researched the point of law in question. The result was that what she expected and presented as a ‘correct’ answer as per the psychological phenomenon she was investigating was in fact incorrect within the law and so any participant who had taken Law of Tort as part of a business or legal course would have given only the ‘incorrect’ answer in her study. The legal knowledge of participants had not been considered and so the results of her study may have been invalid. If you want to argue your case in an essay, report or exam, then be sure that you have academic evidence with which to support your position. Maybe you don’t agree with the findings of the study because of personal beliefs or maybe because you do not yet fully understand the language and theories of psychology and how they apply to the specific topic. Rhetoric, no matter how passionate, is not evidence and you should always be able to provide evidence (see Chapter 4). As I say to my students, you are learning to be psychologists but you should think rather like lawyers. Where are the precedents (published findings) that support your case? Find them, present them, and convince the judge and jury (in this case the tutor or lecturer or another academic reading your paper). Of course to present a critical evaluation you will have to go further than that. A lawyer presents only the evidence, or an interpretation of that evidence, that supports her/his position. What you should do is discussed below.

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If you have little prior knowledge of a specific topic then you may feel that you cannot judge the merits of a paper. However, you are not evaluating its contribution to the subject as a whole, at least not while you are in the early years of your undergraduate degree. You are focusing more on the structure instead. So while you may think that you don’t know enough to be able to determine whether or not the stated aims of some papers have truly been met, you will be able to assess many. Look at the title; what appears to have been the aim of the paper? Now read the abstract and ask yourself the same question. Was there just one major question or aim or were there several? If the abstract is a good one then you should have a minisummary of the whole study. Do the title and abstract match? If not, then what is the difference between them? Now read through the introduction. From this section note what appears to be the aim of the paper; this will usually be at the end of that section. The introduction to any report or paper or essay gives background information before getting to the central aim(s), but that background detail should be concise and relevant. Hopefully the apparent aim stated in the title, abstract, and introduction will match. You can then ask, how might this study be done to achieve this aim? Obviously that would be an easy question if you know quite a bit about research design and analysis but very difficult to answer if you are only a beginner. You will have already looked closely at the design and methods and results and so, by this point, you will probably have a good idea as to whether or not the stated aims have been met. The final section to examine is the discussion of the results. This should focus on how the findings are similar or different to what has been done before and also on the implications of these findings. The conclusions drawn here should be consistent with the title, abstract, and the aims apparent in the introduction.

What type(s) of evidence do(es) the author(s) present?

Think about this for a moment. Why is this an important question? What types of evidence do you think that an author might present in a research paper? What sources of information do you think might be useful in arguing a point in a psychology paper?

Whether or not you feel that the writer of the paper has presented a good case in support of her/his claim you should consider the type of evidence that was presented. What materials were used? Was it journal articles, or interviews, or interpretations of statistical analyses, or magazine or newspaper articles, or maybe personal opinions? Did the presentation of evidence seem to be balanced or was there a suggestion of bias on the part of the author? You should not find magazine or newspaper articles or the writer’s personal opinions being used as evidence to support an academic argument in psychology and if these are the types of evidence being presented, instead of an evaluation of journal articles, academic books and quantitative and qualitative analyses, then the work you are reading is probably not of a sufficiently high academic standard to be useful to you in your studies, your essays, reports and exams. KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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Presuming that the paper you are reading is based on an evaluation of journal articles, quantitative and/or qualitative analyses, consider the following questions. Did the writer talk about the findings of lots of prior papers or just a few, say less than ten? Did all of those other papers support the results of the study you are reading or did some or all of them find different results? Are the cited studies fairly recent and, therefore, probably representative of the most up-to-date work in the area? Or do they all appear to be at least ten years old, or older? Maybe this study was looking at something that was a new idea or a return to something that had not been studied for a long time. If so, how has the writer used the findings from other published work to explain and justify what s/he has done, and why it has been done? Is there a different cultural context or maybe new technologies that enable the current investigation? Maybe the writer has found a reason as to why prior studies were incomplete or inaccurate; if so, what is the evidence presented and how convincing is the argument being made? A question frequently asked by students is whether or not there is a specific minimum number of references that should be cited in a paper, essay, or lab report. One could say that the number of different sources cited might reflect a good provision of evidence but you cannot judge the value of a paper, or indeed a book, by the number of academic sources that it cites. There may be many relevant texts to be cited in a discussion and an evaluation of one piece of research but very few available or published that apply to a different study. This does not necessarily mean that one topic is more valuable than the other. You should also be aware that some journals place a restriction on the number of sources that may be cited in a paper, so have a look at other papers published in the journal to see how the length of their reference list compares if you are wondering whether or not the author cited as many relevant sources as s/he could have done.

How do these findings compare to or contrast with what other researchers have found?

Think about this for a moment. Why is this an important question? Does it matter whether or not the findings being discussed in this paper are consistent with or different from those being presented in other papers? Why?

When told that they have to do this for their essays or reports or exams, one immediate response that I sometimes see in first year students is a startled look. How am I supposed to know whether or not the findings in one study are similar to or different from those of other studies? Am I supposed to read lots of different papers to be able to read just one paper? The answer to these questions is that in a wellwritten report and in a published paper the author(s) will have done this work for you. The introduction section of the paper will have already talked about work that has been done on either this specific topic or on closely related topics and in doing

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so it will have talked about the research findings of other papers. The discussion section of the paper will talk about the implications of the findings from the paper you are reading and then elaborate on these by comparing and contrasting them to those of other published works. So why does this matter? A paper will not be published in a peer-reviewed journal unless it can add something to what is already known or unless it can provide new knowledge about something. Immediately you might think – wait a moment, if the findings have to be something new or extra then how can they be similar to other papers that have been published? As you will learn in your classes on statistics and research methods, one of the most important things about research is that it can be replicated. This means that other researchers can conduct the same study that you did and get similar results. If this happens then evidence has been found to support the claims of the earlier work and this is news, hence it is potentially publishable. Of course not every paper that says, ‘yes they were right’, is going to get published; in fact most of them will not be published. Finding the evidence that supports earlier work is only news if the earlier work was something new or if you have found that the principles they discovered can also be applied to similar or even different groups or circumstances. A paper must find something that adds information to what we already know if it is to be considered for publication. There may be 50 other papers that have been published on, say, Questionnaire X, but the one you are reading used a different type of participant group than had been used previously or maybe they tested how the questionnaire could predict scores on a different test, or perhaps they found how it was not really suitable to be used with particular clinical groups or age groups; you get the idea. If the author(s) found results that were different to those discussed in other studies then you need to ask yourself why this might have been the case. What was different about their study and the one(s) that went before? Was there a difference in the type of participants that took part, a different age group for example? Did they use the same questionnaires and/or tests or did they use different versions of them, maybe newer or older versions? Did they have a very small number of participants, which could have affected the results (see Chapter 7), or maybe a much larger group than other researchers used? Did they use a different type of statistical analysis or interview technique than was used in the other studies or maybe different exclusionary criteria? For those ones you would probably have to look at the other papers. If there is something different about the findings of the paper you are reading compared to other published work then there is a reason. It may not be obvious what that reason is and, indeed, it is possible that the author(s) of the paper may not know what happened either. If the reason for the difference is not clear than you can speculate as to what it might have been but, as is often said on the popular television show C.S.I., if you hear hoofbeats think horses and not zebras: look at obvious potential reasons and not exotic ones. So while you are reading the discussion section of a journal article what you are trying to identify is what it was about the study that was similar to others and also what it was that was different. The reason that you are reading the paper in the KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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first place might be because you are looking for studies that support a particular point that you want to discuss in an essay, report, or exam. Alternatively you might already have enough material to support the point and are looking for work that found something different. As we will see in the next chapter, you should always consider evidence for and against any point that you want to discuss. So unlike the lawyer who is arguing one side of an argument in court, you get to play the prosecution, the defence, and the judge and jury in every essay, report, or exam that you write and in the reading of every journal article or book that you choose to read.

How have other academics responded to the paper or book?

Think about this for a moment. Why is this an important question? Does it matter what other researchers think of the study you are reading?

If a paper or book was published more than a year ago then you can often find out, through various online databases that may be available through your university’s library, how many times other academics have cited this work. If the option is available in the database through which you have found the article then it should be clearly visible. If it is there you can usually click on the number of citations and, depending on the database you are using, this may bring up the list of every paper or book in which the paper has been cited so far. Unless you are doing a detailed piece of work and want to follow up on every article you can find in a specific area, it is not necessary to look at every source that cites the paper you are reading. Of course it is useful to use this facility to further your knowledge by reading around the topic. It is a also good idea to check at least one or two of the sources that cited the paper, just in case they had something negative to say about it. Maybe the reason it has been cited 20 times in the past year is because other researchers are pointing out a flaw with the study rather than praising it for having made a notable contribution to the area. Of course maybe the reason the paper has been cited so many times is because other academics see it as an important or valuable piece or work. Maybe the only academic who has cited it in other papers, so far, is the person who wrote it; if so you might wonder why nobody else has cited the work. It is also possible that the reason a paper might not have been cited anywhere is because it is too soon after its publication; there can be a gap of up to a year or more between the date of submission of an article and its publication in a journal. As you become more familiar with specific areas of psychology you will start to recognise the names of key researchers and writers in those areas and so if you see that it is some of these people who are citing the paper, and seem positive about it, then you can feel confident that the work has been accepted by the academic community as being useful.

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Summary The advice presented in this chapter does not represent a list of things that you absolutely must do every time you sit down to read a journal article, but rather some guidelines to help you in the task of judging the academic merit of work. Reading journal articles is an important task, from your first undergraduate year to your career as a postdoctoral lecturer or researcher, and, like many other tasks, you will develop speed and skill with practice. When you start, or even later in your career if you encounter a lengthy or difficult paper, it can take more than a hour just to read a single journal article – though many will take a lot less than that, even at the beginning – but by following the guidelines outlined above you will be able to make better use of that time. You will be able to read the work, whether it be a journal article or, say, the chapter of a book, with a critical eye, thereby reading the material in an active rather than a passive manner. And cognitive psychology tells us that an active processing of information can lead to better retention in the long-term memory than the passive processing of that same information.

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4

GOOD ESSAY WRITING

Aims This chapter focuses on how to write university-level essays in psychology, one of the most important skills that you will develop over the course of your studies. You may study hard enough to acquire expert-level knowledge on a topic, but if you cannot communicate this through your essays and exam answers then your excellence will go unrecognised and you may find that you miss out on the postgraduate place and subsequent career opportunity that you really want. By the end of this chapter you should know: • • • • • •

the typical characteristics of each university grade (essay or exam) what is meant by plagiarism the difference between descriptive and critical how to form an argument the structure of an academic essay in psychology how to do your referencing.

What is expected at university? Good essay writing is one of the most important skills that you will develop as a psychology student. It is a key transferable skill that will prove invaluable should you go on to take a master’s or doctorate and it is also of considerable value when you join, or return to, the general workforce. This is because not only do your writing skills improve and develop but your ability to research a topic and to evaluate and report on it concisely also strengthen. Throughout the course of your psychology degree you will have to write a lot of essays. Some will be for tutorials or as part of the coursework for some of your lecture courses, others will be in exams, and the rest will be as literature reviews for reports or your final year research project. The length of an essay will depend on its purpose though a typical word count set for first and second year students is around 1500 words, while third year (and fourth year if you are on a four-year programme) students are usually assigned essays of around 3000 words.

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This might sound intimidating, particularly if the subjects that you took in school or maybe in certificate courses had you writing essay answers that were in the region of 600–800 words. Maybe you are a mature student returning to education and have not written an essay in ten, twenty, thirty years or more. However, don’t panic; you can do it. In fact you will get to a point in your undergraduate studies where you will find that 3000 words is almost too short an essay in which to be able to develop all the points that you want to raise in as much detail as you would like. There is a format in which academic essays should be structured and once you have mastered that structure you will find that you can produce an outline for an essay on almost any topic. So, other than the word length, what is so different between a school essay and a third-level psychology essay? I have known quite a few students who came to university having got lots of A-grades in school, including for English, and yet struggled at first to write good honours essays in psychology. This was partly due to the different approach that is required of a writer. In school, for many subjects, we got A-grades for doing what amounted to little more than regurgitating the material that we had learned in class. Doing this at university will lead to disappointing grades and a second-level A-grade student can find themselves dropping to being the equivalent of a C-grade student. I’ve known students who, upon receiving their first and even second university essay grade, took the disappointing mark as an indication that they were somehow not suited to study psychology or to being in university, that somehow they had made a big mistake. Yes, they had made a mistake – but not the one that they thought they had made.

What are the usual criteria for achieving different grades at university? The first thing that you need to know about the grading system in universities is what the grades are called and the marks that they represent. The usual breakdown is as follows, though sometimes there is a very slight difference in the lower mark that represents the second class honours grades. – – – – – – –

First class honours Second class honours, first division Second class honours, second division Third class honours (or pass) Fail 1 Fail 2 Fail 3

70–100% 60–69% 50–59% 40–49% 30–39% 20–29% 0–19%

These grades are known colloquially as a first, a 2:1, a 2:2, a third, an F1, F2, and F3. In order to pass the year it is usually required that you achieve an overall passing mark with no more than one subject having had an F1 grade, though individual universities may differ on whether or not you can compensate for a fail in any one subject. Should you get two F1 grades or at least one F2 or F3 you are likely to find KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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yourself having to take supplemental (repeat) exams in the autumn or being asked to repeat the whole year. However, if you apply the same format to handling exam essays as you do to your course essays, as outlined in this chapter, then you should not fail, presuming that you have studied of course. Although you are only starting out in your studies in psychology you may already be thinking about career options, about studying at postgraduate level. If so it is important that you achieve either a first or a 2:1 in your degree as you will find that most postgraduate places are open only to graduates who have achieved those grades. To give you an idea of what is usually required for each grade, or the flaws or omissions that may be inherent to any grade, I will go through them in their reverse order of merit, from a fail through to first class honours. Hopefully this will help you see how each level is a development of the previous one. Some university departments may have slightly different expectations and require a slightly higher standard than do others but the basic requirements will remain the same. But whatever standard is being applied it is important that you realise that getting 70 per cent or more in school or in a certificate course is very much easier than getting 70 per cent or more at degree level. In fact many students will go through their entire time at university never having got a first in any essay or exam and yet will still come out with a good degree.

Fail (0–39%) Contrary to the odd rumours that one sometimes hears among students, lecturers and tutors do not set out to fail people. I have yet to meet one who enjoys having to give a failing grade to an assignment or exam paper and, personally, I hate having to fail students. However, if I cannot in good conscience pass the work then I will give it a failing grade. In fact many of us will do what we can to find a justification for passing a weak assignment or exam paper, usually in first or second year (when the results do not go towards the degree grade), but sometimes what is before us just cannot be passed. The most common reasons for failure that I have encountered in students’ work are: (i) not answering the question that was asked; (ii) forgetting that the essay is supposed to be an academic one on psychology rather than a description of personal thoughts and feelings; (iii) writing too little; (iv) turning in work so late that the associated penalties result in a zero or failing grade; (v) plagiarism; and (vi) not writing anything at all. The latter is more commonly seen in exams rather than in coursework although I have come across a student who did not hand in a single piece of coursework in a whole year; it was a very silly way to throw away what otherwise would have been a 2:1 in his degree. If a student does not answer or at least attempt the required number of questions in an essay-paper exam then there is a high degree of probability that they will fail. Tips on how to all but eliminate this problem – that is, the failure to answer enough essay questions in the exam – are included in Chapter 6. The other five points will be discussed here and they too will be dealt with in that chapter, in relation to how they apply in exams.

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Not answering the question that was asked This may seem like such an obvious thing to say but it is very important that you answer the question that has been set and that your essay is on the specific topic or issue that you have been asked to discuss or to evaluate. However, failing to do this is a remarkably common error. Sometimes we will read the question or essay title too quickly and so miss a key word or phrase or the specific meaning of it. Sometimes we will get side-tracked in our reading or writing, which will cause us to go off on a tangent that results in an essay that misses the point. Maybe we did not do enough reading on the topic, maybe we completely missed the requirements of the assignment or misunderstood the subject matter, maybe we wrote a very broad essay on the topic without ever getting to the specific point of the assignment, maybe we did not leave ourselves enough time in which to prepare and write the essay, or maybe we just didn’t like the topic and so did not bother to put in sufficient effort. Whatever the reason, if you write an essay that is not the one that was required then you are unlikely to get a passing grade. You should always read back through your essay, while keeping the assigned title in mind, to make absolutely sure, as a good friend of mine always says, that you have ATFQ – answered the flippin’ question.

Failing to write an academic essay A lot of the topics that you will study in psychology will be somewhat familiar to you as what you are studying is the science of mind and behaviour. You already know a lot about the mind and about behaviour, or do you? There is a lot that we do know about these broad areas because they are a part of our lives and because information gleaned from scientific research has made it into the public sphere, often through popular media outlets such as television shows, movies, books, and newspaper and magazine articles. There is also a lot that we think we know because of ‘common knowledge’ or because that’s what someone well-known said, but these sources may not be correct and the world of academia may have demonstrated, through research, that these old wives’ tales, or stereotypes, or gems of wisdom are in fact incorrect. Maybe some topics are familiar to you because of personal experience or because of your work. However, you must be careful not to fall into the trap of handing in a personal story or a lifestyle article instead of an academic essay. If you fail to write an academic essay then you will most likely get a failing grade. Here is an example from an exam answer I once graded: the requirement of the question was to write an academic essay on the different types of schizophrenia. However, the student included instead a rant about how some teenage boy s/he knew had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic but was in her/his opinion really just a normal teenager and so THEY were all wrong. There was not a single mention of any of the types of schizophrenia or the diagnostic criteria for them. In fact there was no academic content whatsoever and no consideration that clinically-trained professionals who had spent years working and researching in this area might know more about schizophrenia KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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than an undergraduate student taking a beginners class in abnormal psychology. There was just personal feelings and a mention of some sensationalist newspapers articles in the essay and s/he left me with no option but to give a failing grade on that question.

Writing too little All tutorial essays and essays that must be submitted as part of coursework will have an assigned word count. The assignment guidelines will usually let you know how much flexibility you have with that word count before penalties will be exacted; for example, you may be told to write an essay that is 1500 ± 250 words (i.e. a range of 1250 to 1750). The word count will be exclusive of the references section of the essay. If you write quite a bit less than the required word count (e.g. 800 words when 1500 were required) then you may fail, largely because you have not covered enough material in sufficient detail. Where this is most often an issue is in exams. Exams are covered in Chapter 6 but think about this: if you have two hours in which to answer two essay questions then you should be writing for a minimum of 45–50 minutes on each question. If you only submit one or two handwritten pages for an answer to an essay question on such an exam, then you absolutely and certainly have not written enough and you can expect a low grade on that answer. Most of us can fit about 200–400 words on a single A4 page that has the wider lines (such as university answer booklets), so if you are only going to hand in two handwritten pages as an essay then you are also handing in somewhere between 400 to 800 words, depending on your handwriting – and that is much too little.

Turning in work late Your university will have rules relating to the late submission of coursework and you should make sure that you are familiar with them. It may be something that is left up to individual departments and it is entirely on your head to find out what the rules are and what penalties will be exacted for being in breach of them. ‘Oh but I didn’t know’ is not an excuse that will get any sympathy at university. The penalties may be in the form of a cumulative deduction for every day you are late beyond the deadline, or just a flat zero for being late either at all or beyond a certain number of late days. With each assignment there will be a deadline and whether that deadline is given by a member of the academic staff or a postgraduate tutor does not matter; the deadline will be binding unless you have been granted an extension. Usually only serious things such as your ill health (with medical certs), or that of your children (if you are a mature student), or difficulties posed by a disability or impairment that you have, or a bereavement, will be accepted as grounds for an extension, but the decision will be up to your tutor or lecturer. ‘Oh but I have three essays due in the same week’ or ‘I’m going away for Christmas and so won’t be able to start the essay until I get back’ may not gain a favourable response; time management is one of the

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skills that you need to develop when studying at university. You may indeed have three essays that all have the same deadline, say the last Friday of the term or semester. But who said that you would have to write them all at the same time? There’s nothing wrong with submitting essays a week or more before the deadline. So, when you have clashing deadlines – and you will have clashing deadlines during the course of your studies – you will need to manage your time so that you can get the work done. I know that is easier said than done but you need to find a system that works for you in order that you can submit your work on time.

Plagiarism The issue of plagiarism is one that seems to cause a lot of confusion for students. Put simply, it means passing off somebody else’s work or ideas as your own. For example, if you copy a sentence or paragraph from a book or journal article or website and paste it into your essay without putting it between quotation marks and citing the source, in the correct format, then you have plagiarised that sentence or paragraph; you did not write it but you have still presented it as if you did. You are highly unlikely to fail just because of one copied paragraph but you may lose marks. If you copy and paste lots of bits and pieces from other sources then a larger proportion of your essay will be plagiarised and your assignment will lose a lot of marks or get a failing grade, depending on the amount that has been copied. This does not mean that you can copy and paste lots of bits together, put them in quotation marks and cite the sources, and expect to get a good grade. Of course you can quote from various sources, giving the proper citations, but if the bulk of the essay consists of quotations then the bulk of the essay was not written by you. Copying material and just rephrasing it, without giving the appropriate citations, is also plagiarism, as is submitting an essay that was wholly or partly written by somebody else. Many universities use computer software to detect plagiarism, for example by getting you to submit an electronic copy of your work to a website such as www.turnitin.com. Others may require you to email a copy of your assignment or submit it through a virtual learning environment such as Moodle or WebCT, sometimes in addition to submitting a printed copy; the electronic copy will be used to check for plagiarism. But even if you only have to submit a printed copy of your assignment do not make the mistake of thinking that you can ‘get away’ with plagiarism. Your tutor or lecturer will be far more familiar with the subject than you are and they are also sufficiently experienced to be able to spot the various telltale signs that show a paragraph or section or whole essay has been copied from other sources. So how do I avoid plagiarism? Most of us will copy paragraphs word for word when taking and making notes (and always make sure you add the full citation so you know where you got it). That is perfectly okay – it means that the chance of misunderstanding the point they made is reduced. However, when it comes to writing your essay it is a good idea to use your notes only for reference and ideas and to talk about the points, facts, or ideas expressed within them in your own words, while crediting the original sources of course (see the two sample essays at the end KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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of this chapter). You may feel that you cannot say what they said as well as they did, and that may be the case, but if you try to understand the central message and then relay that in your own words, you are more likely to remember it later than if you had just copied something or memorised it by rote. In addition to reducing your risk of deliberate or inadvertent plagiarism, doing your essays this way will also help you to develop your own personal style of writing.

Third class honours (40–49%) Although this grade band is widely referred to as third class honours, you do not have an honour. If this is your final degree grade then you took an honours degree but only passed it and you will find it almost impossible to get a place on a master’s course in psychology. An essay or exam answer that is awarded a third class mark, the minimum passing grade, may include some of the faults outlined above but to a lesser extent. It may have been too short but with just enough relevant and accurate information to enable the examiner to award a pass. There may have been some minor or moderate factual errors but nothing serious enough to warrant a fail. It may have contained very little academic psychology, been merely a partly-remembered regurgitation of a lecture that was given on the topic, or showed zero or almost no evidence of any reading of even the required texts. A third class answer will also be quite superficial and entirely descriptive. It is a very weak answer that is just barely acceptable for the current stage of your studies. If the essay barely passes in first year psychology then it will probably fail in second year and definitely fail beyond that.

Second class honours, second division (50–59%) If you are studying for an honours degree and your final overall result is at least at this level then congratulations, you got honours. Getting a 2:2 in your earliest university assignments is quite common as you are still learning how to raise your standard from school level to university level. The strategy of writing about what you have learned, or remember, without really delving into to it in any analytical way, would have worked very well in many school subjects and on any post-school certificate courses that you may have taken. Depending on the subject it is a strategy that may have rewarded you with lots of A-grades. However, just as there is a leap in standard from GCSE to A-Level, or from Junior Certificate to Leaving Certificate, there is also another leap forward to university standard. An essay for which you might have got an A at GCSE or Junior Certificate level may have fared no better than a C at A-Level or Leaving Certificate standard. Similarly, an essay that got you an A in your final year at school may earn only a 2:2 at university. At university level a 2:2 is the equivalent of a C-grade. An essay or exam answer that is awarded a 2:2 will usually have accurate content with no more than minor errors. It may have the beginnings of a critical evaluation

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(which is a requirement for a 2:1) but be a little short in length, which has weakened its value. It will be a reasonably good answer to the question that was posed and there will usually be some evidence of having read the required texts and maybe even a little extra. However, the biggest flaw in a 2:2 standard essay or exam answer – what one might even call its defining characteristic – is that it is almost entirely descriptive in nature; this will be discussed below. You may have done loads of reading and thinking about the topic, you may have cited lots of sources in your essay or answer but, instead of developing your points and presenting a strong argument, you have just described lots of facts in a reasonably coherent sequence. Effectively you have just mentioned their existence and perhaps made a one- or two-line comment on them, but no more than that.

Second class honours, first division (60–69%) A 2:1 is the equivalent of a B-grade at university and it is usually the minimum overall grade that you must have in your degree to be eligible to apply for almost all postgraduate courses in psychology. An essay or exam answer that gets a 2:1 is a very good one but still one in which there could have been considerable improvement. It will show clear evidence of an understanding of the topic, it will answer the question that was posed, it will be reasonably well or very well structured (depending on where it lies within this grade band), it will not contain any major errors and no more than one or two very minor ones. The 2:1 essay will show clear evidence that the student has read the key texts and, again depending on the level within this grade band, that s/he has also read extra material around the topic. However, there is one criterion that must be present, in addition to all of the above, and without it the essay cannot get a 2:1 grade: there must be a critical evaluation. This will be discussed below.

First class honours Many students will go through their entire degree course without having received a single first class honours mark in an essay or exam; lab reports are much easier assignments on which to get a first (see Chapter 8). You may have got beyond 70 per cent in every subject you did at school but that does not necessarily mean that you will get firsts at university. This is something that often comes as a shock to students who were high-achievers in school. Getting a first is not a matter of reading as much as you can about a topic and then regurgitating it all in an essay or exam. Indeed, adopting such a strategy could lead to a 2:2 or low 2:1 grade due to a lack of structure or depth of development to your argument and through trying to show what you know instead of answering what you were asked. A first class essay or exam answer is an excellent one; it has earned the university equivalent of an A-grade. It will show clearly that the student has a thorough

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knowledge of the topic and that s/he has read and understood the course materials in addition to a variety of academic sources that are relevant to the area. There will be a very good structure, it will be well-written and, importantly, there will be a clearly identified central argument. The writer will have introduced the key points, presented evidence that will be weighed-up and applied to the central position, drawn conclusions based on the evaluation of this evidence, and then tied together the key evidence and conclusions to provide a coherent concluding section that shows how their case has been made and has succeeded in demonstrating their position. Very few students will produce a first class essay on their first attempt in first year. Indeed, of all the students whom I’ve tutored only three managed to hit 70 per cent on their first undergraduate essay and all three of them eventually graduated with high honours. Many students will get a 2:2 or low 2:1 on their early essays but that does not mean that they will not become high-achievers at university. If you get disappointing results in your early essays do not lose heart as with practice you will get better. Not every psychology department will provide detailed instruction on how to write academic essays. There is a variety of reasons why this might be the case and instruction on essay writing may be left up to individual lecturers and tutors. An assumption that ‘the smarter ones will figure it out’, which, sadly, I have heard expressed aloud, can be found occasionally; it is a sign of poor teaching. Without guidance, students can spend their undergraduate years trying to figure out what they’re doing wrong. In my experience, I have found that there are some very good students out there who will get marks that do not reflect their actual capabilities, simply because they have been rummaging around in the dark trying to find out what it is that they need to do differently to get the higher marks. They have many gifts but divine inspiration is not among them. It takes practice, and sometimes a lot of practice, but by following the guidelines set out in this book every time you write an essay in psychology then you will be off to a good start. Of course, you will still have to do all the work yourself. I am often reminded here of one student whose first two essays, in a course requiring a total of six in the year, got 2:2 grades, much to her disappointment; she had been an A-grade student in school. She had been to my tutorials and had studied the associated handouts and could not understand what she was doing wrong. It can be hard to assess your own work (hence the exercise set out at the end of this chapter) so I talked her through the comments on her essays. On her third one she got a good 2:1. Then, as she said, something clicked and she earned a first on each of her final three essays of that year. She went on to get a first class honours degree and, on the day that she received her final results, thanked me for having been the one who took the time to show her how to write a first class essay.

Think about this for a moment. Based on what you have read so far, what do you think is meant when we say that an essay is descriptive or critical? What do you think might be the difference between these terms?

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What is the difference between descriptive and critical? One of the most common mistakes made in essay writing, and particularly in exams, is to misinterpret what is meant by ‘critical’. We are so used to the idea of being critical as meaning ‘to criticise’ that the trap into which many fall is to find fault with whatever theory, model or statement that they are supposed to evaluate critically, pointing out only the negative aspects or perceived flaws. This means that just one side of an argument has been covered and the criticisms raised may not be justified if they are presented solely due to a misunderstanding of the meaning of ‘critical’. I have found that when students take this approach they rarely use academic literature to support their complaints, merely attacking on the basis of personal opinion or by arguing that some basic aspect of the methodology was flawed. As a result these essays will usually fare no better than a 2:2 grade. Without an explanation of what was done incorrectly, the student is often left puzzled with their mark: I wrote a critical essay and did a lot of work on it so why did I not get a 2:1 or a first? To evaluate something critically means to weigh up the evidence that supports and refutes a particular point or claim and then present an argument that is objective rather than driven by emotion, personal biases, or whatever you think the examiner wants to see. Maybe the point you are evaluating is a definition, and how it applies in a particular setting, in which case you might explore various relevant meanings of the term as they have cropped up in the academic literature. However, rather than just stating a key phrase or idea, the point will have to be developed and discussed. So rather than just giving your final conclusion you must show how you are reaching that point. A descriptive essay, in contrast, just states facts as they are, or as they appear to be, and offers no more than just a line or two by way of comment. It accepts things rather than challenges them and/or it does not read like the development of an argument. Some descriptive essays read more like a grocery list than an academic essay and they often cram together lots of pieces of information, moving swiftly from one to another without comment, elaboration, or discussion. Compare and contrast these two extracts (full paragraphs) both of which come from undergraduate essays in psychology. The first was in a mostly descriptive essay on the development of gender differences before and after birth. The whole essay got a mark of 60 per cent at first year level and the sample paragraph was the only time that any of the information within it was mentioned in the whole essay. The second comes from a longer critical essay on culture and health, which got a grade of 80 per cent at senior undergraduate level. Other than the length of these two paragraphs, can you see what makes one descriptive and one critical?

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Sample paragraph 1 (descriptive)

In the first two months of foetal development gender is undetermined. If, after this time, testosterone is the dominant hormone the foetus will develop male sexual organs; if not the foetus will become female. The mere presence of hormones at this stage of

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development does not in itself guarantee that the initially developing gender will be the final one, however, and occasionally there arise individuals with inconsistencies between any of the various components of sexual anatomy and physiology (Gross, 1996, p. 577). These inconsistencies may arise through chromosome abnormalities where there is a discrepancy between chromosomal sex and external appearance, including the genitalia. The best known of these are Turner’s syndrome (XO) and Klinefelter’s syndrome (XXY) (Gross, 1996, p. 577).

Sample paragraph 2 (critical) We talk of culture but what does it mean? In the business sense, organisational culture has been defined as ‘the commonly held and relatively stable beliefs, attitudes and values that exist within the organisation’ (Williams, Dobson & Walters, 1989). Some tend to think of a country as representing a culture but, as Hughes observed (1994, p. 15), in speaking of America, ‘America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory’. Within any organisation or group, however big or small, there are likely to be represented several or many different cultures, different beliefs, attitudes and values. There are also likely to be many overlapping features of these cultures but it is often true that dominant forces within the group seek to pass on what they perceive as being the correct way to perceive, think and feel. Can we ever look totally objectively at a culture, whether our own or another? ‘We cannot observe cultural practices,’ notes Swartz (1998, p. 5), ‘without remembering that our act of observation is a cultural practice in itself’. Our own personal biases and beliefs will colour how we see those of another. Lewis (1996) says that ‘the route to self-understanding is to question many of those values which were pumped into you when you were young’, and it can be argued that it is precisely this that we must do when faced with trying to understand culture. ‘Culture’, says Littlewood (1992, p. 8), ‘cannot be thought of as a bag of memories and survival techniques which individuals carry about with them and of which they have forgotten to divest themselves. Rather it is a dynamic re-creation by each generation, a complex and shifting set of accommodations, identifications, explicit resistances and reworkings’. Therefore, cultural similarities and differences must be taken into account when attempting to determine if an individual is ill or in need of treatment. ‘Taking culture into account is not simply an issue of whether it is legitimate to apply mainstream schemata to people from other cultures’, warns Eisenberg (1996, p. xiii – cited in Swartz, 1998, p. 59), as ‘diagnosis itself is a cultural issue in mainstream society’.

The first example just states facts and moves on without elaboration or discussion and the only source it cites is an introductory psychology textbook. The second example explores a concept, uses a number of academic sources, and draws conclusions about the importance of culture in a health setting, while alerting the reader of the fact that the very act of diagnosis can also be a cultural act; the rest of the

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essay develops the argument. You should also note the way in which quotations have been presented. The quotation is always integrated into the regular paragraph format in psychology essays and should never be presented as a separate indented paragraph as you would do in an English literature paper. Also, it is presented between double quote marks, not single quote marks. This is important as some anti-plagiarism software will not recognise material presented between single quote marks as being quotations and instead will add them into its assessment of potential plagiarism.

Preparing to write your essay Though the actual process of physically writing your essay may take just a matter of hours, there is a considerable amount of work that needs to be done before you start writing.

Step 1: Read the title carefully This may sound blindingly obvious but it is remarkable how many people fail to do so, particularly in exams. Chapter 6 will include detailed examples of how to break down an essay title so the present discussion will be very brief. Reading a question quickly and then making a snap decision is a trap into which many fall, particularly in an exam. Just because you have spotted a few key words that apply to a particular topic does not necessarily mean that this is what the assignment is about. Break down the title or question. Identify the ‘buzzwords’. Identify all the parts and subparts, both stated and implied. Now determine what the title or question is asking you to do. Is there a specific claim that you are required to debate or is it being left open to you? If there is a specific claim then what are the different sides to its potential arguments? Is there an accepted approach that argues for a combination of these perspectives (as in the nature versus nurture debate where the old dichotomy is replaced by an interaction between the two factors)? If the argument to be presented in the essay is being left up to you then what are you going to choose and why? The wording of the question or title may not directly ask you to argue a point or to take a position but, even so, it is always expected that you will do so – it is an implied requirement for getting a 2:1 or first class honours grade – regardless of what action word appears in the question (e.g. evaluate, describe, discuss, outline, etc.). Approach all your essays and exams in that frame of mind and you are already on your way towards doing well.

Step 2: Conduct your literature review Having determined what key questions and debates relate to the assigned topic and what you intend your position or argument to be, focus your reading in those directions. If you are going to evaluate something you need evidence to support your KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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position or at least that covers the topic from different perspectives. If there is little to no published or accessible literature that directly applies to the question, then look for the literature on concepts that can be related or applied to the assigned task. For example, if the topic was on identifying factors involved in the strength of people’s religious beliefs (as was the case in an undergraduate thesis I supervised a few years ago), you could also review the literature on attitudes; how they are formed or strengthened, or how they relate to behaviour, for example. You may find that you do not have the time to read every journal article that you think might be useful. In that case use what you have learned from Chapter 3 and also The 6 W’s from Chapter 2 to go through the articles quickly so that you can decide whether or not you are likely to cite them in your essay. While doing your reading, take down the full reference for every source you read and use. Doing so at this stage will save you loads of time later when it comes to producing the references section of your essay!

Step 3: Reconsider the title Now that you have read about and around the topic you should have another look at the title of the assignment. Has your interpretation of it changed? Perhaps another potential argument or approach occurred to you while you were reading and now your essay will take a direction that is different to what you had originally thought. If so, does that new approach still meet the requirements of the assigned task? It is likely that your final decision on the way you will handle the essay will be made at this time. This may lead you to read a little more or perhaps you will decide that some of the notes you made can be stored and used at another time. You can now start to write the essay but do reread the title and requirements from time to time, just to make sure that you do indeed ATFQ.

Step 4: Forming an argument Throughout this chapter and the previous one I have been telling you of the importance of having a clear argument in your essays. Technically it is a claim that you state in your introduction and the argument is the way in which you present the evidence that supports your claim. In stating your claim (this essay will demonstrate clearly that A is a better approach than B …) you may also give an indication of what your argument will be (… as the new methodologies employed in A have enabled a more detailed examination of how this phenomenon works than was possible with B). Most students are already expert at arguing before they come to university; it is something that comes naturally to us. You want something, somebody does not want you to have it, so you get a little annoyed and state a list of various reasons as to why you should get what you want. Or maybe it is you who does not want to give in to something and so you will argue, in every way that you can think of, all the reasons why you are right and the other person is wrong. Some of these reasons may be valid while others may lack validity, but we will try everything we can think of in the hope that at least one or two points from our blitz attack will hit

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their target. When trying to form a claim and an argument for your essays you will be doing something similar, only in a more organised way. You have been at the lectures (at least, I hope you have) and attended the tutorials (they tend to be compulsory) and you have done some of the required reading. As you read the essay title some ideas may come to mind. Perhaps you agree with what is said or implied in the title, maybe you disagree, you might not have formed an opinion one way or the other or perhaps you just don’t care. Whatever your thoughts you will have to take a position and defend it. Agreeing or disagreeing are the best options; arguing that you don’t care (as I have seen in a few exam answers) will not be well received. Once you have broken down the title (see Chapter 6) and have decided on your claim, your angle, then you can start to think about how you will present your argument. You might go back through your lecture notes and/or reread the chapter in your textbook and jot down some notes about the key points that seems to apply. Maybe a slightly different angle might come to mind, in which case you might decide to reorganise the notes you have just made. The next step will be to break down the assigned word count to determine just how much space you can devote to each point (see Narrowing Your Focus below). You know how to argue but do you know how to do it well? If you have been an active part of a debating club then you will have had lots of experience with the formulation of good arguments. However, you may not have had the opportunity to be involved in such activities and so may be more prone to making errors in your reasoning. Such errors are known as fallacies and some of the more common ones are highlighted below. There are lots more of these and I would recommend that you have a look at books or websites that cover the topic in more detail. You should also read through your essays to see if you are making any of these errors and, if you spot one or more of them, try to correct them. –

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ad hominem: This Latin phrase means ‘against the person’ and this is where you dismiss the evidence or the argument of somebody purely on the basis of who they are. Maybe you do not like the person or hold them in high regard or are dismissing them because of something like their age, gender, or background. Maybe they gave you a bad grade or they have irritating habits or their personal style is never in fashion. Perhaps their job, profession, or social or cultural background is one that you think must hold certain beliefs and so you have dismissed what they have to say on those grounds, quite probably without justification. But do any of these things have anything to do with the veracity of their argument? Yet you will hear this type of argument all around you: don’t listen to anything that one has to say about the state of the economy, she wouldn’t even bid you the time of day if she saw you on the street. Why would failing to say hello have any impact on her professional opinions as an economist? ad hominem tu quoque: This second part of this Latin phrase means ‘you too!’ and this fallacy occurs when your argument is that the person advocating against something is guilty of that very thing themselves. You should not smoke as it is bad for your health, said the person with the four-pack-a-day habit. However, just because Paul is a very heavy smoker and is also the person dispensing this health warning does not mean that smoking is not bad for your health. Appeal to authority: Just because the famous actor Joe Bloggs or the superstar model Jane Doe say that something is good, bad, right or wrong is not evidence of the veracity of the claim; it

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is just their opinion. So, if you are trying to argue your case in an essay you need to weigh up the academic opinions that have been generated by theory and research and not try to argue your position purely by saying that it is so because some well-known person said that it was. Appeal to ignorance: Just because there is no evidence to support a point does not mean that it is not true. Similarly if you claim that something must be true or must be real purely because nobody has been able to disprove it then you are also committing the fallacy of appealing to ignorance. Appeal to pity: Please don’t fail me because my dog was hit by a car and I had to bring him to the vet and then my wallet was stolen and I couldn’t get a taxi home and I had to walk and it was raining heavily and when I got home I couldn’t find my key and I had to call my sister to get the spare one and it was really late and I felt so sick I just had to go to bed and couldn’t finish the essay. That is very unfortunate for you but, I’m sorry, this is not a valid argument as to why a bad essay should receive a passing grade. Your work will be assessed on what you hand in and not on what you might have written if your personal circumstances had been different. Appeal to popularity: This is a very common fallacy and can be witnessed where someone tries to argue on the basis that ‘everyone’ says it is so. But, of course, just because a practice or attitude has had majority approval, real or imagined, does not mean that it is the best way of doing things or even that it is appropriate in a changing world. Appeal to tradition: This is the way it has always been done in the past so that must be the best way to do it. Of course this is not necessarily true but it is a problem that can be encountered when, having done or studied the research that demonstrates a better approach to the task or problem, you find that your audience will not listen, dismissing your claims purely because it is different to what they’ve always done in the past. Confusing cause and effect: My favourite example, from when I was an undergraduate, is a statement that there is a high degree of positive correlation between eating ice-cream and being pregnant so does this mean that eating ice-cream makes you pregnant? If your conclusion is yes, then you have confused cause and effect. These two items may go together quite often but it does not mean that one causes the other; there could be lots of other factors that you have not considered. False dichotomy: Sometimes as students we commit this fallacy by accident, largely because we have limited knowledge about a topic. This error occurs when we argue that there are only two options and we work to dismiss one of them and then use this as evidence that the other must be the correct answer. There may be many other possibilities but we have dismissed them through omission, either deliberately or inadvertently. If you want to avoid doing this then make sure that when you present only two options and then eliminate one of them, that you suggest this means that Option A appears to be a better explanation of the phenomenon than does Option B. It would also help if, somewhere in the essay, you had indicated your knowledge of other possibilities but explained why you were taking just these two. Hasty generalisation: If you look at only two or three sources and they say the same thing then you may be tempted to presume that they are reflective of the overall academic opinion on the topic. However, you might have found the only two or three papers that disagree with the wider academic community and so may have jumped to a premature conclusion. Of course if you read the papers carefully, rather than just looking for the ‘quotable one-liner’, you should be aware of whether or not they agree or disagree with the overall body of literature on the topic. You will come across this in your statistics classes when you will have to consider how the sample of participants that you tested may or may not be representative of the population as a whole. post hoc: This means ‘after this’ in Latin and it is a term that you will come across during your statistics classes. When it comes to arguments the post hoc fallacy refers to making the erroneous

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assumption that because B followed A, this means that A caused B. You were nervous about sitting your statistics exam so you ate some chocolate while waiting to enter the room. You passed the exam and so conclude that the chocolate helped you. You now decide that you should eat chocolate before every exam to guarantee that you pass. Red herring: Many mystery stories in popular fiction contain red herrings, threads of action or thought that are designed to lead you in the wrong direction. These stories will eventually steer you back on the correct path. However, if you use the red herring strategy in your essays you will go off on a tangent and end up arguing for something that is removed from what should have been your central claim. Slippery slope: This occurs when you string together a sequence of steps or events that develop into a conclusion of dire consequences for which there is no real evidence. It is a form of argumentation that can lead the writer to go off on a tangent. For example, you might have said that specific drugs are prescribed for certain conditions, that these drugs can cause side effects, and that in rare cases there might be the complication of organ damage so the person may need a transplant and there are so many people on waiting lists that they might be tempted to buy an organ on the black market and thereby fuel the illicit international trade in body parts. So you conclude that the drug market is indirectly boosting the illicit trade in body parts. Where is your evidence to support this claim? The premise does not logically lead to the conclusion. Straw man: If you can anticipate potential counterarguments to your claims and defend against them in advance then this can be a useful strategy that strengthens your overall argument. However, if you try to do this by presenting an over-simplified or wildly exaggerated version of your opponent’s position just to dismiss it and claim that their actual position is to be rejected, then you are committing a fallacy. Not only are you misrepresenting the opposing position but you are weakening your own one by having to stoop to such often-obvious tactics.

The structure of your essay Although we all know that there has to be a start, middle and end to any essay, many students will still forget this. The result is often an essay that starts and just keeps going, sometimes in no particular direction. In other words, it lacks a structure and this is a flaw that can make the difference between getting a 2:2 and a 2:1, or better. Sometimes the problem is that there has been a misunderstanding about the role of the introductory and concluding sections of an essay. When it comes to exams I have several times overhead one student tell another just to write and write and write, whatever comes to mind – tell them all that you know – and then when the announcement is made that the time is nearly up, to finish whatever you were saying and start the next sentence with ‘in conclusion’. After you finish that sentence you are done. That is not good advice. It may appear to work for some students who would claim to have done this and got a 2:1. However, it is likely that they had some degree of a critical evaluation in their ramblings, which was enough to get the grade, but that they could have done much better had they used a proper structure for the essay. Many students who just write whatever they can think of about a topic will end up with a 2:2 or third. The four parts to any academic essay in psychology are the introduction, the main body, the concluding section, and the references. Of course, you do not need to produce a references section in an exam! Each part plays an important role and, in my KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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experience, an essay that lacks a good introduction and a good concluding section will not score particularly well. These different sections should be obvious to the reader, due to their content and structure, so you should not put in headings that clearly show introduction, main body, and conclusions.

Think about this for a moment. Imagine that you have been given an essay assignment with the following title: ‘Is there a relationship between intelligence and reaction time? What does this tell us about intelligence?’ What information do you think might go into the introduction? How might you structure your opening paragraph?

Part 1: The introduction The introduction is like the abstract on a report or journal article in that it provides an outline for the whole paper. It also informs the reader as to how the paper will proceed: what it will show, how it will show it, what the writer’s position is, and how the argument presented will answer the question that was posed. One approach might be to pose a series of questions and then state how these questions will be answered in the course of the essay. For example: ‘Tom has a problem. He has this symptom (identify what this is) and that symptom and some other symptom. What problem might he have?’ Another approach might be to identify the context, include some background information on the topic being covered, and then define the key terms. This could then be followed by identification of any major issues that should be considered when reviewing this topic, which of these you will present, and what it is exactly that your essay is arguing. As with the rest, this should always be written in the third person. Hence, there should be no mention of I, you, we, my, your, the author, the reader, etc. Although this section, which is usually no more than one or two paragraphs in length, outlines the structure of the entire paper, it should never read like a shopping list or instruction manual. Also, the language of the introduction should always be positive; you will never ‘attempt’ anything and you do not ‘hope’ anything. Instead, this paper will clearly demonstrate … As an example, let’s say the question (on an Introduction to Psychology paper or Individual Differences paper, rather than a Cognition paper) was this: ‘Is there a relationship between intelligence and reaction time? What does this tell us about intelligence?’

Think about this for a moment. How might the introduction to such an essay look?

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Example of a bad introduction

In this essay I will attempt to show that there is a relationship between reaction time and IQ. First I will talk about studies on reaction time. Then I will talk about IQ testing. Having looked at the literature I will then see if the two variables are related. It is hoped that it will then be possible to say what this tells us about intelligence.

This is a bad introduction for a psychology essay. I am not trying to be funny but this is the very sort of opening that I have seen time and time again in psychology course essays and exam scripts. Straight away the reader is thinking – oh dear, probably only a pass or maybe a 2:2 coming up here; could even be a fail. So what is wrong with it?

Think about this for a moment. Without reading the answer below, try to identify the flaws in this sample introduction.

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It is much too short. The writer will ‘attempt’ and also ‘hopes’, suggesting that s/he is uncertain of what they are doing. The writer says that s/he is going to talk about studies – here comes a descriptive essay! There is repeated mention of I. It is a list of things that the writer will do, even though the essay is supposed to be evaluating what has been found already. What is IQ? There was no mention of that in the question? If you want to use an abbreviation you must give the full term the first time you mention it and put the abbreviation in brackets, e.g. intelligence quotient (IQ). Exactly what is it that you are going to look at in relation to intelligence testing? Wait, you are going to look at the literature on reaction time and, separately, the literature on intelligence testing? Surely you should have reviewed the literature that focuses on these two together. Only then will you determine whether or not the variables are related – really? You are supposed to know the answer to that question before you start writing! And after all of this you are hoping to find out the answer to the question that is supposed to be the whole point of your essay. So what is the answer to the questions posed in the title and how will you argue your position?

Compare this example to the one below; you should be able to spot the difference in quality quite easily. With an introduction like the ‘good introduction’ below, the reader is more likely to be thinking – oh good, potentially a solid to high 2:1 or even a first coming up here. Once again, the essay title was: ‘Is there a relationship between intelligence and reaction time? What does this tell us about intelligence?’

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Example of a good introduction

Research (e.g. Joe & Bloggs, 1972) has shown that there is a negative linear relationship between intelligence and reaction time, that is, those who score more highly on an intelligence test tend to show quicker reaction times in laboratory tests. These laboratory tests typically involve responding to lights or images on a computer screen. The intelligence tests used are usually standard measures of what is known as one’s intelligence quotient (IQ). There are a number of methods of assessing IQ and these will be outlined briefly below. The issue of whether intelligence is something that owes its existence to learning, experience, and our environment (nurture) or whether it is entirely biologically determined (nature) has been the subject of much debate. Results from reaction time studies provide evidence that supports the nature side of the debate but, as will be clearly demonstrated, these findings do not settle the issue. In fact it can be argued that they support the proposition that intelligence is a result of the interaction between biological and environmental factors.

Think about this for a moment. Why is this introduction better than the first one? What are its strengths? Can you identify any weaknesses?

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This is a clear and concise introduction of a length that would be appropriate for a 1500 word essay, although it could be a bit longer. Both questions posed by the title have been answered in the opening statement. The first piece of academic research has been introduced and cited. When you use phrases like ‘Research has shown’ or ‘studies have demonstrated’, always cite at least one source as an example. The methods that are usually used in these studies have been identified. The concept of intelligence quotient (IQ) has been introduced as an example of one way in which intelligence is measured, and the abbreviation has been provided. Now this abbreviation can be used throughout the essay. The fact that there are different ways of assessing IQ has been stated but the writer does not go off into a tangent by talking about them here. A major debate in psychology has been introduced and applied to the question at hand. The writer has stated her/his argument. The reader has a good idea of how the essay will be structured.

This introduction was written a few years ago, as you might have guessed given that the only source cited here (not a real one) dates from 1972, though it was written during the current century. Ideally the research that you review in your essays should have been published within the past five years and certainly this century. However, from time to time it will be necessary to include older material as the key theory, model, or paradigm may have originated quite some time ago. In an essay

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with the title used above, a student would be expected to base their paper almost entirely on recent publications.

Narrowing your focus and breaking down the size of the essay You may have noted that the writer of the second introductory paragraph identified the specific things that would be discussed and the direction in which s/he was taking that discussion. Unless you are told that you must talk about one thing or another, it is up to you what will be included in the essay. This is one of the reasons why the introduction section is so important. Let’s say that there were seven key points that your lecturer covered in class but you are being allowed only 1500 words in which to argue your case. So what do you do? Do you try to cram in all seven points? If the points were something like diagnostic criteria for a psychological disorder then, yes, you will have to comment on them all. However, for many topics you will find that you can narrow your focus. If you have 1500 words in which to write your essay then you will need to set aside up to 300 for your introduction and the same amount for the concluding section. This leaves you with no more than 900 words for the main body of the essay, and that is not much. If you try to deal with seven points in a critical manner then you will find it very difficult to manage within 900 words. However, if you choose just two points as being good examples or illustrations of whatever it is that you have to write about, then you will have 450 words available for each one. That is still very little room but it is manageable. (There are tips on how to edit and shorten what you have written given in the next chapter.) If you are happy with your introduction and find that it is only 240 words, then you will have another 60 to play with in the main body of the text. Should you choose to narrow your focus in this way, then it is essential that you identify, in your introduction, the specific angle or points that you are going to evaluate. If you do not do this then the reader is left to wonder whether or not you are aware that the other five points exist or, if you do, that you know what they are. This could mean the difference between getting a 2:2 or a 2:1, or even between earning a 2:1 or a first. So remember, your introduction is very important. It is like an abstract of the whole essay in which you clearly identify the topic, any relevant key methods or approaches that are associated with it, any key debates that may also be relevant, the answer to the question, and how it is that you will defend your position. It is not a ‘to do’ list or set of instructions and it is not some thoughtful musings on the subject.

Part 2: The main body This is, obviously, the bulk of the essay. It is where you must present, in detail, your arguments and evidence. Rather than just state facts you need to analyse the material, explain and elaborate some points, and then show why concepts or points

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are important. You need to present a balanced argument by using published research papers (rather than introductory textbooks) to support your claims. Remember that introductory texts are like extended essays; the work they cite was done by others and, hence, the authors of a textbook are also only commenting on, discussing, and debating the findings of others. So if your introductory textbook was written by Tom and Jerry (2000) you cannot claim that Tom and Jerry (2000) did such-and-such piece of research when all they did was talk about what someone else did; this is a remarkably common error. You may find it helpful to go back through the above section on the differences between a descriptive essay and a critical one, paying particular attention to the sample paragraphs that came from the main body of different essays. The main body of the essay should be well structured and organised and also written entirely in a paragraph format. Avoid using bullet points! There is no need for them and they lead the writer into a common trap. All too often students who use bullet points will come away thinking that they have discussed a particular point or area, yet have done nothing more than provide a series of bullet points, with no comment, explanation, or evaluation. If there are, say, four points to something, then integrate them into the text. For example, there are four major sections of a critical essay: (i) the introduction; (ii) the main body of the text; (iii) the concluding section; and (iv) the references section. You can then proceed to discuss each point in turn. A useful strategy is to focus initially on your first major point, evaluating the relevant academic literature while reminding yourself to maintain a critical standpoint. Complete this section with a quick summary statement of the key or central subpoints and then tie them together in a conclusion that shows how all that you’ve just discussed provides an answer to at least part of the overall question. Go back and reread the essay title to make sure that you have not gone off at a tangent. Then move on to your second point and do exactly the same as you did for the first one.

Part 3: The conclusion This section, which should usually be only one or two paragraphs in length, ties together all that you have said in the course of the essay. It outlines what has been discussed, how it fits together, shows how any questions posed were answered and what the implications are, and what can be concluded on the basis of the evidence presented. It is a discussion, not a shopping list, and so will be written in the same style as the introduction section. If your essay was structured in the format suggested above, then the structure of your concluding section becomes easy. Restate the key question that is at the heart of the question posed, identify the summary and concluding points that you would have raised for each side of the argument, and then draw this together to come to a final conclusion. This final conclusion should, obviously, match the conclusion you stated at the end of your introduction – yes, again, I have occasionally seen essays or exam answers where the final conclusion was completely different to what had been stated in the introduction.

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A commonly-made error is to leave out this section completely or to replace it with a single sentence that starts off with the words ‘In conclusion …’ and finishes with a one-line answer to the question that was posed. If you do either of these things then you are throwing away marks and yet I have seen both on literally hundreds of exam answers. In almost every case the student would have got a slightly higher grade had they included a proper concluding section.

Part 4: The references section This is very important and failing to do your references properly is a silly way to lose marks for essays or reports. Remember that in psychology this section is called References and not Bibliography. Different subject areas have different ways of organising this section but you need to stick to that used in psychology. A list of references must be provided at the end of the essay; these are the materials and sources that you cited within it. If you read something but did not actually cite it, then it should not appear in the references section. Some people will type up their essay and then spend a boring hour or more just typing up their references. The quickest and least painful way to compile your list of references is to type them in as you type the essay. That is, as soon as you make the citation in the essay, scroll to the end and slot in the reference. There are different styles for citing references and then listing them. The APA format is the one you should always use for psychology and while examples are given below you will be able to find more comprehensive descriptions of the rules online.

Within the text of the essay –

After you make a statement, put the author’s name and the year in brackets at the end and place a full-stop after the citation; for example (Weiss, 1998). – If you are referring to something on a specific page within the text, or giving a direct quotation, then give the page number as follows (Weiss, 1998, p. 123). – If there are two authors for the same book/journal article then write this as, for example ( Joe & Bloggs, 2000, p. 32). You should never cite this as ( Joe, 2000) or ( Joe et al., 2000). – If the piece of information you are giving comes from, say, two or three different books/ journals then give this as (Bloggs, 2000; Joe, 1999; Smith & Jones, 1999), making sure that they are ordered in date order (most recent first). – If you find a quote or a reference to a text within a different text, identify the original author – for example, Smith (1989) said – and give the reference of the source in which you found this as (as cited in Anderson, 1991, p. 78). The full reference for both these sources must be provided in full and separated from each other in the references section – there should be no mention of the Anderson source in your full citation of Smith (1989) and the phrase ‘as cited in’ must never appear in your references section! – The first time you mention a reference that has three, four or five authors, you must list all the names (e.g. Tom, Jerry, Bloggs, Doe & Murphy, 2000). – On the second and subsequent times that you cite this same reference you may give it as (Tom et al., 2000). But ‘et al.’ must not appear in the references section at the end of the essay! – If there are six or more authors then you must use et al. both the first time and every time thereafter.

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End of essay

Here you must list, in alphabetical order of surnames, all the references you placed in the text. For example, the following are how you must list a chapter or paper in an edited book, a journal article, and a book. You can use these as a basic template. Piaget, J. (1970). The stages of the intellectual development of the child. In P.H. Mussen, J.J. Congor & J. Kagan (Eds.), Readings in child development and personality. (pp. 291–302). New York: Harper & Row. Weiss, R.S. (1998). A taxonomy of relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, (15), 671–683. Williams, A., Dobson, P. & Walters, M. (1989). Changing culture: new organizational approaches. London: Institute of Personnel Management.

The full reference – all the names – must be included in the references section at the end of the essay or report; no et als here. You will notice how part of the references above are in italics. If you are citing a journal article then it is the name of the journal that goes in italics. If you are citing a book then the name of the book goes in italics. Alternatively you can underline these items. Don’t mix your styles though, pick one and stick to it. Also, you should note that the full stop/period goes after the reference, not before. The reference, after all, is a part of the sentence so why would you put it after the full-stop? Always remember, all the references mentioned in the text must go in your references section at the end of the essay. Every good academic book or journal article has their references listed at the end (or at the bottom of a chapter) so there is no excuse for not including them. Just make sure that you put them in the APA format as they may be in a different style in the place where you found them. For example, the references section at the end of this book is not in the APA format. There is no particular number of references that have to be provided in an essay or report (unless you are told otherwise for a specific assignment). However, you should use as many sources as possible. If you mention a study within an essay that was mentioned within a text from which you took a piece of information then this reference must also be listed in your references section. The details of the reference will appear at the end of the work from which you found the material.

Summary This chapter has covered a lot of ground and some aspects will be developed further in Chapter 6 when we move on to the topic of exams. Writing good academic essays is arguably the most important skill that you will develop during the course of your degree and yet it is one area in which students are often given minimal formal training. Just handing out an essay title, a brief handout and saying ‘Off you go’ is not sufficient training for such an important task. Nor is sending first year students off to the library to research a topic to then have them talk about it to the group a week or two later; giving oral presentations and writing essays are different skills and being good at one does not necessarily mean that you will be good at the other. Luckily many students will have the good fortune to have access to an

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effective tutorial system or to classes on critical thinking and essay writing. But even so, it will take a lot of work and a similar amount of practice to master the technique of writing a good academic essay. The guidelines that have been presented in this chapter have been developed through personal experience as both a student and a teacher. They have been tried and tested in several universities and/or departments and with students who were either pursuing a full-time or part-time degree in psychology or were studying psychology as a part of a nursing, general arts, or business qualification. Many students who have followed these recommendations, in both their coursework and exams, have seen their grades improve, sometimes by quite a bit.

Sample essay exercise The two essays that follow are real essays that were submitted by an undergraduate student doing an honours degree in psychology. Full permission has been given by that former student to use them here (their author now has a PhD) and these have been chosen for specific reasons. Neither contributed towards the student’s final degree mark, though they were compulsory assignments as part of small-group tutorial classes, and between them they contain examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly in essay writing. The exercise that I would like you to perform is one that I have been giving to all the first year and second year psychology undergraduates that have been assigned to my tutorial groups in the past few years and one that each has said they found to be a useful learning experience. In this chapter you will have learned about how to write a critical essay in psychology, and also about what not to do. In my experience as a tutor I have found that students can struggle to remember all of this advice when it comes to writing their own essays and that is why I devised this exercise for them. The two essays presented below are of differing standards; one is good and the other is weak. Your mission, should you choose to accept it (which I hope you do), is to read each of these essays with a critical eye to identify their strengths and weaknesses and to make a note of the things in them that you should not do and those that you would do differently. Note also why these things are good, weak, or bad and also how and why you would do something differently. If you think that some aspects of the essays are good then ask yourself this: how could these be even better? Go back through this chapter to remind yourself of the things that you should consider. My tutorial students, who have done this exercise, have used the first essay below as the initial piece to be evaluated but a different and much longer essay for the second part. Common initial responses when asked to perform the exercise are ‘But I don’t know anything about those topics’, ‘I’m only a first year and I haven’t written a university essay yet so how can I judge these ones?’, ‘Does it matter if I don’t understand the subject matter in the essays?’ and ‘O-kaaaay’ (while nodding and smiling yet looking a little worried). The purpose of the exercise is not to teach you about the topics that have been covered in the essays but to show you how to write critical essays on pretty much any topic in psychology. By following the guidelines KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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set out in this chapter and applying them to these essays you should be able to identify many of the strengths and weaknesses of both papers. The idea is that by making you go through somebody else’s essay with a critical eye this will help you to identify and correct errors that you might make in your own essays, preferably before you have submitted them. Annotated versions of these two essays are provided in the appendices section but you should complete the task yourself and only read those comments and suggestions after you have performed your own evaluation of the essays.

Essay 1: The value of qualitative methods in psychology ‘Begone foul demon!’ cry the extremist experimental psychologists. ‘Only that which can be measured with numbers is of relevance to us scientists’. ‘Only that which can be concretely shown to exist is of value’. What poppycock! Without qualitative methods in psychology the field, of science if you wish to call it so, would be a laughably closed-minded endeavour, claiming to explain or help to explain the richness of humanity and yet failing miserably to provide us with anything more valuable than details of reaction times and processing speeds, responses to stimuli and the number of times that one scratched one’s nose during a conversation. These are, no doubt, all fascinating and exciting events but they tell us no more about what it means to be human than typing into a word processor and printing the results tells us anything about how a computer works. Humanity is about life, living, emotion, cognition. It is about millions of unique experiences, feelings and ideas stored within millions of individuals scattered around the globe. One cannot deny voice to these considerations and claim to adequately explain the human condition. Psychology purports to be the science of the mind but the mind is much more than the sum of its parts, reaction times and processing speeds. Without the use of qualitative methods in complementing the necessary quantitative analyses, psychology cannot succeed in this mission. In presenting this argument I will first look at what is meant by qualitative research and then show, by example from several different fields of study within psychology, the value of such methodologies. Qualitative research consists, say Banister and colleagues, of three things. It is an attempt to capture the sense that lies within, that structures what we say about what we do. It is an exploration, elaboration and systematization of the significance of an identified phenomenon. It is the illuminative representation of the meaning of a delimited issue or problem. There is no single qualitative methods, and quite different aims will be accomplished by different interpretative approaches. (Banister, Burman, Parker, Taylor & Tindall, 1994, p. 3). For example, administration of a paper and pencil test that asks participants to describe their feelings or opinions towards, say, the admittance of mature students to university, may be suitable and appropriate for one setting whereas the analysis of answers given in a face-toface interview may be more useful for, say, investigating what illness really means to an individual. Why the different methodologies? Simply, in the first example opinions are requested and required but heartfelt feelings are not really necessary.

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If, however, one really want to gain some insight into the patient experience, one needs to employ a methodology that allows for the emotion and feeling to be communicated. The face-to-face interview is invaluable here. Merely administering cold, sterile questionnaires, for example, that can be processed and analysed by a computer is, in these examples, going to miss the point. So can findings from a qualitative study be generalisable? Not necessarily. So what then is the value of the study? My statistical analyses, large samples, emotionless questionnaires, sterile processing and dehumanisation leaves me able to draw inferences about meaningful processes within the general population and are, therefore, of use. True, but human beings are not depersonalised automatons whose behaviour, moods and thought processes can be predicted, labelled and neatly packaged. There are, as I’ve shown, times when the more human touch is required. One of the features of quantitative methodologies is that they try to eliminate the room for subjective interpretation of findings, and therefore to attempt to produce a clear and unmediated representation of the object of the study. What is quantitative data? It is information that can be meaningfully represented in numerical form. (Coolican, 1994) For example, should one decide to investigate the frequency with which undergraduates stay late in university computer rooms and the stage of the academic term during which these late night vigils are most likely to occur, one could do the following. First record the instances of this occurrence throughout each academic term. Then enter the tallies into a computerised statistics programme for analysis. Using these computer-generated results, one can confidently predict during what periods university computer facilities will be under most strain at 2am. Of course statistics can only lend support for or against hypotheses – they never ‘prove’ anything. It is only possible to confirm or reject the null hypothesis, that gem of scientific research meaning merely that one hypothesises the results will not be significant. Given this shortcoming of quantitative methodologies, the accusation by those extremist experimental psychologists that a fundamental flaw of qualitative research is that it ‘proves’ nothing, suggests that a fundamental insecurity lurks behind their veil of certainty. So what then is qualitative data? It consists of any information, gathered during research, which has not (yet, at least) been quantified in any rigorous way. (Coolican, 1994, p. 384) So my collection of reaction times waiting to be analysed are qualitative? No. These would be quantitative – data awaiting, or already having gone through, the process or number crunching (or statistical analysis). Qualitative data is analysed not for its mathematically rigid qualities but for its meaning and content. Take, for example, the following from a team research project entitled ‘Patient Psychological Care in the General Hospital Setting’ (Brogan et al., 1999). When trying to learn something about the experience of illness and need for patient psychological care, which is more meaningful, the cold, statistical analysis or the qualitative perspective that follows? ‘It can be clearly seen from this table that the overall percentage of patients meeting the criteria for a diagnosis of M.U.S. is 3.8%’. ‘…there were days when she raged and days when she was in despair and days when she was in tremendous silence and days when she hated me and days when she KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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loved me. Everything was intense’. Clearly this is a case when the qualitative provides a more meaningful statement than the quantitative. In this study, the team investigated the level and type of psychological care being provided to patients in the general hospital setting in Dublin. Questionnaires could have been designed or statistics computed to show numbers of hospitals, practitioners, clinicians, providing psychological care but a study of purely this nature would have missed out on the richness of human experience. That experience sampled was the perceptions and feelings of both practitioners and patients alike with regard to the actual human experience of this situation. The description of one doctor of having a psychologist working in his pain clinic as being like ‘manna from heaven’ or the deep emotion experienced by some patients as ‘soul pain’ say more than any statistical analysis ever could. So what fields of study within the umbrella of psychology benefit from the integration of qualitative methodologies with the more traditional quantitative ones? The list is a long one but includes such fields as communication and language, gender studies, social psychology, personality theory, thinking and health psychology. We shall take a brief look at each in turn. Communication is arguably the most fundamental aspect of all interactions between animals, including of course, humans. It comes in numerous guises including spoken words, body language, intonation, posture and gesture, and so on. How can something so vague and that relies on a such a high level of individual intuition be studied by churning out reams of statistics? So what if x% of us gesture with our hands while talking and y% remain motionless, for example. A more qualitative analysis of the observed human interaction might tell us that hand gestures by the speaker were used to add emphasis to the meaning of the words, for example, or that facial expressions indicated the degree of attention that the listener was engaged in, pieces of information that are inherently more useful as a description of the processes that were going on during the encounter. Of course, that is not to say that the statistical information was not also of use. I merely stress once again that one cannot make use of the statistical in many circumstances without the added flavour of the qualitative. Gender studies have become an increasing popular area of study, with a prominent argument in the field being the androcentric nature of psychology. Psychology’s theories and definitions have traditionally been based on the male perspective with the female case seemingly as a deviation from the male (for example, see Freud). This is the reason why feminist psychologists have been to the fore of the qualitative movement, recognising that women’s unique experience of what it is to be female within a male-dominated environment can only be adequately studied using qualitative methodologies. Social psychology is a different story as it derives arguably as much benefit from the more quantitative approach as it does from the qualitative. For example, the nature of most attitude studies is such that merely an indication of belief, scored in a standard five-point scale, is adequate. In case of more searching investigations in which the degree of convictions may be informative, application of more qualitative methodologies, such as asking participants to explain their feelings in writing, would be more appropriate.

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The very term ‘personality theory’ is suggestive of qualitative methods. Freud, Adler, Jung and Rogers, for example, did not need to recourse to the realms of mathematics in order to formulate their theories of the nature of humanity, and one would seriously doubt any of their more modern counterparts did either. The cognitive science of thinking, one of the major fields in cognitive psychology, relies heavily on quantitative methods. However, some areas of research within the field rely largely on the qualitative approach, for example research into the phenomenon of daydreaming. Health psychology, a relatively new and rapidly growing field within psychology, is largely dependent upon qualitative data. A key topic in this field is the investigation of the relationship between culture and health, an area that would obviously be rendered fairly meaningless should qualitative values and methods be discarded. This paper has only taken a cursory glance at the areas within psychology where use of qualitative methods of analysis can prove invaluable: to provide examples from further branches of the field would be to risk repetition. The message should, however, be clear. If psychology wishes to continue to grow and develop as a science, it must be willing to embrace its proverbial black sheep, qualitative methodologies. Live long and prosper O foul demon!

References

Banister, P., Burman, E., Parker, I., Taylor, M. & Tindall, C. (1994). Qualitative methods in psychology: a research guide. Buckingham: Open University Press. Coolican, H. (1994). Research methods and statistics in psychology (2nd ed.). London: Hodder & Stoughton. Woolgar, S. (1988). Science: the very idea. Chichester: Ellis Horwood.

Essay 2: Is nightwork a hazard to health? ‘…the human body and mind are meant to sleep at night and be active during daylight. Some workers can adapt to working continually during the night but even among these certain health disorders are prominent’ (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997, p. 274). Despite this, increasing numbers of people are being asked to work at night. If one makes the switch to working only at night and sleeping by day then the body may acclimatise, just as it would if changing time zones. However, for many night work is an irregular feature of their occupational timetable with night shifts alternating with day. This is where the problems arise. Even so, the recently broadcast Irish documentary Léargas reported that an estimated 20% of the Irish workforce now work at night. This essay will look briefly at why nightwork has become such a busy employment area, the organisation of shifts, the effects on the body’s circadian rhythms and the health difficulties associated with nightwork. Increased demands for productivity and changes in lifestyle over the past fifty years or so have seen more and more people finding work at night. The availability of electricity was largely responsible. World War II also played a large part in this

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revolution as demands for munitions was high and continual, offensive and defensive missions were often carried out under cover of darkness and greater strain was placed on the emergency services than ever before. That is not to say that there was nobody working night shifts before then, on the contrary. As long as there have been facilities providing care for the sick there have been people working through the night. Most of the common farm animals give birth to their young at night so large and busy farms usually have people working during the night throughout the annual calving, lambing and foaling seasons. Public houses didn’t have to close and hotels are usually open 24 hours a day. Newspapers too have staff working at night. The main difference today is that there are so many people from all walks of life working at night with about 20% of the Irish population engaged in night work (Léargas, RTÉ, 1998). As more companies and businesses take on night staff there is a knock-on effect. As the afore mentioned documentary also pointed out, the more people that are working in, say, offices and factories at night, the more taxis, coffee shops, garage shops and night-clubs will be made available, hence more nighttime staff required. The duration of the night shift varies though many businesses work on a threeshift rotation. A common European shift organisation sees the early shift on from 0600–1400hrs, the late days shift from 1400–2200hrs and the night shift from 2200–0600hrs (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997, p. 269). The 8–16–24hrs shift system is commonly used in America and Kroemer and Grandjean point out that this seems to have advantages, both physiological and social. Each shift allows the family at least one meal together and also provides times for enough sleep for persons working the early and late day shifts (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997, p. 270). Of course not everywhere in Ireland operates to these times. Many Irish nursing homes, for example, operate shifts of 0800–1400, 1400–2000 and 2000–0800, no doubt due to the fact that the workload is considerably lighter during the night shift. Some organisations operate on a two-shift system, usually two 12–hour shifts (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997, p. 270). Again there are variations as, for example, the day shift on some Irish horse farms is from 0800–1700 with an hour off for lunch in the middle of the day, while the night shift, consisting mainly of security and foaling staff, are on from 1800–0700. In Europe periodic rotation of shifts is the general rule but in America it is not uncommon to work the same shift all year round (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997, p. 270). Certain social advantages can be found in this arrangement though Mott, Mann, McLoughlin and Warwick (1965) and Kroemer, Kroemer and Kroemer-Elbert (1994) found that in the long run continuous nightwork is not acceptable, either on social or medical grounds, to at least two out of ten people who engage in it. Kroemer and Grandjean (1997) point out that until the 1960s it was considered that the intervals between shift rotation should be as long as possible and that recommendations for rotation every three or four weeks were based on the idea that people need several days to change their biological rhythm and that adaptation to the new shift can take place only if several weeks are allowed. However, they continue ‘we know that this interpretation is

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misleading because the work-free weekend partly negates the just initiated adjustment’ (p. 270). They further point out that adaptation is not complete, even after several weeks and that daytime sleep of many workers on night shift remains inadequate, both quantitatively and qualitatively, for a long time. Sleep is crucial to a healthy body and mind so anything that disrupts it has obvious detrimental effects. Pilots on long-haul flights also run into similar problems. If they are crossing time zones regularly, they are regularly exposed to what is popularly known as ‘jet lag’, the term used to describe the lack of wellbeing experiences after long-distance air travel (Hawkins, 1987, p. 56). The body’s rhythms and cycles are disrupted just as they are if working at night and, as Hawkins also points out, disturbances of sleep, bowel elimination and eating habits may occur. ‘Lassitude, anxiety, irritability and depression are often reported’, he continues. ‘Objectively, there is evidence of slowed reaction and decision-making times, defective memory for recent events, errors in computations and … a tendency to accept lower standards of operational performance’ (Hawkins, 1987, p. 56). The various bodily functions of both human and animals fluctuate in a 24-hour cycle called the diurnal or circadian rhythm (diurnal = daily; circa dies = approximately 1 day) (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997, p. 259). Under normal circumstances the body has some idea of the time of day by observing various time-keepers or zeitgebers. These time-keepers are regular features of our daily experience which indicate time, for example, changes from light to dark, or social contacts. If all zeitgebers are removed a person automatically shifts to a day spanning somewhere in the region of 22 to 27 hours (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997; Hawkins, 1987). While this situation is extremely unlikely to crop up in normal daily live, it is important to note this discrepancy in any case. The first scientific reports concerning biological oscillations appeared in the literature more than 200 years ago but since 1950 there has been an acceleration in research in this field, which has results in the creation of a new sub-discipline, chronobiology (Hawkins, 1987, p. 59). By the late 1970s it became clear, for example, that control of a substantial part of the body’s rhythms resides in the suprachiasmatic nuclei of the hypothalamus in the brain (Hawkins, 1987, p. 60). A typical example of a rhythmic body system is oral temperature. This temperature rises during the day and falls at night. Sleep normally occurs when the temperature is falling and waking occurs when it is rising (Hawkins, 1987, p. 60–61). Various researchers, for example Klein, Wegmann and Hunt (1972), have found that cognitive and psychomotor performance and also reaction times show the same type of peak and dip pattern as that of body temperature. This variation is in addition to any effect from sleep deprivation. Much research has been done on the effect of disturbed sleep. Vigilance and calculation tasks have been shown to be significantly impaired and mood adversely affected, for example, simply by displacing the sleeping period by two to four hours (Taub & Berger, 1973). Despite this it will often be found that the person just transferring to the night shift will launch straight into the job, rather than being given lighter and less KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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responsibility-laden tasks for the first days, until they have had the opportunity to adjust. A study by Minors, Healy and Waterhouse (1994) surveyed 43 student nurses before and immediately after their first eight weeks of nightwork. Although their general health status was not found to have differed significantly, they did show a significantly greater deterioration in interpersonal relationships while on nightwork. Strain put on interpersonal relationships can result in difficulties in other aspects of an individual’s life and can lead to problems in the working environment. A Finnish study, by Harma, Hakola and Laitinen (1992), looked at the relationship between age and the circadian adjustment to nightwork in three groups of shift-workers, those aged 19–28, 30–44 and 53–59. They found that aging decreased circadian adjustment to nightwork. The same researchers (1996) found that women adjust more quickly to nightwork than do men. The negative effects of working at night do not appear to be as pronounced if the person has chosen to work at night and the period of night work is long term. A British study by Barton (1994) examined the impact of choosing to work at night on individual tolerance to shift work. She had 587 participants, all nurses and midwives, and came to the conclusion that the results obtained offer support for the maintenance of permanent night-shift schedules and that this has implications for the future design of shift systems. A Welsh study by Adeniran, Healy, Sharp, Williams et al. (1996) found, on the other hand, that there was some validity in a shiftwork model of affective disorders. They found that concentration, interest, energy, sleep and appetite were significantly disturbed during nightwork, and that there was an increased perception of recent criticism from others. Nightwork is very much a part of modern human living in many parts of the world and it is highly unlikely that the practice will disappear in the foreseeable future. Therefore the task for human factor investigators, employers and psychologists is to be aware of the problems that can be caused by working at night, to find ways to compensate for these problems and difficulties as much as possible and to offer understanding and assistance to any night shift workers who seek help. There is much evidence that points to nightwork being a hazard to health. However, it must be said that the hazardous effects, in terms of long term health of the individual, do not affect all night shift workers. Many of the hazards come from slowed responses, calculation and concentration difficulties and occasional lowering of standards that one experiences while working when the body wants to sleep. The effects that working at night can have on the system can be summed up by the findings of an Italian study carried out by Costa in 1996 in which it was concluded that shift work, particularly night work, can (1) disturb circadian rhythms of psychophysiological functions, beginning with the sleep–wake cycle, (2) interfere with work performance and efficiency over 24 hours, with consequent errors and accidents, (3) strain family and social relationships, and (4) impair sleeping and eating habits and result in more severe disorders of the gastrointestinal, neuropsychic and cardiovascular functions.

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Adeniran, R., Healy, D., Sharp, H., Williams, J.M.G. et al. (1996). Interpersonal sensitivity predicts depressive symptom response to the circadian rhythm disruption of nightwork. Psychological Medicine, 26(6), 1211–1221. Barton, J. (1994). Choosing to work at night: a moderating influence on individual tolerance to shift work. Journal of Applied Psychology, 79(3), 449–454. Costa, G. (1996). The impact of shift and night work on health. Applied Ergonomics, 27(1), 9–16. Hakola, T., Harma, M.I. & Laitinen, J.T. (1992). Relation of age of circadian adjustment to nightwork. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Ergonomics and Health, 18(2), 116–118. Hakola, T., Harma, M.I. & Laitinen, J.T. (1996). Circadian adjustment of men and women to nightwork. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Ergonomics and Health, 22(2), 133–138. Hawkins, F.H. (1987). Human factors in flight. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Klein, K.E., Wegmann, H.M. & Hunt, B.I. (1972). Desynchronisation of body temperature and performance circadian rhythm as a result of outgoing and homegoing transmeridian flights. Aerospace Medicine, 43(2), 119–132. Kroemer, K.H.E. & Grandjean, E. (1997). Fitting the task to the human: a textbook of occupational ergonomics (5th ed.). London: Taylor & Francis. Kroemer, K.H.E., Kroemer, H.B. & Kroemer-Elbert, K.E. (1994). Ergonomics: how to design for ease and efficiency. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Minors, D.S., Healy, D. & Waterhouse, J.M. (1994). The attitudes and general health of student nurses before and immediately after their first eight weeks of nightwork. Ergonomics, 37(8), 1355–1362. Mott, P.E., Mann, C., McLoughlin, C. & Warwick, P. (1965). Shiftwork: the social, psychological and physical consequences. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Taub, J.M. & Berger, R.J. (1973). Performance and mood following variations in the length of time asleep. Psychophysiology, 10(6), 559–570.

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5

GOOD WRITING SKILLS AND BASIC NUMERACY

Aims This short chapter focuses on writing skills, something that is very important but is sadly often overlooked, and it also takes a brief look numeracy. The latter may come as a bit of a surprise to some students but as there is a mathematics element to psychology it is very important that you remember some of the basic rules of calculation. Your writing is even more important. You may have some wonderful ideas, theories, or interpretations about aspects of psychology, but if your work is full of bad grammar and bad spelling and it is badly presented then you are throwing away marks. It is also unprofessional and if you do not correct these errors now, while you are a student, then you may continue to make them when you join the workforce. By the end of this chapter you should be familiar with: • • •

important points about written style and grammar do’s and don’ts with regard to the presentation of your work some basic rules that apply to calculations.

What is expected at university? You are not expected to produce essays, reports and exam answers that are full of big words and fancy language. Instead you want to develop a clear written style that enables you to transmit your knowledge, ideas, theories, interpretations, or anything else. Of course you must use the correct terminology as it is applied in psychology but if your reader has to reread a sentence, paragraph or page a few times to figure out what it is that you have said then it is poorly written. You may find that some academic publications are a puzzle because of the way in which they have been written, but just because some journal articles are in a literary sense badly written does not mean that it is acceptable for you to produce work that is hard to read and understand. Besides, you are being graded on your work and those authors are not. Even a novice with good language skills should be able to read one of your essays and have an idea of what it is about.

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Numeracy is often overlooked in university teaching because it is presumed that you have mastered the basics by the time you arrive. Your statistics classes will usually not cover any of this as it is expected that you know it already. However, unless you have recently taken at least one A-Level subject that used some form of mathematics, completed Ireland’s Leaving Certificate, taken some postsecondary school course, or worked in an area that required use of numeracy skills, you may be rusty on some of the basics.

Written style and grammar Think about this for a moment. Why is it important to write well, to write clearly, and to use good grammar? Why does presentation matter?

Everyone has their own written style and it is something that can develop throughout the course of your life. Sometimes we can recognise a writer purely from the way in which they describe or say something in print. It is neither expected nor required that you, as a psychology student, develop an elaborate or literary writing style. However, it is very important that the style you use is clear and easy to read. You will not gain marks for using complicated sentence structures or strings of big words, in fact if you do this then you may lose marks for being unclear. It is important to remember that you are trying to make an argument in your essays and that you are trying to convince the reader of the veracity of that argument. If they cannot understand what you are trying to say then your argument will fail to convince and your grade will suffer. Another important point that you should remember when it comes to writing essays is this: if you are unsure of your argument then how do you expect to convince the reader of your position? Phrases such as ‘This essay will attempt to’, ‘It is hoped to be able to show’, ‘Hopefully this will become clear by the end’ and so on, should not appear in your university work. They tell the reader that you have probably not done enough reading, are not really clear on what the whole essay is about, are fumbling your way through the assignment in the hope that something coherent will emerge by the end, and that you do not have any confidence in what you are saying. Those are not characteristics that one would associate with a good honours essay or exam answer. Be confident, or at least try to sound as if you are confident. Phrases such as ‘This essay will demonstrate clearly that …’ and ‘It can be argued that …’ are much better choices. Can you think of others? You will also create a poor impression if you use bad grammar. There are some excellent and some quite amusing books on the market that talk about common grammatical errors, but funny as they are bad grammar is no laughing matter. If you think that your grammar is weak, or if you have been told that it is, then I would recommend that you read a book on how to do it properly. Here are some of the most common grammatical errors. KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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The split infinitive One could argue that the popular television show Star Trek is at least partly to blame for this very common grammatical error. The opening voice-over, given by Captains Kirk (original series) and Picard (The Next Generation), announces that their mission is ‘To boldly go where no-one has gone before’. ‘But what is wrong with that?’, you say. The answer is simple. There is an infinitive of every verb: to be, to stand, to sit, to talk, to examine, and so on. You are not supposed to split this up; the two words are like linguistic conjoined-twins. Hence, what both intrepid space captains should have said is this: ‘To go boldly where no-one has gone before’. The verb is to go, not to boldly. Similarly, while you may perform a critical evaluation, what you will be asked to do is to evaluate critically what was said in the paper, not to critically evaluate it; the verb is to evaluate and not to critically. On exam papers, or in essay titles, the opening words of a question are often just ‘Critically evaluate …’; this is fine. This grammatical error is so common that you will even see it in newspapers and magazines, hear newsreaders using it during television broadcasts, and famous politicians slipping it in in press conferences. Even the most careful of us will forget from time to time and split the infinitive, but just because lots of people do it does not make it right.

Use of an apostrophe Part of the opening sequence of the cult television comedy Monty Python’s Flying Circus shows us a long-haired, somewhat dishevelled man go through some event or process, such as wading through water and collapsing exhausted on a beach, or having a drink of wine with his girlfriend, or just sitting at a table staring at the camera, before announcing just a single word ‘it’s’; then the jingle begins. But does the ‘it’s man’ mean it’s or its and how do we know? Does it even matter? If your grammar is good you will remember what you had to study about ‘it’ in primary school, and then you may think that this is rather silly and a pointless issue to raise. However, misuse of the apostrophe is a remarkably common grammatical error. It’s not just annoying for the reader but it will look very unprofessional when you enter, or reenter, the workforce. The ‘it’s man’ is announcing the start of the programme, that this is Monty Python’s Flying Circus. No doubt there are complex explanations as to why we must use an apostrophe but when I was in primary school we were given a very simple rule. You use an apostrophe to indicate that a letter is missing or to indicate possession (except in the case of the possession belonging to it). Therefore, if what you meant to say was ‘it is’ then you can use the contraction it’s because you are leaving out a letter i. However, if you want to indicate that some object or attribute belongs to it then you must not use the apostrophe; what do you think of its colour? For all other words the apostrophe will indicate either a contraction or possession. ‘You are’ becomes you’re, ‘they are’ becomes they’re, and you can talk about Paul’s book, Jane’s calculator, and so on. Sometimes, when a single object ends in the letter S or the object is a plural, you will see something like this: James’ car or the horses’ bridles; dropping the second S. This is one of the grammatical points that raises debate, and

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some publications will require that the S be added or dropped, depending on their style requirements. Microsoft Word’s grammar check will leave out that second S. The form of misuse of the apostrophe that really irritates me is when I see people sticking one into every single word that ends in the letter s. I have read essays, lab reports, and exam scripts that were filled with words such as statistic’s, theorie’s, themselve’s, and the like. What are they talking about? Do they mean ‘statistic is’, ‘theorie is’, and ‘themselve is’, or is it something belonging to the statistic, theorie, and themselve? Most likely these writers will have had no idea as to where and when one should use an apostrophe so, to be ‘safe’, they stick one in everywhere. If you do this also then stop now! I would not think that an employer examining a CV that was written in that style would give it a second glance, if they even read to the end of the document on their first look. Below is a table of some commonly misused words. Make note of them and try to avoid using the incorrect ones.

I before E except after C I’m sure that you remember this phrase from your school days, the one to help us to remember how to spell the words receive and believe. It is remarkable just how many people seem to think that it applies to every single word in which the letters i and e follow a letter c. It doesn’t, so please do not spell ancient or science as anceint or sceince!

Superfluous words and phrases University assignments will usually have a set word count and there may be little to no flexibility in the degree to which you can deviate from it. When students feel Table 5.1 Commonly misused words It’s

It is

Its

Something belonging to it, e.g. its colour

They’re

They are

Their

Something belonging to them

There

Used as a place (e.g. go over there) or as a pronoun

You’re

You are

(e.g. there is a cup of tea on the table) Your

Something belonging to you

Let’s

Let us

Lets

Allows

Who’s

Who is

Whose

Belonging to someone (e.g. whose laces were undone)

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that they cannot reach the target sometimes they are tempted to include superfluous words and phrases or overly lengthy sentences to pad it out. Similarly, when students go over the word count it can be because too much of the total was wasted on unnecessary extras. When it comes to overly long sentences then yes, I am most definitely guilty as charged. Do not dismiss my advice on this point because of my ‘crime’, as to do so would be to commit the fallacy of ad hominem tu quoque (see Chapter 4). I do strive to shorten my sentences but at this stage of my life doubt that I’ll break the habit. I have spent over twenty years writing non-psychology articles for newspapers and magazines and my bad habit stems from that experience. When an article is a little too long to fit into the available space some sub-editors will just chop off the last sentence or three to make your piece fit, rather than actually editing it. Occasionally this leaves the printed article ending rather abruptly or at the start of a point that seems just to hang in the air without going anywhere. As a result of this, many of us with extensive media experience have developed the style of cramming as much detail as possible into a single sentence. In newspapers and magazines a sentence is a paragraph and so if we cram the whole point into a single and lengthy sentence then we are not left with those odd endings should the sub just decide to chop. However, you are your own sub-editor of your essays, exams, and reports. Keep your sentences fairly short but not so short as to leave the piece feeling like a collection of short, jerky, and unrelated points. You want to aim for an essay that flows smoothly rather than one that feels like sitting on a bus that stops and starts every few feet in heavy traffic. There are lots of superfluous words and phrases commonly used by students. For example, all journal articles that you read will either be based on research that was conducted by the authors themselves or they will be a review paper that evaluates all the key research in a specific area. Books will talk mostly about other people’s research, tying it all together and putting it into context so that the reader can learn about the broader topic rather than just one specific piece of work. With this in mind you should realise that there are some things that you do not need to say when including academic sources in your essays. Sadly, many students will use up a chunk of their assigned word count repeating phrases such as ‘conducted a piece of research in which they …’, ‘in their research that was done in [year]’, or ‘did a research study that looked at’. If you are citing an academic source then it will be fairly obvious that research was involved or that the authors were commenting on something else. Do not say ‘research study’ as the words have the same meaning in this context and so it’s like saying that they conducted research research or a study study. Although other subjects, for example literature, may require that you identify authors by their first name and surname, e.g. Virginia Woolf, in psychology you do not give the first name of the authors unless there are two, who will be cited in your essay and who have the same surname, e.g. Anna Freud and Sigmund Freud. Similarly, you do not include historical or biographical details of the authors you are citing, unless the essay is specifically on their work or career and then such details would be relevant.

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Table 5.2 Do not say

A better way

Tom and Jerry (2009) conducted a piece of research in which they looked at … and they showed that …

Tom and Jerry (2009) found that …

Laurel and Hardy (2009) did a research study that looked at …

Laurel and Hardy (2009) said …

In their research that was done in 2009, Crane and colleagues …

Crane, Poole and Schmidt (2009) ...

Homer Simpson, the hilariously incompetent safety inspector at the nuclear power plant in Springfield, asked his colleagues last year about their attitudes towards their working conditions and said that …

Simpson (2009) reported that …

At the end of the day when all is said and done and all such matters have been considered in their proper place and context …

It can be concluded that ...

Presentation How you present your work is very important. A badly presented essay can put the assessor in a bad mood (we are human, after all), which could inadvertently lead to a lower mark. It also looks sloppy and careless and, depending on the assignment, you may be throwing away any marks that were being awarded for presentation. These days you are expected to type your essays. You will not be given typing classes so if you do not know how to type, or if you are not very fast at it, then you need to practise. If you have a physical or sensory impairment that means you cannot type or use a computer then make sure that you contact your university’s Disability Services office at the start of the academic year so that assistance can be arranged for you. Sometimes you will be given specific guidelines as to how you are to lay out an essay – and if so, adhere strictly to them – but quite often you will not be provided with any details. In any case, here are some important tips. –

– – – – –

Use only single or line-and-a-half spacing (double-line spacing can cause reading difficulty if your lecturer or tutor has a contrast perception problem, particularly when it’s black print on white paper). If you choose not to indent the first line of every paragraph, then you must leave a blank line between each paragraph (otherwise the whole essay will look like a single block of text). Make sure that your left and right margins are at least one inch from the edge of the page (so that comments can be written in). Use a font that is clear and plain, something like Verdana, Bookman or Times, and always make the print black (the default setting in all computer packages). Make sure that the font size is either 10 or 12 point (if your lecturer or tutor requests a larger size then use it – they may have a visual problem). Never use handwriting fonts or other fancy fonts.

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Never use emoticons, different coloured fonts, or little pictures of teddy bears, flowers, or other images in the margins (yes, I’ve seen these in essays and this is not primary school). Do not stick photos or other pictures into your essays for decoration (labelled diagrams that are necessary or required are fine). Do not justify the text, i.e. blocked paragraphs, unless specifically told to do so (if the tutor or lecturer is dyslexic then justified text may make it difficult for them to read your work). Never use texting language or slang and avoid colloquial expressions (at the end of the day, dis ain’t B-), yo?). Use English spellings not American spellings and make sure that you have set the default language in your word processing software to reflect this. Make sure that you proofread your essay to eliminate as many typos as possible (hopefully all of them). Proofreading will also help you to catch glaring errors and to eliminate those wonderful bloopers and bizarre statements that will produce both laughter and irritation in examiners (see below and Chapter 6 for some real-life examples). If you have a visual or reading difficulty then ask somebody else to proofread your work for you. Do not print your assignments on scented paper (yes, I’ve had that one too and was not impressed). If you are a smoker make sure that your assignment does not reek of stale smoke when you hand it in (paper absorbs the smell, it lingers, and it is very unpleasant for the person who has to read it!). Do not print your assignments on coloured paper (unless either you or the examiner has a visual problem that means it is easier to read from coloured paper and then all the pages should be the same colour). Do not use lots of headings (they break up the flow of the text and can lead to the essay reading like a group of separate chunks rather than a unified whole). Do not include ‘notes for the teacher’. Messages such as ‘Please, please don’t fail me’, ‘go easy on me, I’ve had a rough week’, ‘I’m sorry this is so bad – my cat died’ or ‘Thank you for reading this essay. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it’ are not going to create a favourable impression (and yes, I have seen all of these on essays or exam scripts). Number the pages. Put the pages in their correct order (very important!). If you are required to attach a completed departmental cover sheet to the front of your assignment then make sure that you do so. Bind your essay with just a single staple in the top left-hand corner (do not put it in a folder or binder or plastic sleeve unless you have specifically been told to do so). Never laminate the pages!

Shortening, rewriting and finishing touches A concise use of words is a useful skill to learn whether you are taking notes, in class or during study time, or writing essays for coursework or exams. The idea is that if you can say something in just 20 words then don’t use 50 instead; keep it brief and concise. You saw some examples of this in the section on superfluous words and phrases. Here’s a tip that I learned from my early days working in the print media: take a large newspaper or magazine article and try to rewrite a story in just six to eight sentences. It’s not as difficult as it may seem at first though, like any new skill, it does take practice. What you produce will lack the full flavour of the original piece but it will help you to develop your ability to identify the key points in a

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document that you are reading and also to be able to condense a large amount of information into a small space. Once you get good at that task you will find it easier to phrase things more concisely in your essays. This will mean that you will have more room available to you, within restricted word counts, to develop your argument. Always go back through your work before preparing it for submission. You may feel that you do not want to see it again but it is very important that you edit and proofread your work. You may find that you have left something out, that one point would be much more effective if you moved it to a different location in the essay, or that you have made an error of some description. The following are examples of some of the fascinating statements that I have found in student essays where, clearly, the writer did not proofread or edit their work. You do not want write anything like these! ‘The theory of planned behaviour is an extension of the theory of planned behaviour so the theory of planned behaviour will be discussed first … [shortly afterwards] … The theory of planned behaviour, on the other hand …’. ‘… thoughts or experiences that were so painful they were pushed deep into unconsciousness … this is called recession’. ‘There is growing evidence that genetic factors have a predisposition to alcohol’. ‘Russell’s recommends the use of exploratory factor analysis over exploratory factor analysis’. ‘Thomas Browne, in 1664, stated in court that “witches exist because we all know that they do”. So what does that say about how we perceive and treat mentally ill people today?’

So, make sure that you re-read your essay and implement any necessary updates or changes before you submit it. You should also run through the following checklist: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Have you put the title on your essay? Have you put your name and student number on the essay? Have you attached the departmental cover sheet (if there is one)? Have you written a clear introduction section? Have you written a clear concluding section at the end? Does the essay read well? Is it clear and logically presented? Does it make sense? Does it adequately answer the question posed? Have you committed any fallacies in your arguments? Have you fully referenced your research material? Are the spellings and grammar correct? Have you correctly cited and referenced every source that you identify in the essay, both in the text and at the end? Have you left adequate margins? Have you used a clear font and print size? Have you indented your paragraphs or left a blank line between each paragraph? Have you numbered the pages? Have you put the pages in the correct order? Have you used an appropriate binding on your essay (i.e. a single staple unless told otherwise)?

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When you are happy that you have included everything print out the assignment for submission, making sure to include your name. It is usually a good idea to keep a copy yourself in case you should need to refer to any material in it before the corrected one is returned. Please, please read and follow the advice and corrections indicated in the assignment feedback so that you do not make the same errors in future work. It is amazing how many students fail to do this and continue to make the same errors again and again, thereby throwing away marks. Remember: Do and Don’t –

– –

–

– –

–

–

–

–

–

Read the essay title carefully and write the essay requested, not what you would like to write. This particularly applies in university level examinations where you can fail for just writing everything you know about the general topic rather than answering the actual question you were asked. Do not write your introduction and conclusion as a list stating that I did this and then that and then the other. This is a common mistake. Avoid clichés and expressions such as ‘It has often been said’, ‘As everybody knows’, ‘At the end of the day’, and so on. Do not use colloquial expressions, for example, ‘one can short of a six-pack’. Write in the third person. Hence, do not use I, my, you, your, we, the reader, the author, and such words or phrases. The aim is to produce a piece of work that reads as if it was a journal article. This takes practice. Consider using phrases such as ‘on the basis of the evidence it could be concluded that…’ or ‘it can be argued’ instead. Do not ask the reader his/her opinion or thank them for taking the time to read your essay or exam. If you want to use an expression like ‘Many researchers have said…’ you have to give examples. This might read as ‘Many researchers (for example, Tom & Jerry, 2006; Beavis & Butthead, 2003) have said…’ Avoid copying paragraphs directly from books or journal articles – even if referenced correctly. Try instead to summarise the material and then rewrite the point in your own words; this shows that you have thought about the material. It will also help you to remember the point should you want to make it during an exam. Provide a reference to show from where the point came. If you use text from a book, journal, or other source, and do not give the reference, you are citing somebody else’s work as your own and this is considered to be plagiarism. This can lead to the assignment or exam being failed when representing as little as 20 per cent of the assignment. When making any statement, e.g. ‘Hysterics, for example, expressed “unnatural” desires for privacy and independence’ (Showalter, 1987, p. 134), always put in a reference. If it’s a direct quotation you must use inverted commas, as in this example. Do not place quotations in single quote marks (‘like this’). Apart from the fact that it is incorrect to do so, anti-plagiarism software such as turnitin.com will not recognise material between single quotes as being quotations and so will add in those passages to the proportion of your essay that it suspects may be plagiarised. Always remember to put the full stop after the reference rather than at the end of the sentence. Tagging on the reference after the full stop is a common mistake. For example, putting the full stop after the word independence in the above example would be incorrect. The full stop must go after the reference provided. Do not put a space between the ( and the next word when citing a source. For example, ( Showalter, 1987, p. 134) is incorrect, but (Showalter, 1987, p. 134) is correct. This error is oddly commonplace.

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Do express your own opinion but make sure you can defend it by reference to the literature. Expressing you opinion without saying ‘I’ or ‘in my opinion’ can be done by saying ‘on the basis of the evidence presented it could be concluded that …’ or ‘it can be argued …’ You should read from several books or journal articles when researching a single topic as the opinions of some writers may not be in agreement with popular or established ‘fact’. Beware of relying on older texts (e.g. pre-2001) as the information in some of them may now be out of date. Beware of using material found on the internet. Not all such material is reliable or accurate. Always use books and journal articles before looking for material on the net. If it comes from a university website it is probably okay and, in some countries, you can tell that it is a university site from the end of the web address. British universities have a web address that ends in .ac.uk while American and Canadian universities have an address that ends in .edu Define terms used within the essay with, of course, references. The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology or the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology are particularly useful texts, both for this purpose and as a study aid.

Basic numeracy If you think that your math skills could do with a refresher course then there are lots of useful resources that are available online. For example, the website www.easymaths.com includes GSCE tutorials, exam questions, games, and puzzles that you may find helpful. You won’t have to use any algebra, geometry, trigonometry, or calculus while studying psychology and you will most likely do most of your maths on a calculator or computer. However, class tests and exams may not allow the use of either and so you may have to do them by hand. I am not going to give you a mathematics tutorial here but I will point out some of the common errors and how to avoid them.

Multiplying negative numbers A negative number is one that has a minus sign in front of it, obviously. If you are multiplying two negative numbers then the result will be a positive number; the minus sign disappears. However, if only one of the numbers is a negative number then the product of those two numbers will also be a negative number. So, if you had to calculate −3 × −6 then the answer would be 18. But if you had to calculate −3 × 6 the answer would be −18.

Equations What is the answer to the equation 5 × (3 + 4)? It is 35. What about 5 × 3 + 4? It is 19. When dealing with equations you must always perform the calculation that is between brackets first so the first equation became 5 × 7. If there are no brackets then division and multiplication always come before addition and subtraction: the second equation became 15 + 4. There is a useful acronym to help you to remember this: BODMAS, which stands for brackets, order, division, multiplication, addition, KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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subtraction. The only one of these that might seem unfamiliar or hazy is order (of magnitude) and by this we mean power as in 22, 43 and so on. So, if we had an equation 2 + 4 × 23 then the answer would be 34 and not 48; order before multiplication before addition. What if the sum had been (2 + 4) × 23? In this case the answer would be 48 because you must calculate the brackets before order before multiplication.

Summary Writing clearly and well is a very important skill. You may have already developed this before you started university and if so then you are likely to find that you can develop it further as you read more and write more. If your written skills could use some improvement then take the time to develop them. There are lots of fun books out there on writing and grammar and it may be worthwhile to check them out. The best way to improve your writing is by doing some writing, but reading wellwritten material can also be very valuable as it will give you chance to see how language can be used. It is also important that you are or become comfortable with basic numeracy as you may not always be allowed to use a calculator or computer.

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Aims This chapter focuses on how to approach exams, whether they be multiple choice questions (MCQ) or essay papers. In addition to showing you how to narrow your focus, break down questions and other positive strategies, it also shows you some of the things that you should not do in an exam. By the end of this chapter you should know: • • • • • • •

how to prepare for and take MCQ tests and written exams the importance of making an effort in every year of your degree how to answer the question that you thought you couldn’t how to reduce exam stress how to break down what the exam question is asking you to do why it is important to read back through your answers before submitting them some things that you should consider doing if you are a student with a disability.

What is expected at university? You will have been used to doing summer exams and also Christmas tests in school or on any courses that you have done since then. In most cases it has been only your summer exams, in combination with continuous assessment work, that provide your yearly grade. This is usually because you study a subject over the course of the whole academic year; your English or mathematics class, for example, started in September and continued through to the end of the school year. University is different. Many British and Irish universities are now semesterised, which means that the year is effectively split up into two distinct sections. If your university is operating this system then it is likely that the courses you take in the first term will finish in December and that exams will follow either immediately or a few weeks later. Then you will start new courses in the spring and take the exams for those in the summer. In other universities you may finish courses in December but not take the exam in those subjects until the summer exams period. You may also have to take class tests or do coursework in some subjects and it is usual that those mini-exams

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and assignments will contribute towards your overall grade. Clearly it is very important that you make yourself aware of your course requirements as soon as possible, preferably no later than the second week of the term. There are two different types of exams that are commonly used in psychology: multiple choice questions (MCQ) and essay questions. They use different skills and, despite the popularity of the former style, it is arguable that only the essay-style exams are truly appropriate for undergraduate psychology. One of the aims of the degree is to develop your ability to evaluate material critically but MCQ tests are not about thought or evaluation; they are purely memory tests and it is possible to get a first on an MCQ test without really understanding the material that you have memorised. A student who has an excellent memory but poor critical thinking skills could get 100 per cent on an MCQ exam but no more than a 2:2 had that same test been given as an essay exam. Similarly, a student who has excellent critical evaluation skills and comprehensive knowledge of a topic might get a first in an essay exam but do poorly on an MCQ test that required the memorisation of facts and figures. I remember one MCQ exam that was so full of such details that my classmates joked that the questions were like asking a student to recall ‘on the picture on the upper right-hand corner of page 45 of your textbook, was the person wearing (a) a red shirt, (b) a blue shirt, (c) a green shirt, (d) a jumper’? Essay papers, which are the more usual approach, are a different story. If you do not understand the material, adopt a critical stance in your answer, and produce a well-structured essay then you are unlikely to do well. You will be expected to produce an exam answer that is as well-structured, well-written, and well-argued as would be an essay that you submitted as coursework (see Chapter 4). Obviously you will not have as many citations in your exam answer as you would in a course essay and you will not be producing a references section in the exam, but you will still have to write a good academic essay.

Preparing for and doing MCQ exams Multiple choice exams will not be a familiar experience to most students as, throughout school and any other courses that they may have taken, they would usually have had to write essay answers. Sometimes you may have had to label diagrams or provide short answers to a long series of questions but MCQ would usually have formed no more than a part of an exam paper. Unlike essay questions, MCQ are a memory test and so they do not examine your understanding of the topic, just what facts, figures and pieces of information you can recall. I have always thought of MCQ as being an inappropriate form of examination in university psychology as it is all about memorisation and regurgitation instead of requiring an application of the analytical skills that you must develop in order to do well in your degree. Unfortunately some lecturers see this style of exam as being an ideal time-saving approach for them, particularly if there is a large number of students in the class. MCQ exams will usually consist of at least 100 items consisting of a statement or question followed by four potential answers, sometimes five. You must choose the

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one of these options that best answers the question. There are different types of MCQ exams in that some will be well-written by the lecturer who taught the course, some will have a problematic design, while others will consist of questions taken at random from a question bank which, in my experience, sometimes does not work well, from the students’ point of view. One reason why MCQ exams from the latter group can be more difficult than those that have been written by the lecturer is that questions from the bank may come from chapters and topics that were not covered on your course. Lectures will have focused on an understanding of the material and on how to think critically and if it is a subject that students find interesting then reading will most likely have been broad and evaluative rather than focusing on facts and figures that are not really all that important. The following are examples of sample questions from an MCQ paper on abnormal psychology. The first one represents a better style of question than the second one. Why? The questions and options should be clear and easy to read and while it may seem easy to the examiner, s/he should remember that there may be students taking their exam paper who are dyslexic, have visual difficulties, or require the assistance of a reader in the exam. If the question is long and/or the options are wordy or all very similar to each other then this will present an additional level of difficulty to some students. I know some students with reading or visual difficulties who prefer MCQ exams to essay papers, but many others with similar difficulties have expressed their dismay at having to spend most of the exam reading instead of writing, saying that they felt that their grade suffered as a result of the combination of their disability and the design of the exam.

Sample question 1 High blood pressure in the absence of an evident physical cause is called: (a) (b) (c) (d)

fictitious disorder psychosomatic elevated hypertension essential hypertension.

Sample question 2 In epidemiological studies the term ‘incidence’ refers to: (a) (b) (c) (d)

the overall frequency of a disorder in a specified population the number of new cases of a disorder reported during a specified time the total number of cases of a disorder reported in a specified population the known plus unreported number of cases of a disorder reported during a specified time.

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The answers to these questions are 1d and 2b. Most items on the paper will be of the type in question 1, a statement followed by four short options. There may be a few of the second type of question on the paper but hopefully no more than a handful as these are the ones that can provide problems for students with learning or visual difficulties; each of the options contain several of the same words but in different orders.

Think about this for a moment. How do you think that you might have to prepare for a MCQ exam given the often specific nature of the information that they require you to have remembered? How might your strategy be different to how you would prepare for an essay exam?

Preparing for a MCQ exam will require a different strategy than you would use in studying for an essay paper. For the latter you would have to do a lot of reading, studying the course textbook and additional sources, trying to understand both the important details and the broader issues of the topic. For a MCQ exam you will work only from your course textbook and lecture notes as the questions on the exam will almost always be taken directly from their content. This means no additional reading and no need to worry about understanding the material in order to do well in the exam; just memorise to regurgitate. You do not have to learn the whole book by rote but you will have to memorise facts and figures from each chapter that is covered on your course. How will you know what to look for? There are different types of questions that will be asked on an MCQ exam and these are as follows.

Definitions These questions will either ask you to identify the term being described or they might give you the term and ask you to choose which of the options provided best defines it. The first sample question above is an example of this. To prepare for these types of questions you should pay particular attention to the glossary in your textbook. This might be at the end of the book or it may be in the form of key terms highlighted throughout the chapter or collated at the end of the chapter. Your first step should be to learn this terminology and what it means. Then go back through the chapters to identify any other terms that strike you as something that could appear on the exam. Jot them down with their definition and add them to the glossary.

Acronyms An acronym is an abbreviation made up of the first letter of each of the words for which it stands, for example IQ for intelligence quotient. In these questions you will be given the acronym and be asked to identify which if the options is the correct one. Occasionally you will find a somewhat silly answer among the options, which

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may be there to make you smile or because the lecturer just couldn’t think of another plausible-sounding option. An example of this type of question is this: REM is the abbreviation for (a) (b) (c) (d)

rapid early movement right eye movement rapid eye movement really easy money.

The answer to this question is option (c). Every time you come across an acronym in your textbook you should make a note of it and, of course, what the letters stand for.

Criteria or stages This is another very popular type of question on MCQ papers. You will find that many things in psychology have different parts, stages, or diagnostic criteria and you should make sure that you learn these. There are two different ways in which these questions can be asked: by identifying components in the correct order or identifying which one is missing or incorrect. Diagnostic criteria may not be in any particular order. However, theoretical models or stage theories – for example, Freud’s psychosexual stages of development or Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – have parts that must be placed in a specific order. For these it is not enough to remember the names of the different steps but you must be able to list them in sequence. If you are familiar with the different steps, stages, and criteria for the conditions, theories, models, and so on that you come across, then you will also be able to spot the answer in the questions that include some of the correct points with one incorrect one included. Examples of these types of MCQ are as follows (the correct answers are d and c respectively): The three stages of Seyle’s General Adaptation Syndrome are: (a) (b) (c) (d)

awareness, resistance, exhaustion alarm, reaction, exhaustion awareness, reaction, extinction alarm, resistance, exhaustion.

Which of the following is not a symptom of an asthmatic attack? (a) (b) (c) (d)

wheezing tightness in the chest sense of impending doom difficulty breathing.

People and paradigms Two important pieces of information that you should learn with each theory, model, or approach that you study are the person associated with it and the paradigm

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under which is falls. With what are the famous people in psychology associated? These are some of the easiest questions on an MCQ exam and yet they are ones that too many students get wrong. An example of this type of question is: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are associated with the: (a) (b) (c) (d)

cognitive paradigm biological paradigm behavioural paradigm psychoanalytic paradigm.

The correct answer here is option (d). To prepare for this type of question you should ensure that you always associate famous theorists with the overall broad approach under which they fall (the paradigms) and also that you are familiar with each of the major paradigms in psychology and what it is exactly that they are about.

Fill in the blanks These questions are presented as a statement that contains one or more missing words. You have to choose the correct option to complete the sentence. An example of this type of question is: Depth perception in babies can be tested using the ________ experiment. (a) (b) (c) (d)

virtual reality binocular parallax virtual cliff temporal context.

The answer is (c). These questions can be on any aspect from your course and the missing term can be anything, perhaps a person’s name or the name of a model, theory, test, or disorder. The best way to prepare for these is to make a note of key pieces of information that you think might be a potential multiple choice question.

Scenarios Sometimes the question might be presented as a mini case study with a question at the end; this would most likely be seen on an abnormal psychology paper. You need to know the diagnostic criteria for the different types of disorder covered in order to be able to answer this type of question. The following is an example of this type of question (the answer is option b): Yutake is a bright 17-year-old whose parents hoped he would attend university. Over the past year he has become increasingly socially withdrawn. He eventually stopped attending school or communicating

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with friends and he has not left his bedroom for several months. Like an estimated 1.2 million young Japanese, Yutake may be going through: (a) (b) (c) (d)

schizophrenia hikikomori pibloktoq koro.

Facts and figures Questions that require you to have memorised details such as prevalence rates, proportions, age ranges, or other numeric values appear quite frequently on MCQ papers. The information may have appeared on a graph, table, chart, or other figure in a book, something that you may have glossed over if you were studying to understand and evaluate the material. An example of this type of question is as follows: The prevalence rate of specific phobias in men is about: (a) (b) (c) (d)

7% 9% 11% 13%.

The correct answer is option (a) and the best way to prepare for these questions is to make a note of everything in your textbook that quotes a prevalence rate, proportion, or age range and then study that list. Past papers are a great way to practise for your MCQ exam but often you will find that there are none available; your university may not publish multi-choice exam papers. Find someone in the year ahead of you who may have taken the exam last year and still have a copy of the exam paper. These days many textbooks come with CD-ROMs and they may include sample questions. You will also be able to find sample quizzes online and while it is a good idea to practise on these they may not cover exactly the same content as your textbook and you should remember that your exam will be based on the book that was recommended by your lecturer and also the lectures that you attended. Many MCQ exams will apply negative marking, which is designed as a deterrent to stop you from just guessing the answers. The usual format for this is that you will gain one mark for every correct answer but lose one-third of a mark for every incorrect answer. Unanswered questions are usually awarded zero. Although the idea is to reduce guessing I have found, both from personal experience and from talking to students, that the presence of negative marking increases perceived stress levels in exams and can lead to second-guessing on answers that you know are right but feel must be wrong because they are ‘too obvious’. Some students have reported that they only answered the questions of which they were sure and left out everything else for fear of losing marks. That is a bad strategy and I know that several of them failed because they either did not answer enough questions to pass or because they only answered 40–50 questions out of 100 and got some of them wrong. KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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So how should you go about doing an MCQ exam? The first thing is to stay calm, as you should do in every exam. There is usually more time available in MCQ exams than you will need if you know the answers to most or all of the questions after the first couple of readings. You will usually be expected to complete the answer sheet by pencil so it important that you bring at least two pencils with you, HB rather than H, as well as a good eraser and a sharpener. Make sure that you read the instructions on the front cover of the booklet as there may be important information there of which you were not aware. You will also have to complete the information section on your answer sheet(s) and this is usually at the top of the page. The information required may include your name but it will definitely require either your student number or your exam number. Read the instructions very carefully; if you put the wrong number on the page then you may find that no grade will be returned to you. Filling out an MCQ answer sheet is rather like completing your lottery slip; you must shade in the box that represents your answer. If you only put a light mark or a tick or partially complete the box then the machine that is usually used to compute your score may not be able to read your answer and so you will not get any credit for it. If you want to change an answer then rub out the one you marked, thoroughly, and fill in the box that indicates your final answer. You must not use a pen to complete the sheet because if you do and then change your mind on an answer you won’t be able to change it on the sheet. That is because the machine will read the two boxes you have shaded in and mark you as being incorrect; at least one of the answers you have marked in this scenario will be wrong. Remember that you have plenty of time to complete the MCQ exam and make sure that you read through the questions and options carefully; if you read them too quickly then you might misread them. If you are sure of the answer then fill it in on the answer sheet. If you are unsure then skip that question and move on. Once you have gone through all the questions go back to the start of the booklet and spend more time on the ones you left out the first time around. If you think that you do not know the answer to a question, or if you are not sure of the correct response, then go through each of the options carefully to see if you can eliminate any of them. It’s like going 50:50 on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire though, sadly, you cannot phone a friend or ask the audience. Which options are definitely not the correct answer to the question? You may find that by doing this you are left with just one remaining option, which is probably the correct one. Sometimes you will even find the answer to one question is contained within another question in the same exam booklet. You may also find that something that appears in one question or its options might jog your memory and enable you to answer correctly a question you thought you could not do. I have seen some students mark all their answers on the question booklet and then transfer those answers onto the answer sheet but this is not a good idea. Some of those students have run out of time or discovered that they accidently skipped a question during the transfer process, leading them to fill in the wrong answer on every subsequent question. Oops! Your question booklet may be collected at the end of the exam but it will be not be used in the grading process; only your answer

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sheet will graded. On several occasions I have chosen to grade MCQ exams by hand rather than using the OCR and computer software. What I discovered during that process was that many students were not completing their answer sheet correctly and, in at least a couple of cases, students would have failed had their sheet been entrusted to the computer! Apart from the strikingly high proportion of students who seemed unable to follow the instructions on how to enter their student number at the top of the sheet, many had used ticks, dots, circling of boxes, or the partial completion of boxes, or had used either pen or a very light pencil to complete their answer sheet. Those students were lucky that their lecturer had chosen to mark their exam by hand and they would not realise that they would have got often considerably lower marks if their answer sheet had been processed automatically. You should always presume that your answer sheet will be graded by a computer and so you should ensure that you complete it properly. The following are examples of how to complete the student number section on your answer sheet, and how not to do it; these are a typical layout. In these examples the student’s number is 09135248. The last box shows how to mark the answer that you have selected to a question, in this case option (b).

Once you have decided that you cannot answer any more questions on the paper, go back through the booklet and answer sheet to make sure that you are happy with your answers and that you have filled in the boxes properly.

Preparing for essay papers Many students have asked me when and how they should start studying for their exams. When is too early and when is too late? Are there any particular things that they should do or avoid? Are there any short-cuts? It is never too early to start preparing for exams but how late you can leave it will be a combination of your particular learning and work styles (see Chapter 2), the amount of material that you need to cover, the number of exam papers that you have to take, and what it is that you hope to gain from the exams. Not every student is motivated to strive for first class honours; many are quite happy to maintain a 2:1 average. That is fine. You may have any number of other things going on in your life, particularly if you are a mature student and/or if you have to work to be able to pay for your fees and accommodation, and aiming for KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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a 2:1 degree is enabling you to get a good degree that will allow you to compete for the jobs or postgraduate places that you seek. However, a disappointing attitude that I have often seen in first and second year students is that they will be happy just to pass the year. Why should they bother working when these two years don’t count towards their degree mark? They’ll work in third (and fourth) year as that’s the grade that will go on their degree cert.

Think about this for a moment. Why might it be a bad idea to aim or settle for only a pass or a 2:2 in the first two years of your degree? Might this have implications for your career choice? Might this affect your overall degree grade even though the marks from first and second year do not count?

There are several reasons why not making the effort to do well in first and/or second year exams and continuous assessment is not a good idea and some of them are discussed below.

Transcripts The first thing that you should realise is that the universities to whom you are applying for a postgraduate place, or even some employers in related areas, will not request only your degree grade but a transcript of all of your results from each year of your degree course. If you slacked off in your first two years and got low marks but then started working in third year and achieved a 2:1, this will be apparent to the people who request your transcript. That 38 per cent on a first year paper or 45 per cent year average that disappointed or even amused you will look bad to the university or company deciding whether or not to take you on. You may be passed over in favour of the consistent achiever or steady improver or you may lose out on a financial grant (studentship) that would have funded you for your postgraduate research. Don’t panic! Many of us will have one or two poor marks on our transcripts but these will be ‘forgiven’ if your overall performance is consistent or shows steady improvement from good grades to even better grades.

Skills The first two years of your degree course are not doss years or easy years. They are designed to give you the opportunity to develop the key skills that will enable you to do well in your degree and that will ensure that you are then ready to move on to higher study or further training. If you spend either or both of these two years partying, missing classes, doing the bare minimum, and achieving poor or low grades then you are jeopardising your chances of doing well in third (and fourth) year. Also, many of the courses that you will take in your final year(s) will presume that you know the related material that was covered in your first two years. You need to study and make an effort in every year of your course.

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Continuing in psychology Most psychology degrees are direct entry, which means that once you get your place on the course you are allowed to continue into second and third (and fourth) year so long as you pass your continuous assessments, your exams, and any other requirements that the department may have. However, you may be studying psychology through a general arts route that allows only a specific number of students to progress from first year into second year psychology. Competition for those places is tough and I have heard of students who achieved first class honours in freshman psychology but still missed out in the race for places in the second year; too many other students in their class scored more highly. If you are taking psychology in first year arts and hope to continue on towards a psychology degree, then you must work very hard and do extremely well in your assignments and exams. Otherwise your only options will be to continue your degree in the other freshman arts subjects you were taking or to try to apply for a transfer to another university in the hope that they may have a place for you in second year psychology.

Low expectations If your lecturers and tutors see that you are not making an effort then their expectations of you may be lowered. You might think, so what? However, these are the people upon whom you will be relying for academic references and those forms often require the lecturer to rank you among all the students that they have ever taught. If you show an attitude of not caring or of not trying then you may find that you are ranked ‘below 50 per cent’ on reference forms and a tick on that box will see your application drop to the bottom of the pile. If it is a reference for a job rather than a postgraduate place then you cannot expect the lecturer to say that you are hardworking, motivated, and a self-starter if you just didn’t bother in the early years of your degree. You may have worked really hard in the year(s) that made up your final grade but first impressions have a tendency to stick. Okay, you might decide that you just won’t be going on to postgraduate studies in psychology so you won’t be looking for an academic referee. However, you will have to do an independent research project (called a final year project, dissertation, or undergraduate thesis) in your final year and for that you will need an academic supervisor. If you have created the impression of being a slacker or someone who appears to have little interest in psychology, then you may find it hard to enlist the supervisor that you want or who is willing to supervise the type of project that you want to do.

Past papers How do you prepare for essay exams? The first step I always recommend is to get a copy of as many past papers as you can, even if they were set by different lecturers. There may have been different topics covered or emphases stressed in the courses given by other lecturers, but the style of question asked will be very similar if not the same. Identify the topics that appear on each paper and match them up with KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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questions on the same topics from other exam papers. For example, you see that the topic of operant conditioning came up on the summer exam on Introduction to Psychology in each of the past three years. Make a note of the year and the question: 2009 Explain what is meant by operant conditioning and give examples of how it is applied in education and childcare. 2008 What is the difference between classical conditioning and operant conditioning? 2007 Discuss the concept of operant conditioning and show how it can be applied in a modern setting.

If you do this for every topic on every exam paper for the courses you are taking then you will have built up a question bank. You will be able to use these questions to guide your reading, to give you an idea of the angles that may be required for discussion, and to help you keep your focus on the specific issues that are covered on your course rather than getting lost in a wider range of reading for fun and interest. Spending many hours in libraries reading widely about psychology can be fun and it’s possible to find the most interesting books by browsing through the stacks. However, a common mistake that first year students make is to read broadly without having also concentrated on the specifics of their courses. Realising that you should have focused more on exactly what was covered in lectures rather than what you found interesting is a little late if it happens as you are sitting in the exam hall reading through the paper. A good time to get a copy of the past exam papers and to group questions by topics is in weeks one and two of the term or semester, when you will know which courses you will be taking throughout the year. Many universities will have online copies of past exam papers, which you can download and save, whereas others will have printed copies available in their libraries for photocopying. Past papers are a wonderful study aid.

Memorised essays and question spotting We saw in Chapter 4 that one of the common reason why students fail in exams is because they did not answer the question that was posed; remember to ATFQ! Perhaps you knew lots about the broad topic and just wrote about that, never really dealing with the specific angle that was required. Maybe you spotted a term or concept in the title and presumed that it was the central focus point of the question. Or maybe you did not read the question carefully enough to realise that it actually contained two or even three distinct parts, each of which you were expected to discuss. Some students like to prepare essays in advance, memorise them, and then use these in an exam, but this is a practice that I would advise strongly against doing. Think about this for a moment. Why might it be a bad idea to memorise an essay and then try to regurgitate it or modify it in the exam?

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Think of something that you have memorised by rote in the past and that you can still recite well, maybe a poem, song lyrics, a prose piece, maybe even a prayer. Now start reciting it from the 14th line, right now and without thinking about it for more than a second or two. You can’t, can you? You cannot do it without going back to the start, scrolling through the piece in your mind until you get to the start of the 14th line. Then you can do it. Now imagine that you are sitting in an exam hall with just three hours in which to write three critical essays of around 1000–1500 words in length, each. You spot ‘your’ three topics, the ones for which you prepared and memorised essays, but the angle being asked for is not the angle you have prepared. What do you do? You cannot write out the essay you memorised and expect to get a good grade because your essay would not be the required assignment. Instead you need to try to restructure the essay that is only in your head so that it answers the set question. But the section that you need is in the middle to end of the memorised essay. You may have thought that you would be able to make any necessary changes to your memorised essay in the exam but, as you will learn in your cognition classes, stress impedes the cognitive processes (i.e. memory, thinking, perception). Now you find yourself desperately reciting your essay in your mind, trying to get to the part that fits the exam question because you find that you cannot just jump in somewhere in the middle and keep going. Time is passing and if your exam answer just launches into that part of your memorised essay then its structure will be poor, which could lead to a lower grade. Your answer is also likely to be too short because you are only using a part of your prepared essay and not the full thing; short answers are a leading cause of poor grades at university. Please, for your own sake, do not memorise essays that you plan to regurgitate or modify in the exams. ‘Your’ three topics; now that’s another story. With rare exceptions, which are usually cases of lecturers who don’t really bother changing their exam paper from year to year, you cannot predict what questions will or will not come up. There are no patterns or systems. Lecturers do not consult past papers and think ‘Hmmm, which question will I give them this year? Well I asked them A in 2007 and B in 2008 and 2009, so it’s time for A again this year’. If you look for patterns in exam papers you will find them but these are a coincidence and you cannot afford to play Russian roulette with your exams. We have all done this at some time or another and sometimes we will gotten have away with it but it can go so badly wrong. Make sure that you prepare thoroughly at least twice the number of topics as there are questions on the paper that you must answer. So if you have to answer three questions then you need to prepare a minimum of six topics.

The ‘what if I knew everything’ game You are sitting in the exam, you have to answer three questions, and of the four topics that you have prepared thoroughly only two have come up. What do you do? What you certainly do not do is to hand in fewer answers than were required and leave the exam early. If you have to answer three questions and you do only two, then you have thrown away 33.33 per cent of your exam. If you averaged 60 per cent KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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on the two that did answer then you may get away with it; your mark would be 40 per cent. You would pass but that would drag down your overall average for the year, and this could be your degree year. But if you only averaged 58 per cent then you will be returned a grade of 38 per cent. If it was a two-question paper and you only answered one then you have almost certainly failed. This means a poor overall average for your year, having to do a repeat exam or failing the year, depending on the subject and the department’s rules. One way or the other it will be an embarrassing blip on your academic transcript, which will be seen by other universities to which you may apply for postgraduate research or training or by any employers who may also want your transcripts. In my experience almost all students who do not answer the required number of questions in an exam will end up failing the paper. In many of these cases the scripts look as though the writer did not study enough or did not know how to write an exam essay in psychology. Sometimes you can find yourself in a situation of coming up one answer short because of stress, even though you have studied hard and you know that you know the answer. But whatever the reason that you find yourself in a situation where you feel that you cannot do the required number of questions, there is a game that you should play. It can be very effective at jogging the memory and it can also be the difference between failing or barely passing an exam or getting low to high honours on the paper. We will be looking at how to break down essay titles shortly so I will be brief here. The game is the ‘what if I knew everything’ game and here is how it works:

Box 6.1:

The ‘what if i knew everything’ game

Step 1: Read the remaining exam questions carefully and decide which one you feel is least threatening/scary/panic-inducing/incomprehensible. Step 2: Break down the title (see below). Step 3: Open a page or answer book for rough work and remembering what we talked about in Chapter 4 break up the page into the headings introduction, main point 1, main point 2, main point 3, and conclusion. Step 4: Ask yourself ‘If I knew everything about this topic what sort of things would I have to mention in the introduction?’ and then jot down bullet points under your heading Introdution. This might look as follows: Introduction – general statement about the topic – identify key issue – define key concept – state my position – state how I will show my position. (Cont’d)

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Step 6:

Step 7:

Step 8:

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You do not have to know anything about a topic to be able to produce these bullet points. What might you have to define, discuss, evaluate or comment upon in an essay on this topic? Think of three main points that you could make, without worrying about what you would say about them. Maybe you could talk about the meaning of the key concept (as in the culture sample paragraph in Chapter 4) or a key debate that could be applied (just note the idea for now). Each of the points will get its own section in the main body, which you should structure as you would a course essay. Don’t forget about The 6W’s Model as applying it to your thinking may help to jog your memory or produce a better structure for the points you want to include in your answer. If this is not jogging your memory and you are really desperate, then pull out the paradigms in psychology (you’ll have learned about them in Introduction to Psychology classes). Choose two or three of the major ones so that you can spend the major paragraphs of the main body of your answer talking about the key idea expressed by those paradigms and how it can be demonstrated by and applied to the exam question. Organise your bullet points into an order that makes some sense as a wellstructured potential answer to the question. Put your strongest one first, your weakest one second, and the other one as your final point before the concluding section. In social psychology you will learn about the primacy and recency effects and this is what you are aiming for here. Start strong and go out with a bang and the reader may forget just how weak the mid-section was. After all, the examiner will probably have several hundred essay answers to read. Now start writing your answer, putting it in the essay format as outlined in Chapter 4 and not forgetting to put a concluding section on what you write. Make sure that you write as much as you can on each of the major points, bringing in any academic psychology that you think you can apply in a relevant way. Make sure that you try to make this construction sound like a essay rather than a series of disjointed points that go nowhere. Keep looking to the question to be certain that you are not going off on a tangent.

Yes, this could produce a descriptive and fluffy essay that does not really delve into the topic in any real way. However, you may find that the process of thinking about applying the standard essay structure before worrying about content may have jogged your memory and enabled you to write a good essay. If you never really knew much about the topic to start with then playing this game in the exam will mean that you have answered the required number of questions. Even if you only get a barely passing grade on the question you could still be getting honours overall and that is so much better than failing the exam. KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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How long should my essay answers be? This is a very common question and while some will reply ‘as long as they need to be’ that is not helpful. I suspect that the reason some academics don’t answer the question is because, on a conscious level, they don’t know the answer; it is not something that they’ve really thought about and they haven’t counted up the number of pages written by students. However, I and some of my colleagues have done the math. If you are in your first year you will be expected to produce a bare minimum of four pages per hour; anything less than that and you have probably not written enough. In second year you should be aiming for five pages per hour and if you are in your third or fourth year (if your course has a fourth year) then you should be aiming for six pages an hour. It is not that we are looking for quantity over quality; far from it – six pages of waffle are just waffle and will not score well! If you are to answer the question properly then you need to be writing at least these amounts, if not more. I have seen final year students who can achieve an exam output of eight to ten pages per hour, and that is eight to ten pages of regular-sized handwriting with regular spacing. Those students will tend to get a high 2:1 or a first in their degree. These amounts may seem a little scary and, indeed, many students will express concern and panic when they are told just how much they will need to produce in the exam. However, if you follow the guidelines in this chapter and from Chapter 4 then you will have no difficulty in reaching and even surpassing those targets, presuming that you have studied of course. Some people have a rare gift of being able to produce an excellent critical essay with a slightly shorter word count, but most of us cannot do that and so please do not take the example of someone who claims to have written just two pages per answer and got a 2:1 as being representative of what you should and can do.

Reducing exam stress Most of us will experience stress in exams. The physiology of stress and how it effects our minds, our bodies, and our health will be come up in several courses during your degree and I am not going to go into any detail here. One of the physiological aspects of stress is that our body increases its production of cortisol and that can interfere with memory and our ability to think. By reducing your stress level you reduce the amount of cortisol that your body is producing. There are various ways in which you can reduce your stress level and some of these are described below. Maybe you can think of others. Just be sure that you do not disturb your fellow students.

Positive thinking Whenever I received my exam papers and was told to start I tried to squash the stress with the following thought: ‘Well, whether I’m sorted or screwed this is going to be

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fun!’ Yes, I have been told that I have an odd concept of what’s fun. In fact a mature student stood up during a class one day to tell me this, with a smile, and after I’d mentioned for about the twentieth time that year that exams can be fun! Seriously though, you have the chance to argue a point, whether or not you really believe it, to apply theories or models to different situations in fun ways, and if the exam has anonymous marking then they’ll never know it was you. Try to maintain a positive attitude in the exam because if you think negatively about it you will only increase your stress levels and therefore potentially bring about a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Breathing The physiological state of being under stress can lead us to hyperventilate, that is to breathe too quickly. Try to breathe at a slow and steady rate (quietly) and close your eyes too if that helps. You can also try to visualise something calming while doing this. Don’t worry about wasting valuable exam time as, after all, if you are feeling very stressed you will probably just spend a lot of time engaging in panicky thinking rather than actually writing anything. Of course don’t spend too long at this or any other relaxation technique in an exam, and make sure that the slow breathing and closed eyes don’t make you fall asleep!

Humour Divert your thoughts from the exam to something humorous, something that will make you smile or even feel like chuckling. Of course don’t actually chuckle as this may disturb those around you who are also taking the exam and who may be just as stressed as you feel. It could be a funny joke that you heard, or maybe something you saw on a TV show such as Scrubs or The Simpsons, or it could be an image that you bring to mind. Make sure however that you don’t drift off into a sea of memories and forget all about the exam!

Busy work Don’t just sit there doing nothing but panicking, looking at the first page of your answer book on which you’ve written nothing but 1. or copied out the question from the exam paper. Make your brain focus on the task at hand by writing something. Use one answer book for rough work and make yourself break down the questions that you think you might tackle. Write down the bullet-point structure of how you would have to go about dealing with a question, even if no potential content is coming to mind. Play the ‘if I knew everything’ game. Just make sure that you do something rather than nothing. The very act of writing bullet points in a rough form and trying to force yourself to remain calm while reading through the questions can reduce your stress. Sometimes stress can hit us in the middle of an exam rather than at the start and this can produce just as much panic. Again, take a moment or two here to try to do something to reduce your stress. Maybe you can even use it to produce a good exam KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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answer. What?! Let me give you an example from my own undergraduate days. The exam was a senior undergraduate paper that counted towards our degree grade and we had to answer two questions in two hours. I had prepared well for the paper and settled in quickly. Upon completion of my first answer I switched to the second question that I had chosen: ‘Why do we forget? Discuss with reference to the literature on the cognitive science of memory’ (or something to that effect). I had prepared this fun topic thoroughly but as soon as I tried to start my rough work I drew a complete blank. I sat there in a panic and the sounds of rustling paper behind me, and a ticking clock that was on the wall in front of me, suddenly seemed so very loud, though not quite as loud as the sound of my pounding heart. Then I found myself laughing inwardly; this was so silly, of all questions on which to draw a blank, nobody would ever believe this one. It seemed so absurd that, still chuckling to myself, I dispensed with the rough work and just started writing so my introduction went something like this: Here I sit in an exam desperately trying to remember what I learned this year about forgetting but guess what, I’ve forgotten it all. What are the chances that I will remember any of the material before the invigilator calls, ‘That’s it, time is up, stop writing’? According to the mood state dependency theory they’re not good. Why might that be? Well, when I studied the material I was sitting relaxed in a comfortable chair and with a cup of hot chocolate (with marshmallows) in my hand. Now I am sitting in an exam hall thinking ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! How am I going to remember any of this stuff?!’ Let’s see what happens then shall we?

This had the effect of reducing my stress. Before I started to think about my earlier panic I realised that more than half an hour had passed and I was most of the way through an essay on the set topic that was actually applying what I had learned during the year to a real-life situation. Most likely it was that approach that led to my high 2:1 grade on the exam. As with the ‘if I knew everything’ game, sometimes it is possible to turn an apparent disadvantage into an advantage.

Breaking down the exam I am often amazed at the number of students who turn over the exam paper, scan it for a couple of seconds, tick some questions – and start writing. A proportion of them will always stop writing within minutes and sit there thinking or panicking. Some will even cross out what they’ve written, reread the questions, chew their pen, shift uncomfortably in their chair, play with their hair, take a swig of water or cola, chew gum, and try to figure out which questions they should do instead. That is not a good exam strategy. You will know weeks or even months before the exam just how many questions you will have to answer and for how many hours you will be in the exam hall. If you have a three-hour paper in which you have to answer three questions, how much time do you have for each one? One hour? Wrong. You should always allow ten minutes at the start of the exam and ten at the end for other tasks and then break down the remaining time by the number of questions that you have to

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answer. In this example you could budget for a maximum of 53 minutes per question (see the Table 6.1 below). Those few minutes at the start and end of the exam are where you do your rough work, break down the questions and, at the end, where you go back through your script to check for errors, omissions, readability, and bloopers. Table 6.1 Duration 3 hours

2 hours

Guide to how much time you can spend on each exam question Questions

Time per question

5

32 mins

4

40 mins

3

53 mins

2

80 mins

4

25 mins

3

33 mins

2

50 mins

You may not need the full ten minutes at the start. Double-check the number of questions you must answer and whether any of them must come from specific sections. Scan through the questions and eliminate the ones that you definitely won’t attempt. Then go back through them and identify the ‘buzz’ words and contexts. Highlight, ring, or underline these so that when you refer back to the question while writing the answer you will not forget about any of them.

Rough work Once you have broken down the question (see below) you should jot down bullet points, just as in the ‘if I knew everything’ game. Don’t censor them, just jot down all the bullet points, key references, terms that you can think of for each question that you plan to do. Then organise them. What is your central position? What will your angle be? What will you need to mention in your introduction? What two major points (three if they will be short) are you going to make and which points that you have jotted down apply to them? Score out some and add in more, but do organise them so that you have an outline of your essay. Do not spend any more than ten minutes doing all of this or you may leave yourself short of time. While you are writing your answers refer back to the question (remember ATFQ) and your notes, crossing these off as you deal with them. You may find that while writing one essay you suddenly remember some point, information, or citation that should go in another essay. Flip back to your rough work, add it in, and then return to the one that you were writing. This saves that annoying feeling of ‘oh darn, I had a great idea on that point earlier and now I’ve forgotten it!’ If you use an answer book for rough work then you must hand it in but make sure that this is marked ‘rough work’. If you are required to draw a line through your rough work then make sure that you do so. It is also important to remember that it is your essay answers that will be KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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graded, not your rough work. In fact, we examiners do not even look at the rough work unless you’ve had a complete disaster on a question, and we’re feeling a little generous and decide to have a look to see if there’s any way that we can squeeze out a mark or two based on what your rough work suggests that you knew; however this would be very rare. Under no circumstances should you refer the examiner to your rough work for further information, which is something I have seen; we will not look.

Breaking down the question Buzz words will appear at the start of the question and also scattered throughout it. The context will often appear at the very end of the question. Buzz words are the instructions (e.g. discuss, evaluate, outline) and the topic (e.g. depression, personality, intelligence). Context is the specific angle that you are being told to consider and it is this that many students miss in an exam. Some students will spot the context but will introduce it only in the final page of their answer, almost as an afterthought; those answers score poorly. Let’s go back to the three sample questions that appeared earlier in this chapter; they were all on operant conditioning and from different fictional exam papers. Don’t worry what that term means right now; you will come across it many times in your psychology classes and you don’t need to know much or even anything about a topic to be able to break down an exam question or essay title. 1. Explain what is meant by operant conditioning and give examples of how it is applied in education and childcare. 2. What are the differences between classical conditioning and operant conditioning? 3. Discuss the concept of operant conditioning and show how it can be applied in a modern setting.

Think about this for a moment. What are the buzz words in these questions and what is the context in each?

Although each of these questions is asking you about operant conditioning each question is actually very different. If you had memorised an essay on the topic in the hope of being able to regurgitate it in the exam you would have found yourself in trouble. You should never find three questions on the same topic coming up on the one exam paper. We will look at each of these questions in turn.

1. Explain what is meant by operant conditioning and give examples of how it is applied in education and childcare The buzz words here are explain and operant conditioning so the essay will be one that talks about what the term means and how it works, giving practical examples for illustration. The context in which you have been asked to do this is education and childcare so your essay structure might be something like this:

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–

–

–

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Introduction: Define operant conditioning and identify who came up with the idea; mention the key terms that are associated with this form of learning; note that it has many practical applications, including in education and childcare; make a statement as to its value and also how you will demonstrate this. Main body, part 1: Focus on education; define key components of operant conditioning and show how they can be applied; include a reference to academic studies that have shown its effectiveness in education and some that have disputed it; draw conclusions on its value in education. Main body, part 2: Focus on childcare; show how key components of operant conditioning can be applied; include a reference to academic studies that have shown its effectiveness in childcare and some that have disputed it; draw conclusions on its value in childcare. Concluding section: Remind the reader what operant conditioning is and what its major components are; summarise the key points and conclusions you have made in the main body, and then tie it all together to show how you have demonstrated the overall position that you stated in your introduction.

What should not appear in this essay, or in either of the other two sample questions on operant conditioning, is any mention of Skinner boxes, pigeons, rats, or Thorndike and his cats. When you come to the topic of operant conditioning in your Introduction to Psychology class you’ll know what all this means. It is remarkable just how many students will write an essay about Skinner and his rats and pigeons instead of writing an essay that explains operant conditioning and how it can be applied. Similarly, when asked to write an essay about Freud’s structure of the mind or his psychosexual stages of development, for example, many students will ignore the set topic and write a mini-biography of Freud instead, throwing in the required points as brief comments near the end. The result for you will be a low grade and for the lecturer who is reading your story it will be the groan ‘Oh no, not another one!’

2. What are the differences between classical conditioning and operant conditioning? The buzz words here are classical conditioning and operant conditioning and the context in which you are to discuss them is in terms of how they differ. You will also have to show where they are similar but the central focus is difference. A common mistake is to launch into a discussion of classical conditioning, including a detailed retelling of the saga of Pavlov and his dogs, and then to switch to operant conditioning and spend a great deal of time talking about Skinner and his pigeons. Such an essay will score poorly. Why? Because it misses the whole point of the set essay. It also leaves out the introduction and concluding sections and includes a lot of irrelevant information about dogs and pigeons, drool and pecking. This is, in effect, a compare and contrast question. Your introduction will make a broad statement about types of learning, state where classical and operant conditioning fit in that area, define key terms, state the difference between them, and identify the context that you have chosen in which to demonstrate this. The structure of the main body of the essay will depend on the approach that you take. KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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For example, you might have decided to choose a context – say, health-related behaviours – and so will break up the main body into two distinct sections. The first will explain what classical conditioning is and how it works, illustrate this with examples from your chosen context, discuss the academic literature that is relevant to the issue, and then close with some summary comments with regard to what this form of learning is and how it can be seen in your chosen context. You can then move on to the second part of the main body and do the same for operant conditioning, except this time you will also need to refer back to what you have said about classical conditioning in order to demonstrate clearly the difference between the two. Your concluding section will remind the reader of what is meant by the two key terms, how they work, and how this can be clearly seen within your chosen context.

3. Discuss the concept of operant conditioning and show how it can be applied in a modern setting The buzz words are discuss and operant conditioning and the context is showing how it can be applied in a modern setting. I am often amazed at the misunderstanding that many students display of the word modern. This is the early part of the twenty-first century so it’s a safe bet that anything from this century can be called modern. However, why do so many talk about the fifties, sixties, seventies or eighties as being modern when we are talking about the dynamic concepts of psychology and society? I don’t know the answer to this. I have marked many exam answers in which students who were supposed to be showing how something applied in a modern context wrote about experiments performed after the Second World War; the forties and fifties. I wasn’t even alive then! The introduction would require that you define operant conditioning, identify it as a form of learning, identify the specific modern setting in which you are going to apply it, and then make a statement as to its value or effectiveness. Note that the title said a modern setting and not in modern settings; you must choose one and not two or more. Within that setting you can choose two specific areas. For example, you might choose the classroom as your modern setting and decide to focus separately on behaviour management and building confidence. If this is what you decide on then you need to make this clear in your introduction. The main body, in this scenario, would be broken into two parts, one focusing on how operant conditioning works in behaviour management (including a reference to academic literature other than that contained in your textbook) and the second focusing on the application of operant conditioning in building confidence in the classroom. Your concluding section would explain briefly what is meant by operant conditioning, how it works, the key terminology, and how it applies in the setting that you have chosen. Perhaps you have decided not to subdivide the modern setting of your choice. You might have begun your essay with a brief case study after which you introduce operant conditioning and its key terminology and state that you will demonstrate the effectiveness (or lack thereof) in applying the principles of this form of learning in

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dealing with and managing this particular client’s problems. That would be your introduction. Your case study would have highlighted two, or maybe three, specific issues with this client and each of those will form a section of the main body of your essay. Your argument should, as always, be supported by a reference to research papers and each section would conclude with a quick statement of how effective or ineffective operant conditioning would be with the client. Your concluding section will briefly remind the reader of the case study, the principles of operant conditioning, and how they have helped, or not, with managing the client’s specific problems or behaviour. A key message that you should take from this is to be aware of what a history tutor of mine called the tyranny of information. Your textbooks and lectures may include a lot of background information but you need to be able to sift through all of that and pick out the details that are relevant to the set question. I know that this can be difficult, particularly when you are in your first year, but if you play around with past exam questions and break them down as we’ve done above then this should help you to be able to pick out the key information in any topic that you approach. If you are studying psychology with another subject you might be interested to know that these strategies, for essays and exams, work in pretty much the same way for history and English literature.

Checking for errors, omissions, readability, and bloopers The final ten minutes of an exam are a very important time and what you do then could make the difference between one grade or another. No, I am not talking about continuing to write on your final question. Doing that may squeeze out a mark, probably no more than 3–5 per cent on that question, which will then be divided by whatever number of questions you had to answer. That is a tiny gain that may make no difference to your overall grade; it will still be a third, 2:2, 2:1, or a first. Those final minutes should be devoted to reading back quickly through what you have written. This could make a huge difference to your grade because you can catch and correct any errors, omissions, illegible handwriting, or bloopers.

Errors The essential point was that two things were not connected but, in your haste, you left out the word ‘not’. Depending on the topic this could count as one of those major errors that sees your mark plummet. If you read back through your answer you may catch such errors and be able to fix them.

Omissions You may remember some very important detail that should have been included. Put an ∗ where the additional piece should be inserted, rapidly number all of the pages of your answer book, note in the margin to ‘see ∗ on page x’, go to that page and KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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write your point, making sure to put the * in front of it. This could be something that was so important that leaving it out could have cost you lots of marks, but you took the time to check and have saved the day.

Illegible and incredibly irritating handwriting You may have made a discovery worthy of a Nobel prize, but if the examiner can’t read what you have written then your brilliant answer might not even get a passing grade. I have received essay scripts that contained large chunks that were completely unreadable and have failed those answers unless the rest was of a sufficient quality and quantity to pass. If you find a word or phrase that makes you pause to decipher it then rewrite this more clearly; if you couldn’t read it first time around, how do you expect the examiner, who does not know your handwriting, to be able to decipher your text? The vast majority of students will have nothing to worry about here. However, there are handwriting styles that are hard to read especially when they have been written at exam speed. Examiners may have hundreds of exam essays to evaluate in a single week and so they will have neither the time nor the patience to reconstruct what students may have written. In addition to handwriting that is just bad there are styles of writing that can be incredibly irritating and difficult to read so these should be avoided. We are only human and if your handwriting contains any of the quirks described below then you may be causing such irritation; a negative mood can influence perception. Also, you should consider the fact that it is not only students who may have visual or reading difficulties; some of them do go on to become lecturers! –

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–

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Hearts for dots: I’m sorry but there is no letter in the English alphabet that has a heart on top of it. You may think that it’s cute or that it’s a personal style thing but it makes your script hard to read. The same goes for big circles or smilies put on top of the letters i and j; use a small dot and not an emoticon! Loopy letters that are all the same size: It looks like page after page of @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ and it can cost marks because at least some of the points made were unreadable. Overly loopy letters: If a word ends with the letter d then do not have a streamer that extends across the whole of the word, curling over the first letter or ending with a pointed tip. Similarly the top of an s should not extend across the length of the word. A lowercase f that looks like a staple on its side may look lovely in slowly-written text, but it becomes a confusing squiggle that could be any of several letters (or a combination of letters) when written at exam speed, particularly if the writing is also slanted. Overly elaborate handwriting like this will also cost you time. Blocked capitals: Scripts written entirely in blocked capitals can be hard on the eyes and mood, especially if they are in the seemingly preferred presentation of tiny blocked capitals. Blocked capitals are usually taken to mean shouting so why are you screaming your answers at us? Please do not write your exams in blocked capitals. Tiny writing: Tired eyes that have read hundreds of answers can find it very hard to process page after page of tiny lettering. I have seen passages in exam scripts whose letters were so tiny and barely distinguishable that they looked more like Morse code than sentences written in the English language.

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Huge writing: Huge writing can be hard to read as letters on one line are often over-written by letters on the line below. – Text/chat speak: This has no place whatsoever in your essays or exams and any submission that is written in text/chat speak will fail. – Incomplete letter formation: I have had to read exam scripts where letters were missing pieces so that many were hard to distinguish from one another. It also looks like some form of Morse code! – Extremely slanted writing: If your writing slants badly to the left or right then please orient your answer book in such a way that it compensates for this and that the letters appear at least close to upright on the page. I have received exam scripts where I had to tilt them practically on their side to have any hope of reading what was on the pages. – A finger between each word: If you put a big space between each word you are creating unnecessary difficulty for any reader who may have a contrast perception difficulty (it’s a visual problem). It also creates the impression that you are trying to make it look like you have more to say than you really do. – Misuse of capital letters: Do not start every word or most words in a sentence with a capital letter! It is grammatically incorrect and can be very difficult to read if the examiner has any of a number of visual difficulties. –

Bloopers Students can make some wonderful bloopers in their exam answers, so amusing that some academics will keep lists of them; they can be a useful teaching tool to both the lecturer and other students. There is a wonderful book called Non Campus Mentis, which is a collection of bloopers made by American and Canadian university students in history exams. It was a bestseller and it is so funny that I had to put it down by Chapter 3 to wait for the pain in my chest to subside and the tears in my eyes to dry. Your exam bloopers may be fairly harmless and also provide entertainment for the reader, but they may be errors that cost you marks. Watch out for them and either correct or eliminate them. Some will just be funny but others will suggest that the writer probably doesn’t really know what s/he is talking about; that is not the impression that you want to create in an exam! The following are genuine examples that I have found in submissions I have graded over the years. You may not see what is wrong with these as yet but as you study more psychology you will spot the reasons why they’re here. Make sure that your exam answers do not include further examples. – – – – – – – –

Thorndike taught animals psychologically certain behaviours and when and how to use them. The statistical paradigm involves examining tests and compiling bell curves of behaviour. The Learning Approach is where you drink and feel sick afterwards. Beck is the most famous researcher in alcoholism. Psychotherapy is where Freud sat down to talk to someone. Humanistic is also known as the disease model. There was a t-score of 2.53 on the asymp sig two-tailed test and this score was significant. Operant conditioning is also known as Pavlovian conditioning because of the research that Ivan Pavlov did in this field.

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Skinner put cats in boxes and when they found the button and pressed it and got out of the box he came up with his theory of operant conditioning. The two most important things to consider in what is abnormal behaviour are reliability and validity.

Instruction terms (e.g. discuss, describe, etc.) You have probably done many exams by this stage of your life and so you will be familiar with the different instruction terms that appear in questions. However, regardless of what they appear to be telling you to do it is very important that you include at least some degree of evaluation in your exam answers. If you do not then you are likely to produce an entirely descriptive essay that cannot score beyond a 2:2. –

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Compare and contrast: Requires you to show how two things (e.g. theories, models, approaches, methods, etc.) are similar to and different from each other. A useful approach is to apply a context within which you will examine them and to use academic literature to aid a critical evaluation. Critically evaluate: Requires a detailed analysis of the concept, theory, model, or statement that has been presented, with copious references to academic literature to support your arguments. Describe: Requires a brief description of the key concept but also that you go beyond a mere regurgitation of your course book and lecture notes, referring to academic literature and including some degree of evaluation. Many students perform poorly on ‘describe’ questions. Discuss: This is like a critical evaluation in that you have been given a statement or premise and it is up to you to tease it out and evaluate it. It may include elements of description, compare and contrast, and illustration. Explain: Requires some details beyond what you might include in a discussion or evaluation as you must explain how something works and how it may be applied in one or more current settings. You should remain objective and include references to the academic literature. Illustrate: You may be using diagrams and/or applying concepts to practical situations but this will be similar to ‘explain’ and ‘discuss’. Outline: Requires that you give just a brief description of the concept but also that you develop your answer by talking about each point, with a reference to the academic literature, rather than just listing a series of points.

Tips for disabled students Doing exams is stressful but it can be more so for a student who may have to take their exams in a different centre to the rest of their classmates. If you have a disability, impairment, or health issue that requires some assistance or modification to your exam setting then you need to contact your university’s Disability Services at the start of the academic year. They will help to arrange any assistance that you might require during the year, for example someone to help with reading, photocopying, note taking at lectures, essay and report typing, and/or exam accommodations. If you are registered with the Disability Services and are physically capable of writing the exam by yourself then you may be allowed an extra ten minutes per

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hour of the exam. Most dyslexic students, for example, will be able to avail themselves of this. If extra time is the only accommodation being granted to you then you will most likely be with a small number of other students. If, however, you need the assistance of a reader, scribe, computer, tape recorder, or any other form of assistive technology then you will be placed in a room occupied only by yourself, your assistant (if one is needed), and the invigilator. The absence of other exam-takers can make it very hard to switch into ‘exam-mode thinking’ as it will not really feel like you’re in an exam. There is nobody to talk to beforehand – with everyone else in a different centre – and all your friends will have gone by the time you are finished. If you have always done your exams in isolation then this may not affect you, but if you have acquired your difficultly more recently (you might have broken both your arms in an accident, for example) then it can be a strange experience. Most invigilators will sit away from you and read a book or a newspaper while keeping a discreet eye on you, but if one sits too close don’t be afraid to ask them to back off a little. The feeling of being closely watched – and it is you that is being watched, there’s nobody else there! – can increase your stress levels. If you are going to be doing your exams in isolation then I would recommend that you: –

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do your exam preparation in isolation too. Get yourself used to being in an academic frame of mind while alone or with just one or two people around rather than spending hours sitting in a crowded library. This will make the comparative silence of your exam room seem less striking than it would be if you have studied only in crowded places. have a ticking clock in the room while you are studying so that you learn to habituate to the sound. It is remarkable how there will often be a loudly-ticking clock in the room and it will be placed square in front of you! find the exact location of your centre at least a few days before the exam; you won’t have classmates to follow on the day. avail yourself of any training provided on the assistive technologies that you may be using. bring along two pens, pencils, ruler, etc., even if you are typing your exam. You will still have to complete the front of the answer booklets into which your printed script will be inserted. If you have to draw diagrams use the answer booklet, number the pages, and then refer the reader to the specific page that contains the diagram. bring a bottle of water and maybe a few sugary sweets. Sometimes students taking an exam in isolation are placed in a small, poorly ventilated room that can get really hot and stuffy after an hour or two. don’t forget to stop briefly every half hour or so to stretch and flex your arms, hands and shoulders so that they won’t cramp if you are typing. You may be doing several exams in a single week and that can put quite a strain on your hands and arms, particularly if a problem with one or both of those limbs is the reason why you are typing in the first place. if the assistive equipment that you are using starts to malfunction in any way, speak up immediately – this can happen!

Summary Almost everyone will feel some degree of stress about taking exams but if you have followed these guidelines and prepared well for the task then you should do just KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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fine, even if it is many years since you last sat an exam. Preparing for and taking MCQ tests is a different experience than doing essay exams as the skills being utilised are not the same; one relies on memorisation and regurgitation whereas the other requires knowledge, understanding, the ability to evaluate the material, and to write about it in a clear and fluent manner. It is very important that you try to remain calm in any exam, that you read the questions carefully, and that you always answer the required number. Do not answer more than that; if you had to do three but you did four then only your first three answers will be read and marked. Structure your essay answers in the same way that you would structure your course essays, keep rereading the question to make sure that you are not going off topic, and make sure that you organise your exam time well so that you can complete the paper without resorting to bullet points and ‘out of time!’ messages that will not be factored into your grade.

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7

PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH SKILLS

Aims Research forms a considerable part of psychology and this is something that often takes students by surprise. You will have classes on research design, statistics, and qualitative methodologies and there are many excellent books that focus entirely on those areas. I have found, by talking to students who are having difficulty with the subject, that the formal definitions they read in their textbooks and are required to memorise cause considerable confusion. I am reminded of my school physics teacher who told us one day, with a smile, ‘But do you not realise that the whole point of physics is to describe the simplest of phenomena in the most complex terms possible?’ When it comes to statistics and research methods then I would agree with him wholeheartedly; the language in which it is presented can increase the difficulty level considerably. The purpose of this chapter is to help you to understand some of the terminology that you will encounter (in plain language), some of the issues that you need to consider when designing and conducting research, and some tips on how to understand which analytical methods you may have to apply. The central focus or theme is to take you through the process of designing your major independent research project in your final year (see Chapter 8). It will cover some of the main points, terms, and issues but this chapter is not designed to teach you about all of these methods and tests and forms of analyses; it is merely a supplement to your lectures, tutorials, and practicals in the area. Among the resources provided is a handy table, like the keyboard shortcuts table in Chapter 1, showing what to click to conduct some popular tests in SPSS. This chart also leaves you with some room to add in steps for additional tests that you may encounter in your classes. By the end of this chapter, therefore, you should know: • • •

what to consider when designing quantitative research how to tidy up and manage your SPSS output files what to consider when designing qualitative research.

What is expected at university? It comes as a surprise to many psychology students that they have to study research design and statistics and that they will have to produce reports and analyses; this is not the popular image of psychology but it is the reality. You will have to attend

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lectures and practicals in this area and there will usually be quite a lot of continuous assessment work to accompany your classes, in addition to class tests and/or exams. Many students panic when they realise that statistics are going to become such a large part of their studies, particularly if mathematics was not a strong subject for them in school or if it has been many years since they left school. Although some statistics lecturers focus on math and proofs and are of the opinion that you can only truly understand how to apply and interpret statistical analysis if you know how to perform the calculations by hand, I disagree strongly with this position. This is the twenty-first century and so if you are an undergraduate student of psychology then all you need to know is how to choose the appropriate test, how to perform it on the computer, and how to interpret and report the results; the math behind it all is irrelevant. If you really want to learn the math as a postgraduate or postdoctoral researcher then go ahead, but for the purposes of what you need to be able to do as an undergraduate (and indeed for the whole of your twenty-first century career in psychology) it is not necessary. We are psychologists, not mathematicians, and when psychologists need any assistance with more complex statistics they will consult a statistician. Indeed, some statisticians would say that psychologists sometimes misuse some statistical tests anyway, for example choosing parametric ones when nonparametric was the correct approach. Don’t worry about what that means right now; you will come across that terminology very often in your classes. If we were mathematicians then we would be studying theoretical physics or mathematics or engineering. Sadly, however, some students will be forced to learn the math and a proportion of them will perhaps end up failing psychology because of it. So if your statistics classes are focusing on the math then you need to handle it in order to pass; get grinds if necessary and pass those classes. But it is very important that you remember this: if you struggle with the math but can do everything correctly on the computer then this does not mean that you cannot do psychology, at any level, no matter what some people may try to tell you. Do not lose heart! If you can master how to do it all on the computer then you can master statistics without having any understanding or knowledge of the math behind it all. Fear is one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of students who are trying to understand how to perform and interpret statistics; poor teaching is another – not everyone who can do the math knows how to teach it to beginners. Statistics does tend to form the major part of an undergraduate’s training in research methods but it is only a part of the overall subject. Before you can collect any data for analysis you have to design a study and this will forms another major part of your course. Some universities place such a huge emphasis on the use of statistics that students would be forgiven for thinking that those methods were the only ones that psychologists could apply in their research. However, the qualitative approaches are just as important even if they often get less coverage at undergraduate level.

Part 1: Research design Throughout your undergraduate degree you will have to perform a number of studies, write them up, and then present them in either a report (see Chapter 8) or

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poster (see Chapter 9) format. In your first two years you may find that the design of these projects will have been largely done for you; your tutor or lecturer will have designed the study that will form part of your coursework. In the final year of your degree you will have to conduct an independent piece of research. You will work under the supervision of a member of the academic staff but you will be the one who has to design, conduct, write up, and present the work. This project has any of a number of different names: final year project, undergraduate thesis, dissertation, etc. For the sake of simplicity I will refer to it as the final year project (FYP) throughout this chapter. If you are only in your first year then the thought of having to perform this task may sound daunting but it is not something that should worry you. By the time you get to your final year you will be sufficiently familiar with the methods and techniques necessary to complete the assignment. If you are taking your degree via distance learning then you will have had less experience of performing and writing up academic research, but even so you will still be able to handle the work when the time comes so do not be concerned.

Supervisor All undergraduate and postgraduate research will be supervised by members of the academic staff in your department. This is because you are only a trainee and hence you are not qualified to work entirely on your own. Students often ask me when they should start thinking about their FYP and I tell them that it is never too early. You should certainly be giving it some thought in your second year, regardless of whether you are on a three-year programme or a four-year one. By that stage you will have been introduced to a wide range of subjects within psychology and also a variety of research methods, so you should be giving some thought to what you would like to investigate. You may wonder why a final-year assignment should be planned, at least in some preliminary form, a year or two before it will be done, but one of the reasons for this is so that you can get the supervisor of your choice. University departments differ in when they require that you arrange supervision for your FYP. For some the start of your final year is fine but for others it must be done in the final term of your penultimate year. Each staff member will have a set number of students who they will supervise each year, based on the number of students in the department and the workload that the lecturer has in that academic year. You may want to work with a particular lecturer but find that s/he is taking on only five final-year students and that those spots have been filled by the time you have approached her/him. Do not try to arrange supervision two or three years before your project year as you will be told to wait. When you do apply for supervision it will help if you have a clear idea of what you would like to do and how you would like to do it. This means that you will have generated a research question or hypothesis and you will have given some thought to your materials, procedure, and participants, amongst other things. KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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Research question The very first part of your design is to come up with exactly what it is that you want to investigate in your study. This may sound obvious but some students approach a potential supervisor with a vague idea of the broad topic that they would like to examine rather than the specific question that they want to ask. The best way to generate your research question is to choose the broad topic in which you are interested and then to perform a broad literature review to get an idea of what questions have been asked and answered. You may find a study or area of particular interest and decide to make some alteration, for example, using a different age group or cultural group than the one used in the original study. Of you may find that during the course of your reading some questions come to mind that do not appear to have been dealt with elsewhere. For your FYP you should choose no more than two related research questions, and often just one, and aim for simplicity rather than complexity. You will have only a few months in which to conduct and write up your study and much of that time may be spent trying to gain access to the materials and participants. A research question is what is sounds like – a question. For example, is there a gender difference in the favourable attitudes shown for such-and-such? You do not need to make any prediction in a research question.

Hypothesis If you already think you know what you may find then you may want to test a hypothesis rather than ask a question. A hypothesis is a prediction and it can be what we call one-tailed or two-tailed. You might predict that there will be a gender difference on the attitudes measured by your questionnaires but you do not say what that difference will be. This means that you are considering that males could score more highly than females or that females may score more highly than males but you do not know which way it will go. Two possible directions means a two-tailed hypothesis. However, you might have a good reason to expect your result to go in a particular direction, for example that women will score more highly than men. One possible direction means one-tailed. If your study produces results that support your prediction then make sure that you do not claim that you have proven anything; you never prove anything in the social sciences, you only find evidence that supports or refutes your hypothesis. Another type of hypothesis that you will come across is the null hypothesis. This is effectively the opposite to your hypothesis; you have said that there will be a difference so the null hypothesis is that there will not be a difference.

Independent Variable (IV) Once you have decided on your research question and your hypothesis you will have to identify the independent and dependent variables in your study, something that causes a surprising amount of confusion in students. Simply put, the independent variables are any variables you are using to investigate something, for example age,

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gender, educational status, experimental/treatment group, height, weight, etc. You will know what these are before you go anywhere near your inferential statistics. You will also need to identify the different levels of your IVs. This just means the ways in which you are subdividing your IVs. For example, female and male are the two levels for the IV ‘gender’. You might break down your IV ‘age’ into the four levels 20–29, 30–39, 40–49, 50–59. Remember: I for independent and I for investigate.

Dependent Variable (DV) You administered a bunch of questions or you got people to respond to something on a computer screen or maybe you recorded your observations of their behavioural responses to something, for example. These are scores or details that you wanted to discover in the course of your study in order to support or reject your hypothesis or answer your research question and the variables that they represent (for example, reaction time, attitude score, number of correct responses, etc.) are called dependent variables. Remember: D for dependent and D for discovery.

Groups Having decided on the variables that you will examine you will be able to identify the different groupings of the participants that you will apply. If you are going to compare the scores of different groups (e.g. male and female) then you will apply a between groups design. If you are going to compare the scores that the same group of participants got on different tests or repeat presentation of those tests, for example, then you will apply a within groups design. This will have implications for the types of analysis that you will conduct on your data.

Participants If you are doing your study with humans then you must refer to them as participants. If you are working with animals then you call them subjects. How are you going to recruit your participants? This can require a lot of thought and planning and it will depend on what it is that you want to investigate. You may have specific IVs that will result in exclusionary criteria, that is things that will make people ineligible to take part in your study. For example, you may want to conduct your work with mature students and that means that anybody who started university before the age of 23 is automatically excluded. Are you sure that having any particular exclusionary criterion will not leave you short of the numbers of participants that you will need? For your FYP you should usually be aiming for at least 100, if not more. Are you going to have to pay your participants or cover their travel expenses? Are you going to have to provide access to any services, such as counselling? Are you planning to do anything to them that could cause them any physical or psychological harm or discomfort? These are just some of the issues to be considered, as you will learn in your classes on research methods.

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Materials What questionnaires, tests, scenarios, situations are you going to use in your study? You will need to have a good reason for choosing them and this will most likely be due to the findings of prior published research that showed these things to be useful or effective in the type of study that you want to conduct. Will you have to purchase them? If so it will most likely be at your own expense. If there are questionnaires that have to be purchased then it is likely that there will be copyright legislation protecting them, which means that you will not be allowed to make photocopies of them to use in your project. Are you eligible to purchase or use them? Some psychometric tests are for trained clinical psychologists only and so will not be accessible to you. Will you have to design and create and field-test new questionnaires or equipment? If so, are you sure that you have the necessary time and expertise to do so?

Procedure and ethics Now that you know what you want to examine, with whom and with what, you need to determine exactly how you will conduct the study from start to finish. The ethical guidelines for psychological research must be adhered to and it is likely that your proposed procedures will have to be approved by your department’s ethics committee before you are allowed to proceed. If your participants are from a group that is outside of the university setting then you may also be required to get permission and ethics approval from them too, and that could take months that you don’t have. If you are doing your degree in the United Kingdom then you should read the most up-to-date version of the Code of Ethics and Conduct as published by the British Psychological Society (http://www.bps.org.uk/the-society/code-ofconduct/). If you are studying in the Republic of Ireland then you need to follow the Code of Professional Ethics as published by the Psychological Society of Ireland (http://www.psihq.ie/DOCUMENTS/Code%20of%20Professional%20 Ethics.PDF).

Confounding variables Another important point that you need to consider in the design of your study is whether or not there will be any of what we call confounding variables. By this we mean some IV that you have not included or controlled for in your investigation but that could be having an effect on your results. This could lead to what we call a Type I error, which basically means that you are incorrectly attributing your significant results to one or more of the IVs that you examined. So, you find that there is a significant relationship between age and math test scores and claim that one predicts the other but you had not examined whether or not educational status could have been what was actually producing this relationship, thereby making the age of the participants coincidental rather than causal (see Chapter 8).

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Methodology The type of question you want to ask, hypothesis you want to test, or materials and procedures that you want to apply will determine the type of methodology that will be used in analysing your data. There are two broad methodological categories and these are quantitative and qualitative. The former is the approach of which many students are afraid as it is centred around the use of statistics. However, qualitative methodologies can be very complex and they are most certainly not an easy alternative. We will take a look at each in turn below.

Reliability This is a very important concept in research. If you decide to replicate a study that someone else performed then you should get pretty much the same results that they found. If you do then their method and approach were reliable. Similarly, other people who might choose to replicate the study that you conducted must be able to replicate your findings. If attempts at replication, following the guidelines exactly, produce different results with different groups of participants who met the same selection criteria as the original group then the study was not reliable. Although it does not guarantee reliability, using a large number of participants can help as some statistical tests will work better the more data you have. This is why students are often recommended to collect data from at least 100 participants for their final year project and more if they have more than three or four levels to any IV. Why? If you have four levels to an independent variable, say age, then you are subdividing your original 100 into groups that may be as small as 15–25 people.

Validity It is very important that your study is valid, that it is actually testing or measuring what you claim it does. If a test is valid then it is presumed to be reliable but this does not work in reverse; a reliable test is not necessarily valid. Your participants may take the same number of steps every time they cross a room (reliable) but this does not mean that they will be able to run 100 metres in any specified time (so not valid as a measure of athletic ability). If the content of the test accurately measures the knowledge of that topic in your participants then it has content validity. If you were to design a questionnaire that would measure intelligence and you found that it correlated very highly with standard IQ tests, for example, then your test may have construct validity; it is accurately measuring a construct. So give careful thought to the design of your project, particularly if you are trying to come up with a novel approach to a topic.

Timeframe Another very important thing that you must factor into your research design is the time which you will have available to carry out the work in its entirety. In some KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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universities you do not submit a research proposal or approach potential supervisors until the start of the first term or your final undergraduate year. It may take a few weeks to get all of this organised, then you must apply for ethics approval, which can take another couple of weeks, and then you may be allowed to start collecting data in January but will still have to finalise the acquisition of test materials or access to participants. You may put up flyers around the campus advertising your study and requesting volunteers but there is no guarantee that you will get a flood of responses. It could take two months to collect your data, or you could get lucky and have it within a week. Then you have to input it into the computer, perform your analyses, and write it up. Throughout this time you will have been busy with all your other classes and assignments, possibly also a part-time job or family commitments, and you will also have been continuing the reading on your project topic so as to produce the best literature review (introduction) and discussion that you can. The deadline for submission could be as early as March. In some universities you must submit a preliminary research plan and organise a supervisor in the final term of your penultimate undergraduate year. You will have to do additional reading over at least part of the summer and you may have to organise ethics approval during that period, particularly if you are going to require any access to clinical groups (under full supervision, of course!) or potentially vulnerable populations, such as children or the elderly. If you are going to use a nonuniversity group of participants then you may have to acquire ethics approval from that outside body, in addition to the approval of your department’s ethics team, and as outside bodies will have their own timeframe you may have to wait months for approval. Then they might change their mind at the last minute, which happened to me in my final year, leaving you to hunt for a new participant group. In these universities you may have to submit a literature review (approximately 5000 words) just a few weeks after the start of the first term, hence the need for summer reading. When it comes to designing your final year project you need to make sure that you are absolutely clear on the requirements and expectations of your department and that you factor time into the equation.

Part 2: Quantitative research Descriptives The first type of statistics that you will consider are the descriptive measures that you perform. They are also the first statistics that you will report in your write-up (see Chapter 8). As their name suggests, these are only measures that are describing some aspect of your data so they will tell you nothing about your research question or hypothesis. They will usually just provide you with some basic information about your IVs. For example, you will know how many participants you had, their age ranges, how they break down into different groupings and so on; they are counts, frequencies. If considering this in the design of your project then you may set targets for the numbers that there should be in each grouping or category.

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mean

−3σ

−2σ

1σ

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3σ

Figure 7.1 A blank histogram showing what the bell curve would look like on data that was normally distributed. The high point on the curve is the mean score (i.e. average)

Inferential statistics When you see a term with which you are not familiar see if you can break it down. Inferential statistics just means any statistical tests that you will use to infer something, to be able to make claims, test hypotheses, and so on. It is a term that can produce a surprising amount of confusion; I once asked a student which inferential tests she was going to perform and she replied ‘Oh they’re too hard. I was just going to do regular statistics like correlations and stuff’. Of course ‘correlations and stuff’ are inferential tests as you use them to test predictions or to discover things about your data.

Normally distributed You will learn in your statistics classes that one of the first things that you must look at in your data, before you choose which inferential tests to perform, is whether or not the data are normally distributed. In other words, you are looking to see if the scores that you collected are spread about (distributed) in the way that is usually expected (normal). Some people will score highly and some will score lowly, but most will cluster somewhere around the middle. This is graphically represented as a bell curve on a histogram (see Figure 7.1 above) and if the histogram graph shows you that the spread in your data falls into that pattern (i.e. neatly under the bell curve and with that type of shape) then your data are normally distributed and this means that you will have to choose the statistical tests that are classed as being parametric. If the spread of your data does not follow the normal pattern then you must choose non-parametric tests instead. If you are only at the design stage of your study then obviously you will have no data to examine. However, you may have a good idea of the type of tests you will have to choose based on the types of tests that published studies performed or that KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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you used in lab classes which used the same or similar types of questionnaires as you are considering for your project. Also, if you are going to use questionnaires that have Likert-type scales (e.g. strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree) then you should always use non-parametric inferential tests, as scores on these questionnaires are ordinal data and they cannot be normally distributed. Some lecturers will disagree with this so if you are told to use parametric tests on these questionnaires then do so to avoid losing marks, but statisticians tell us that such an approach is incorrect.

Bivariate tests When you have put together your research proposal you will have a good idea of what bivariate tests you will need to perform when you have collected your data because you will have made a list of the little and large questions that you want answered in your study. Bivariate means having two variables, so you might be comparing male with female, test group versus control group, or any other two variables. You will learn how to perform the various tests in your statistics classes but the table below provides a quick guide to the different tests. The ‘Handy Guide to Inferential Statistics in SPSS’ table in this chapter (p. 145) is a quick guide to how to perform the tests on the computer and how to report the result. When writing up your report, you must always report the results of your bivariate tests after your descriptives and before any multivariate tests that you may have performed.

Multivariate and post hoc tests You may not come across these types of tests until your second year in psychology so, important as they are, you don’t really need to worry about them at this stage. Basically, if you want to examine three or more variables together then you will Table 7.1 Your variables are nominal or ordinal or your data are not normally distributed

You want to see if there is a ...

Your data are normally distributed

linear relationship

Pearson correlation (r=)

Spearman correlation (rs=) or Kendall’s tau-b (τ =)

difference in means of two separate groups (e.g. female & male)

independent samples t-test (t=)

Mann–Whitney (z=)

difference in means of two related groups (e.g. test & retest)

paired samples t-test (t=)

Wilcoxon signed ranks test (z=)

chi-square test (X2=) or binomial test

difference in proportions difference in variation

one-way anova (F=)

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have to use multivariate tests (i.e. multiple variables). You may be looking for linear relationships or interactions between variables (e.g. multiple regression), variation (e.g. ANOVAs), items that can be grouped together into some sort of construct (e.g. factor analysis, cluster analysis), or analysing responses on Likertscale questionnaires (e.g. Friedman, Cochran’s Q). If any of these form a part of the design of your project you should make sure that you are familiar with the appropriate tests, or that you brush up on the necessary techniques if you are rusty. You may not have the time to do this after you have collected all your data so try to determine which tests you are likely to have to use before you start testing any participants. If you give this some thought during the design stage of your project then you may also think of some additional variables, tasks, or other things that would be useful. If there are any methods that you would really like to avoid then redesign the structure of your project before you submit the proposal for ethics approval. If you are unsure about the tests you may have to perform then talk to a tutor, your supervisor, or another member of the academic staff. You will learn about these in some detail in your classes and also how to choose the appropriate post hoc (i.e. after the fact) tests that often have to be applied to them. Why might we have to perform a test on a test? Because sometimes we need more information to be able to interpret the initial result produced from our data. For example, if you perform a Kruskal–Wallis test and it shows a significant result, then it is telling you that there is some significant variation between the variables but it is not telling you which combinations are responsible for it. Therefore you must perform a series of Mann–Whitney tests on the individual pairs of variables to see which combination(s) is/are responsible for the significant variation that you have found. Don’t worry about this now; it will all be covered in your lectures and practicals. You just need to be aware, at this stage, that the way in which you design your study will dictate how you will have to analyse it. If you really want to avoid using some of the more complex multivariate tests that you will encounter then keep your design simple. As with all bivariate tests there will be times when the different multivariate tests are either appropriate or inappropriate, as you will see in your classes. The one you choose will depend on the design of the study, particularly if you used either a between groups or within groups design. It will also depend on whether or not your data are normally distributed. The straightforward one-way, two-way, and three-way ANOVAs (for 1 IV, 2 IVs and 3 IVs) require a between groups design, as does the non-parametric (i.e. your data are not normally distributed) equivalent, the Kruskal– Wallis test. Some people apply parametric tests (i.e. assuming that the data are normally distributed), for example the data reduction technique of factor analysis or various forms of ANOVAs, when analysing questionnaires that contain Likert scales but non-parametric measures are more appropriate here as the variables on these questionnaires tend to be ordinal (e.g. agree strongly, agree somewhat, neither agree nor disagree, disagree somewhat, disagree strongly). Therefore the Friedman test is more appropriate than using any of the complex ANOVAs that one often sees in reports or journal KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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articles. If your variables are nominal (e.g. blue, green, red) and dichotomous (e.g. yes, no) then use Cochran’s Q test instead. Just remember, complicated tests may look cool and clever but they are not necessarily the correct ones to use.

Managing SPSS output Many experienced SPSS users seem to be unaware of how you can tidy up your output files and will spend time opening and closing various files trying to find the information that they want. These output files contain tables and graphs that the software creates whenever you ask it to perform a test. When you perform your first statistical test on your database SPSS will create an output file, called output, and put the results there. Save your work every time that you add new material to this file. The next time you want to do work on the same database then make sure that you open the output file in which you have already saved work. If you do not open an output file then SPSS will just create a new one and now your results are split up across two files, or three, or four. Output files will have the extension .spo while the SPSS database files will end in .sav When you look at the output file you may notice that there is something familiar about the general layout of the screen. It has two columns, one of which contains folders and file names and the other shows the test results and graphs. This output file looks like Windows Explorer and it can be organised in the same way that you would organise files in Explorer (not Internet Explorer; I’m talking about the window with two columns in which you find, organise, and open your files and that opens automatically when you insert a USB key). If you click twice, slowly, on the name of a file (not the icon) in the lefthand column of your output then you can edit it, and you really should do so. It is the same for the folders. Why should you change them? If you performed a correlation then the folder will be called correlation, as will the file within it. If you perform ten more correlations on that dataset then you will now have a total of 11 folders all called correlation. Do you really want to check through each one to find the result that you want at this particular moment? Give the folder a name that lets you know what’s in it and rename its files too. You will notice, when you see an SPSS output file, that there is a + beside the image of the folder. This means that there is something contained within it. If you click once on the + it opens the folder and shows you a list of the contents, just as this feature does in Windows Explorer (where you may see triangles instead of pluses). After you have clicked on the + you will notice that it changes to –. If you click once on the – then it closes up the folder again. But that’s not all! The tables, charts or other information that the output file is displaying in the right-hand column is the content of the open folders. This is the default setting, which means that all your folders will remain open unless you close them. And if all your folders are open at the one time then you will have to scroll up and down the right of the screen to find the information you want at this particular moment. The oldest stuff is at the top and the newest output at the bottom. It is much easier to close each folder when you are finished with it and to open only those that

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are of immediate interest. It also reduces the chance of transcription errors, that is that you copy the result from the wrong table into your report or paper. If you give each of these folders a clear and different name (e.g. ‘gender & IQ score’ instead of the default ‘t-test’) then this can also include whether or not the test(s) within it show any significant results. Just put a * at the start of the name and then you can see where your significant results are stored at a glance. You can also tidy up the contents of the individual folders. They may include warning messages that you don’t want or other bits and pieces that you would rather delete (for neatness) and you can remove these just as you would in Windows Explorer. You might also decide that you would like to have all the correlations that you performed saved in a single folder instead of being scattered throughout your output file (the files are saved in the order in which they are done, not alphabetically). Just as you can drag a file from one folder to another in Explorer, you can drag an item from one folder to another in SPSS output. You can also move a folder up or down in the overall list of folders (by dragging it there) or move one folder into another, or out of it – it is entirely up to you. You can also make the left and right column narrower or wider, if you like, by dragging the dividing line one way or the other, just as you would do to resize a column in a table in Word or a column in Excel. When you are doing small class projects all of this may not seem like anything of particular importance but when it comes to larger projects, such as your final year project or maybe a postgraduate thesis, then you will really want to do this! It makes it so much easier to see exactly what tests you have done, which ones are significant (and therefore likely to be needed for your write-up), and what tests you still need to do.

Part 3: Qualitative research The amount of exposure to qualitative research that you will get as an undergraduate can vary greatly from one university to another as some psychology departments will tend to focus more closely on quantitative methods instead. Students who are nervous about doing statistics or who just don’t like it will sometimes think that qualitative sounds easier. However, the reality is that the statistics approach is the one that is easy. You can administer your tests on Monday and have your entire report written by Wednesday, statistics and all; I’m not kidding. However, if you took a qualitative approach on Monday then you will probably be still typing or organising transcripts by the following Monday, and maybe even the Monday after that. One colleague has described what he calls the beauty and the torment of qualitative research, talking about the depth and richness that you could get in your data but that you could spend months or even years on the same dataset and still feel that there was more you could achieve. If you are thinking of using qualitative methods for your final year project then give it some serious thought. Will you really have the time that it takes to analyse your data thoroughly? Do you have the typing expertise that will be necessary to produce your transcripts? If there is transcription software available (you can download a free-to-use version at www.transana.org) will you have the time and patience KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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Table 7.2 Handy Guide to Inferential Statistics in SPSS (build up the chart by adding in more tests as you encounter them) Correlation

Independent samples t-test

-> click ‘analyse’

-> click ‘analyse’

-> select ‘correlate’

-> select ‘compare means’

-> select ‘bivariate’

-> select ‘independent samples t-test’

-> click either ‘Pearson’ or ‘Spearman’

-> double-click on the variables you want to test (as many as you like), to make them appear in the box called ‘test variables’

-> double-click on the variables you want to test (as many as you like), to make them appear in the box called ‘variables’ -> if you have not specified the direction in which you expect the result to be, then select ‘two-tailed’ – if you have specified the direction of the expected result then select ‘one-tailed’ -> make sure that ‘flag significant correlations’ is ticked -> press OK

-> select the variable that represents the two groups you wish to compare, e.g. gender, and put it in the ‘grouping variable’ box -> click on ‘define groups’ -> if you coded this variable as 0 and 1, then put 0 and 1 in the boxes. If it was 1 and 2, then use these numbers, and so on. -> click ‘continue’ -> click OK

-> report as (r= [or rs=] ; N= ; p< )

-> report as (t= ; df= ; p< )

Paired samples t-test

Wilcoxon signed ranks test

-> click ‘analyse’

-> click ‘analyse’

-> select ‘compare means’

-> select ‘non-parametric tests’

-> select ‘paired sample t-test’

-> select ‘2 related samples’

-> double-click on the variables you want to test (as many pairs as you like), to make them appear in the box called ‘paired variables’

-> double-click on the variables you want to test (as many pairs as you like), to make them appear in the box called ‘test pair(s) list’

-> click OK -> report as (t= ; df= ; p< )

-> select ‘Wilcoxon’ -> click OK -> report as (z= ; p< )

Mann–Whitney U test

Chi-square

-> click ‘analyse’

-> click ‘analyse’

-> select ‘non-parametric tests’

-> select ‘descriptives’

-> select ‘2 independent samples’

-> select ‘crosstabs’

-> select ‘Mann–Whitney U’

-> double-click on the independent variables gender, age group, etc.) you want to test to (e.g. make them appear in the box called ‘row(s)’

-> double-click on the variables you want to test (as many as you like), to make them appear in the box called ‘test variables’

-> double-click on the dependent variables you want to test to make them appear in the box called ‘columns(s)’

-> select the variable that represents the two groups you wish to compare, e.g. gender, and put it in the ‘grouping variable’ box

-> click ‘statistics’

-> click on ‘define groups’

-> select ‘chi-square’ -> click ‘continue’

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Table 7.2 -> if you coded this variable as 0 and 1, then put 0 and 1 in the boxes. If it was 1 and 2, then use these numbers, and so on.

-> click OK -> report as (X2= ; df= ; p< )

-> click ‘continue’ -> click OK -> report as (z= ; p< ) One-way anova (with post hoc)

Two-way anova (between groups)

-> click ‘analyse’

-> click ‘analyse’

-> select ‘general linear model’

-> select ‘general linear model’

-> select ‘univariate’

-> select ‘univariate’

-> put the IV into the box ‘fixed factor(s)’

-> put the 2 IVs into the box ‘fixed factor(s)’

-> put the DV into the box ‘dependent variable’

-> put the DV into the box ‘dependent variable’

-> click ‘post hoc’ (only if IV has more than 2 levels)

-> select ‘Tukey’

-> select ‘Tukey’ -> double-click on your IV (in ‘factors’ box) to put it into the ‘post hoc tests for’ box -> click ‘continue’ -> click ‘options’ -> select ‘homogeneity tests’ and ‘estimates of effect size’ -> click ‘continue -> click ‘OK’

-> click ‘post hoc’ -> double-click on the IV that has 3 or more levels (in ‘factors’ box) to put it into the ‘post hoc tests for’ box -> click ‘continue’ -> click ‘options’ -> select ‘homogeneity tests’ and ‘estimates of effect size’ -> click ‘continue -> click ‘OK’

-> report as (F= ; df= ; p< ) Binomial test

Kruskal–Wallis test

-> click ‘analyse’

-> click ‘analyse’

-> select ‘non-parametric tests’

-> select ‘nonparametric tests’

-> select ‘binomial’

-> select ‘k independent samples’

-> fill in the box ‘test proportion’ - this must be expressed as a decimal so if your test proportion was 56.7%, then type this in as .567

-> put your DV(s) in the box ‘test variable list’

-> click ‘cut point’ and type in the target figure (e.g. the mean score)

-> Kruskal–Wallis H should already be ticked -> put your IV in the box ‘grouping variable’ -> click ‘define range’ -> if you coded that IV as 0, 1, 2 then make the range 0 to 2. If it was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 then it’s 1 to 5, and so on.

-> double-click on the variable you want to examine to put it in the ‘test variable list’ box

-> click ‘continue’

-> click ‘OK’

-> click ‘OK’

-> report as (N= ; p< )

-> report as (X2= ; df= ; p< ) -> perform Mann–Whitney as post hoc test

One-way anova (simple)

Three-way anova (between groups)

-> click ‘analyse’

-> click ‘analyse’

-> select ‘compare means’

-> select ‘general linear model’

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Table 7.2 -> select ‘one-way anova’

-> select ‘univariate’

-> double-click on the variables you want to test (as many as you like), to make them appear in the box called ‘dependent list’ (DVs)

-> put the 3 IVs into the box ‘fixed factor(s)’

-> select the variable that represents the two groups you wish to compare, e.g. gender, and put it in the ‘factor’ box -> click OK -> report as (F= ; df= ; p< )

-> put the DV into the box ‘dependent variable’ -> click ‘post hoc’ -> select ‘Tukey’ -> double-click on any IVs that have 3 or more levels (in ‘factors’ box) to put it into the ‘post hoc tests for’ box -> click ‘continue’ -> click ‘options’ -> select ‘homogeneity tests’ and ‘estimates of effect size’

Friedman test

Cochran’s Q test

-> click ‘analyse’

-> click ‘analyse’

-> select ‘nonparametric test’

-> select ‘nonparametric test’

-> select ‘k related samples’

-> select ‘k related samples’

-> select ‘Friedman’

-> select ‘Cochran’s Q’

-> put the variables (ordinal only!) you want to test in the ‘test variables’ box

-> put the variables you want to test in the ‘test variables’ box

-> click ‘exact’ and select ‘exact’

-> click ‘exact’ and select ‘exact’

-> click ‘continue’

-> click ‘continue’

-> click ‘OK’

-> click ‘OK’ 2

-> report as (X = ; df= ; p< )

-> report as (Q= ; df= ; p< )

Factor analysis (one example) -> click ‘analyse’ -> select ‘data reduction’ -> select ‘factor’ -> transfer your target variables into the box ‘Variables’ -> click ‘rotation’ and select ‘varimax’ -> click ‘continue’ -> click ‘options’ -> select ‘suppress absolute values less than’ and put .3 in the box -> click ‘continue’ -> click ‘OK’

necessary to learn how to master it? Of course, before you even get to the data analysis stage you have to collect it. This may mean that you will have to organise focus groups, or source free-to-use or inexpensive established qualitative questionnaires (that you are allowed to access; remember that not all psychometric instruments are available to trainees), or that you will have to design and field-test your own questionnaires. Difficult as it may be to design a good quantitative questionnaire,

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it can be even more difficult to design a really good qualitative one and the process involved can be quite lengthy. I am not trying to dissuade you from using qualitative methods; I think that they can produce data that are much better at capturing the human experience than analysing questionnaires or mouse-clicks or other quantitative things will ever do. But it is only fair to you to make it absolutely clear that this is most definitely not the easy option. This section is not going to give you a tutorial on qualitative methods as that would take a book in itself, but it will give you an outline of some of the issues that you need to consider before embarking on this path and it will also introduce you to some of the approaches and terminology that you will encounter in your lectures.

Interviews The process of interviews is a very popular method of obtaining qualitative data. If you are thinking of using interviews for your project then you need to give this some careful thought. How are you going to structure them? Will they be structured, semi-structured, or open? Are you going to have a series of questions that require only a quick answer and/or are designed to elicit particular responses or are you going to have more open questions that allow your participants to talk at some length about the points that you raise with them? How much time will you allow for each interview? Where will you conduct these? Will you be able to book a room in your department or elsewhere in college for the duration of the interviews? Will you have to pay for this? Will you be able to recruit sufficient numbers of participants to obtain the information that you seek? How many will you need? (Remember that you would have fewer participants than in a quantitative study.) Will you have the time necessary to set up and conduct these interviews while keeping up to date with the rest of your work and your life outside of college (e.g. part-time job, family commitments)? Will you be able to remain focused, stay in control, and not let yourself get distracted if the interviewee goes off topic? Don’t forget that you must type up transcripts of the interviews so that you can perform your analysis and that it can take a lot of time to do this typing. If you have suitable digital recording equipment and access to software that can process it and produce transcripts for you then this will save you time, but many students will not have these facilities. You may have to buy the equipment and software yourself and you may have to pay your participants for their time and travel costs. Interviews are a great way to obtain qualitative data but they can be time consuming and expensive.

Focus groups A single session with a focus group can provide you with as much data as may have been generated by a series of one-on-one interviews and this makes them an inexpensive and time-saving approach. Ideally the moderator of the group (you), will start off the discussion with something (relevant) that is likely to get people talking. The moderator should also be well-trained in how to manage the session so as to steer the discussion in the desired direction, to reduce the chance of one or two KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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dominant individuals steering it somewhere else and to be able to make the most of the data that you collect. Group members (usually around six to eight in total) can help to generate ideas, memories, or the confidence to speak up in other members and this can result in more detail being provided than those same individuals may have recounted in separate interviews. If you have not been trained on how to manage focus groups and how to analyse the transcripts from them then you should probably avoid this approach for your final year project.

Case studies It would be unusual for a final year undergraduate to be allowed to produce a case study for their final year project but it is a popular qualitative research approach. As its name suggests, this is where you take a single case, a single person, and perform a detailed analysis of their situation or circumstances. It is usually done over a matter of weeks, months, or even years and it is a method that postgraduate students in counselling and clinical psychology would have to apply from time to time (clinical case reports). The timeframe available for the final year project may not be sufficient and it is unlikely that you would be able to gain access to any clinical or vulnerable groups.

Discourse analysis This is a broad term rather than the name of a specific method. Put simply, it is any of a number of approaches that examine different aspects of communication, including writing, talking, and conversation and this does it by breaking down these events into components such as speech acts, turn taking, grammar, use of rhetoric, sentence structures, sequences, etc. It is interested in natural use language. Discourse analysis is used in a variety of areas within the social sciences so it is not a technique that applies exclusively to psychology. You may receive some training in this area as part of your classes on research methods, though some psychology departments may discuss it in class without arranging any hands-on experience of its application. Therefore this is something that you would only consider for your final year project if you had already done one or more projects in which you had to use this approach.

Thematic analysis Broadly speaking, this is a method whereby you take your data, code these, and divide them into groups that have a similar meaning or related concepts or categories. These emerge from the data and so the researcher does not have any preconceived notions or categories in mind before they begin.

Structured methods These are very similar to thematic analysis but with the important difference that you do have preconceived concepts, themes, and coding schemes. So rather than

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looking for themes to emerge from the data you are imposing themes and structures onto your data. Sometimes some of this qualitative data will be transformed into numeric form, in other words into quantitative form, and this part will be analysed using statistics.

Grounded theory This approach is one that was developed in sociology but unless you are trained in how to use it then you should not attempt it for your final year project as you will just not have the time to learn and master it. Unlike many approaches that have a particular theory in mind before they begin grounded theory aims to generate a theory, not to support or refute or to develop an already existing one. You will often find it included in courses on qualitative research methods but the Grounded Theory Institute (see www.groundedtheory.com) states that the approach is not a qualitative method, that it is ‘a general method … the systematic generation of theory from systematic research. It is a set of rigorous procedures leading to the emergence of conceptual categories’. In other words, you start without any preconceptions or theories and you develop them only on the basis of your findings.

Summary Designing a study may initially sound like an easy task but it should be clear from reading this chapter that there are many things that you need to consider. The research question that you want to ask or the hypothesis that you want to test can dictate whether or not you use a quantitative or qualitative approach. It can also dictate the types of tests, materials, measures or techniques that you will need to use, the number of participants that you will have to recruit, and the amount of time that you will require to manage everything. The details of all of these methods will be covered in detail in your statistics and research design classes and relevant books on these topics that will be recommended to you by your lecturers, which is why they have only been mentioned in passing here. This is an in-a-nutshell guide to research in psychology, not a how-to. But you should have an idea of what may be involved, from a practical point of view, if you decide to use any of these methods in your final year project. Research may sound and feel daunting when you are starting out, but it is a lot easier than it may seem and it can be also a lot of fun. So what should you aim for in the design of your independent research project in your final year? Keep it simple. And I mean simple, not basic. Giving people a single questionnaire to complete and performing a few correlations and Mann–Whitneys will probably not be enough to score really well. You may be expected to have two or three questionnaires and to analyse them independently and against each other. If your psychology department is heavily involved in qualitative research then you may receive a lot of training in this area and do your project accordingly. But whatever approach you are going to take, keep in simple. Do not try to design some large

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and complex project just for the sake of it. The project is just an exercise to see if you are capable of designing, carrying out, and writing up an independent piece of research. It is not about coming up with something that will change the world; leave that until your postdoctoral research. Keep in mind the points and issues raised here, pay close attention to what your supervisor tells you, and I would also recommend that you study Jennifer Evans’s excellent book Your Psychology Project: The Essential Guide For Success (2007). You should work with Andy Field’s Discovering Statistics Using SPSS (2009) for an outstanding and comprehensive guide to anything you might ever want to know about statistics in SPSS. For excellent guides to the intricacies of qualitative research I would recommend David Silverman’s Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice (2004) and also Qualitative Psychology: A Practical Guide to Research Methods(2008), which is edited by Jonathon Smith. Don’t worry and don’t panic; statistics and research methods are not the monsters that they seem at first and in time you may even come to enjoy them.

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8

WRITING REPORTS

Aims This chapter focuses on lab reports, something that you will have to produce in each year of your degree. The number and length of these reports will depend on the classes that you are taking but by the end of this chapter you should know: • • •

the structure and layout of a lab report how to write the various sections of a lab report how to present your report.

What is expected at university? ‘The matter looked dreary reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables of figures …’ (Conrad, 1994 [1902], p. 54). This quotation, which comes from the novel Heart Of Darkness, makes me smile as it almost sounds like the character is talking about some of the lab reports that I produced as an undergraduate or that I have read since. Sometimes they can be rather dull and repetitive with too many diagrams and tables of numbers, but if your early attempts are like that then do not worry as with practice you will be able to write an interesting and engaging report and you will know what is appropriate for representation in a table or graph and what is not needed. You will have to write quite a few lab reports during the course of your degree. Usually these will be fairly short and based on tests or experiments carried out during class time. Some will be longer and some may require that you work in a group and present a team report. In your final year you are likely to be asked to produce a larger individual research report, which is generally known as the Final Year Project (FYP), dissertation, or the undergraduate thesis. For the purposes of this chapter the major research project that you undertake in your final undergraduate year will be referred to as the FYP. There is a specific format in which reports must be presented and it is very important that you follow the structure exactly. If your lecturer or tutor wants you to present any section in a different way then follow their guidelines so that you do not lose marks. However, remember that just because one lecturer or tutor decides to deviate from the regular format does not mean that you should do so in all

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of your classes and for different lecturers or tutors; that could cost you marks. Following the format is an easy way to gain marks for a report and it is usual that you can earn much higher marks for it than you will for an essay. This is because there is normally a set number of marks for each part or each section of the report and so by including the correct information in the correct places you can almost pass some report assignments on this basis alone. However, being careless in applying the correct format to a report, which is remarkably common in students even in their final year, or trying to modify it to suit your own personal preferences is a silly way to throw away marks. If you can gain enough marks from doing it correctly that you can almost pass on that alone, just think how many marks you are throwing away if you do not follow the standard format!

Structure of a report The function of a report or thesis is to explain what research was conducted, why it was done, exactly how it was done, what the results were, and what the implications of these results are when placed against previously published literature. Report writing is an important skill for undergraduate work and especially for postgraduate level and beyond. It encompasses the skills used in essay writing along with appropriate use of data analysis and the method of presentation follows strict guidelines; specific information must be presented within specified sections of the report. The main sections of any undergraduate report or FYP are: – – – – – – – – –

title contents page abstract introduction methods and procedure results discussion references appendices.

An explanation of what goes into each of those sections is provided below. If you are required to include a signed declaration that the work is your own (usually only in your FYP), then you must include this on the page before the contents section. Have a look at any scientific journal article and you will notice that it is laid out in these sections with the obvious exception of a contents page. Some journals combine results and discussion into a single section but you should keep them separate for your lab reports, undergraduate, master’s or doctoral theses. Look closely at what material is included in what sections. Though the style requirements of some journals place some information in different sections than in a formal report, they are all basically the same. An example would be that in some journals the editors insist that no statistical results be included in the abstract. This exception is rare and does not apply to report writing i.e. statistical results must be reported in the abstract. There is a sample report, with comments, provided in the appendices.

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The title The first section of the report is the title and this is something that is often overlooked. All too often we will write a report and then just slap on a title without actually thinking about what the title is conveying. Or perhaps you would just copy and paste the name of the assignment on to the front of your report; that will not be adequate either. The title must go on a separate page (attached of course) to the rest of the report and it is usually on that page that you will include your name and student number and any other information that you have been told to give, for example, the name of the class and/or lecturer. Sometimes you will be told not to put any pictures or illustrations on the front cover, but if there’s no policy on this in your university department then it is probably fine to include something so long as it is relevant and tasteful. But do not go to the expense of trying produce a fullcolour report as you will not gain any extra marks for that. So what should the title tell us? Ideally it should: – – – – –

not exceed 15–20 words indicate what the study was about indicate the independent variable (IV) and dependent variable (DV) identify the subjects or participants indicate some key aspect of the results.

A short, snappy title might sound cool but if it does not give the reader, who may be searching for a specific piece of information, an idea of what is contained in the report then s/he is likely to bypass it in favour of another document. Posters, as we will see in Chapter 9, are different; catchy titles can draw readers in and they can be memorable. As an undergraduate my lab group produced a cognition poster with the title ‘New Age Men Found on Trinity Campus!’. It got lots of attention but, many years later, even I cannot remember what it was about. It is a fun title so let’s look further at it. Think about this for a moment. What is wrong with that title and why would you never put one like this on your lab report?

Firstly, what was the study about? I’ve said that it was for cognition report that was presented as a poster but can you even tell that from the headline? It sounds as though it could have been an anthropology study or a sociology project or even a police report! Maybe it was for a palaeontology class and some fossilised remains of a humanoid species called ‘New Age Man’ were dug up on the university grounds. Now that would have been really cool but sadly that’s not what the study was about. The title sounds more like a newspaper or magazine headline that is designed to draw you in rather than the title of an academic lab report. Always remember, you are studying psychology and not training to be a newspaper sub-editor! So how do we write a title that will tell the reader what the report is about? There are certain pieces of information that should be reflected in a title and there KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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are some superfluous words and phrases that should be left out. As it is a report and therefore obviously the result of a piece of research, do not make any mention of ‘a study to show that’ or ‘research into whether or not …’ or anything else that tells the reader that you investigated something. However, you will need to give some indication of the independent and dependent variables in the study but without using those words. What are independent and dependent variables (see Chapter 7)? These are terms you will come across in your statistics classes and there are formal definitions for them that students will often have to memorise. I have found that formal definitions can cause more confusion than understanding and so I always point out to students that the simplest way to remember what these two types of variables are is as follows: Independent variables are the items that you are using to Investigate something (e.g. age, gender, occupational status, height, etc.) whereas Dependent variables are the things that you are trying to Discover (e.g. IQ scores, depression scores, anxiety scores, attitudes, reaction times, etc.).

Think about this for a moment. Does the title ‘New Age Men Found on Trinity Campus!’ tell us anything about the IVs and DVs in the study?

There is a reference to men in the title so gender may have been a variable, but does this title necessarily imply that women were also being sought? This could have been a study done entirely on male participants. The men are described as ‘New Age’ but is this necessarily a dependent variable? Maybe the study only looked for New Age Men and nothing else and so the fact that this men were ‘New Age’ was not a discovery, hence not a dependent variable. And what on earth are ‘New Age Men’ anyway?! Clearly the title is unclear. Your lab report title should also identify the subjects or participants and there is a very important distinction between those two terms. If your work deals with humans (or sentient beings from other planets, if they exist and are willing to take part in your research!) then you must refer to them as participants and never as subjects. You will find books and many journal articles that do use the term ‘subjects’ in human studies, but the policy changed some years ago and so you should not use the term. It would appear from our title that at least some of the participants were ‘New Age Men’ and that they were found on Trinity campus (is that a business park or maybe a university campus?) but it does not give us sufficient information about them. If we had said something like ‘Paddy, Mick and Joe Blogs found …’ then we would have given too much information and also broken an ethical rule in psychology; we would have named them and that is not allowed! However, if we had phrased the title something like ‘New Age attitudes found in male university students’ then we would know that the key finding in the report is about men who are attending a university and who, therefore, are probably young. Of course there is probably going to be some mature students among them so perhaps the title could have said ‘young male’ or if they were all mature students then ‘mature male’. Whether or not women were also studied will have to be found out from reading the abstract

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(see below) and the rest of the report, but this different title gives us much more information.

Think about this for a moment. If the title was ‘New Age Attitudes Found in Male University Students’ then what could we learn from it about the study?

In addition to finding out something about the IV and the DV (‘New Age’ attitudes, whatever those might be), we have learned that the study was conducted with university students and that the key finding was men were found to exhibit New Age attitudes. Of course we do not know what the context of the report was – attitudes towards what? – but though there is no mention of women we could infer something about gender from this title. Ask yourself this; what would have been the purpose of the study? Most likely it would have been to administer questionnaires that included attitude scales and that male students scored significantly higher on the trait of ‘New Age’ attitudes than did female students. It is not said directly in the title but it could be inferred from it. But even if you read the title that way it does not mean that women were definitely a part of the study. Titles are often the part of a journal article that we barely glance at but you can use them to help you learn to write better titles for your own lab reports. Have a look at journal articles and break down their titles. What was the study about? What were the IVs and DVs? Who were their participants and what were the key findings? It does not matter if you know nothing about the subject of the paper. You will remember that I said you must never use the term ‘subjects’ when referring to human participants. This term is reserved for non-human species and in those cases you will have to give the species’ Latin name in the title too. You may do some lab studies with pigeons or rats, but that will depend on the university that you are in as many do not do these learning studies any more. Here is an example of a title from an animal study: Accompanying preweaned thoroughbred foals (Equus caballus) while separated from the mare during covering reduces behavioural signs of distress exhibited.

Think about this for a moment. Can you identify the IV, DV, and the identity of the subjects in this example? What information does this title provide about the study that was conducted?

The IV here was the group into which the foal was placed and it had two levels (see Chapter 7): accompanied or left on their own in the stable. The DV is the behavioural signs of distress exhibited by the foals and the key finding was that this distress was lower in the accompanied group than in the solitary group. The subjects were very young foals (they had not yet been weaned), they were common horses, species Equus caballus, of the breed Thoroughbred. The reason that they were available for study was because their mothers had been removed for a few minutes KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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(no more than an hour) to visit the stallion. The title does not indicate who it was that did the accompanying (actually it was me!), but the lingo used in the animal behaviour branch of psychology and animal science and welfare makes it clear that it was a human. And all of this information was condensed into just 19 words. The paper was published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science in 2004 and is available online through the Science Direct database, to which your university probably has a subscription – just in case you’re interested in seeing how this type of postgraduate field work was done.

Contents page When the reader turns the title page of your lab report they should see a contents page. Make sure that you lay it out neatly and clearly rather than just typing a small, squashed list at the top of the page. It should indicate the page on which each of the major sections starts and in your FYP, or in a major team research project if you are asked to produce one, it will also include a list of all the tables and figures contained within the report and the page numbers on which they can be found. This page does not have to be fancy and it does not have to be laid out in the way that Microsoft Word can do it; plain and simple will suffice – it’s only a lab report. Your contents page on a short report might look like this: Abstract

1

1.0

Introduction

2

2.0

Methods & Procedure

4

2.1 Design

4

2.2 Participants

4

2.3 Materials

4

2.4 Procedure

4

3.0

Results

6

4.0

Discussion

7

References

9

Appendix 1: Information Letter for Participants

10

Appendix 2: The Joe Blogs IQ Questionnaire

11

Appendix 3: Confirmation of Ethics Approval

12

You will notice that some of the sections have been numbered in this example. It is not essential that you do so for first-year or second-year lab reports, but when it comes to larger pieces of work such as a team project or your FYP then it is a good idea to number the sections as indicated here. In a larger report you may have numerous tables, figures (i.e. pictures or graphs), or subsections within each major section and numbering in this way makes it easier to refer the reader to a specific point. For example, the first table in your results section would be Table 3.1, indicating that it is the first table to be found in section three of the report. You may

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want to refer back to this table in your discussion, for example, so having a number that identifies its specific location is very helpful, particularly when you get to your master’s (~10,000 to 40,000 words) or doctoral thesis (~40,000 to 100,000 words).

Abstract The abstract is a self-contained and self-explanatory summary of the whole report. If you have worked in business or management you may be familiar with executive summaries; the abstract is the same idea. It should provide details of the research question, the IV and DV, details of the subjects/participants, the methods used, the statistics and any other analysis methods used, the findings, and the implications of these findings in light of the hypothesis tested, and normally all this should be in between 120 to 150 words. For larger reports, for example a master’s or doctoral thesis, the abstract will usually need to be longer but the shorter word length should be adhered to for undergraduate reports and journal articles. Although the abstract is placed at the start of the report, the best time to write it is actually after you have completed the rest of the report. After all, the abstract is a concise yet detailed summary of the whole study so it is easier to do this when you’ve written everything else. Here are two versions of the same abstract, a weak one and a better one.

Box 8.1:

Version 1 (weak abstract)

Jenni and Jenni (1976) did a study that showed that men and women carry books differently. We looked at a random selection of students and noted the way they carried their books. We put the data into a statistics package and found that the authors were right.

This example contains many of the errors that I have seen in abstracts of reports written by undergraduate students. It is clearly a book-carrying report based on a very old journal article and it tells us that the participants were students, that gender was an IV, and that how the books were carried is the DV. It also tells us that the data were analysed by computer software and that the results were consistent with what someone had said or predicted. So what is wrong with it?

Think about this for a moment. If this abstract identifies some of the key things that are supposed to be in an abstract then why is it a poor one? What is wrong with it?

The first thing that should jump out at you is that this abstract is much too short; it is only 47 words! It does tell you what was done and why, but it is so superficial KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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that are no details whatsoever. What is the difference between the way in which men and women carry books, according to Jenni and Jenni (1976)? Who is ‘we’? Apart from the fact that you should never mention I, you, me, we, our, your, and similar words in your reports, this implies that the writer was not the only researcher. A ‘random selection of students’ – random has a very specific meaning and so how did this random selection take place. Was it random or was it an opportunistic sample? How did you note the way in which they carried their books? Was there a checklist or something else to be completed or did you just write down a note on how they were carrying the books. How many books? Did you look at students who were carrying a single book, or maybe two, three, five, or more? Was it large or small books? Just as the phrase ‘did a study that showed’ is a superfluous phrase (see Chapter 5), so too is ‘we put the data into a statistics package and found’. Most people will be using computer software to do their calculations and the fact that you did so tells us nothing about the findings. And neither does this abstract! The ‘authors were right’ – what authors? ‘We’ or maybe Jenni and Jenni? And what was right? Did the study just find that men and women carry their books differently? If an abstract poses more questions about the study than it answers then it is indeed a poor abstract. Now look at version 2 of this abstract. Can you see why this is so much better than the first version?

Box 8.2:

Version 2 (better abstract)

To test the theory, put forward by Jenni and Jenni (1976), that there is a gender difference in the way in which males and females carry books, an observation study was carried out by a team of first-year undergraduate psychology students in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Opportunistic sampling was employed and 209 students (m=104; f=105) were observed. The carrying style that each used, organised into the six different methods (split into two main types), as defined by Jenni and Jenni, was noted by ticking the corresponding icon on a printed checklist. More females than males use the book-carrying methods designated as Type A, that is with the short edges of the book resting on the hip or in front of the body ( X2 = 55.46; p < .0001), which supported the earlier published findings.

Hopefully you can clearly see the differences between this version of the abstract and the previous version. This abstract has 130 words, which is a suitable length. It identifies what Jenni and Jenni (1976) found to be different in how men and women carry books, who conducted this newer study, where and how they did it, and what was found. A chi-square test was performed to see if there was a statistically significant difference in the proportions of men and women who carried their books in the different styles; there was on Type A, with more women than men using this method. A value for degrees of freedom should have been included in the chi-square result but that’s a minor omission.

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Introduction The introduction is rather like an essay (see Chapter 4). It will give the relevant background information to the topic under investigation, with relevant being a key word. Don’t write a lengthy essay about the history of eating disorders and how they affect people throughout their lives if the research question was the prevalence of eating disorders in pre-teens. The topic will need to be addressed but only briefly and your introduction should start out fairly broad but gradually narrow its focus. As with an essay, all material must be fully and properly referenced. Whereas an essay closes with the conclusions drawn on the basis of the evidence provided, a report’s introduction closes with a formal statement of the hypothesis or the research question being tested, for example: the hypothesis was that men would show a more favourable attitude than would women towards the television cartoon series Beavis & Butthead. You do not, however, give any description of how you actually went about conducting the research; that comes later. The following example is an introduction section from a freshman child psychology lab report that looked at the messages of violence and gender stereotyping portrayed in the very popular television cartoon series The Simpsons, which is viewed by children and adults alike. The effect of television viewing on children has long been a hotly-debated topic with numerous studies showing that children copy, to varying extents, what they see on screen, whether that be the imitation of a pop idol or the violence portrayed in action films, documentaries or cartoons (for example, Bandura, Ross & Ross, 1961, 1963). Indeed, it has been estimated that by age 16 the average child will have witnessed more than 13,000 killings on television (Liebert & Schwartzberg, 1977). In one study a ten-year follow-up of more than 200 children found that the amount of violent television watched at age nine was the best single predictor of juvenile delinquency offences related to aggression at age 19 (Leftkowitz, et al., 1972). Huesmann and Eron (1986) found, however, that there was a bi-directional effect. Not only did children who watched more aggressive television become more aggressive over time, but also more aggressive children watched increasing amounts of violent television over time. It is important to remember, however, that while viewing of television aggression can increase people’s tendency to be aggressive, both immediately and at some time in the future, this link is not inevitable (Deaux, Dane & Wrightsman, 1993, p. 273). Children learn much by watching and observing and, as Kendall and Hammen (1995, p. 482) point out, ‘one of the three levels on which observational learning takes place is violence on television, in film and in music lyrics’. The same is true, in many cases, of gender roles and gender stereotyping. One way in which the learning of stereotyped perceptions and behaviour might occur is through differential imitation of same-sex models (Manstead & McCulloch, 1981). The current ‘Barbie Doll’ hit song, for example, does not exactly portray women or girls in a favourable light, leaning more towards the blond bimbo stereotype instead. And one only has to look around them to see young girls dressing and acting like, say, the Spice Girls. Before studies of the effects of TV watching can be evaluated properly, it is important to adopt a valid view of the person who is watching. ‘To assume that television can impact upon a passively receptive child audience with messages about sex stereotyping (or indeed anything else which may influence), thus moulding innocent young viewers’ conceptions of gender, is largely accepted as an over simplistic picture of what really goes on’ (Gross, 1996, p. 588). Viewers exhibit a

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degree of activity in selecting what to watch, what to pay attention to and what to remember in a selective fashion to particular characters and events and their perceptions, memories and understanding of what they have seen may often be mediated by dispositions they bring with them to the viewing situation (Gunther & McAleer, 1990). Even so, children do tend to imitate what they see, for varying reasons. Kostelnick, Whiren and Stein (1988) described why children find superhero play, for example, so attractive. Superhero characters have been endowed with powers and qualities that embody the best of human nature. Among their characteristics are that they possess powers that children wish they had, nobody tells them what to do, they can overcome any obstacles, they are popular and they rarely make mistakes. This is all very appealing to a child, particularly one who is feeling unloved or vulnerable. While few would choose to model themselves after Homer Simpson, from The Simpsons, there are doubtless many young boys and girls who would choose to model themselves after his children Bart and Lisa Simpson. This study examined a single episode of the very popular television cartoon show The Simpsons, identifying the degree of violent and gender stereotyped behaviour contained within it.

You will, no doubt, realise from the dates of the citations and cultural references that this introduction was written in the final decade of the twentieth century. Even for that date, however, some of the sources that it cites are a little old and ideally the writer should have used more recent material. Many freshman lab reports will include only a small number of references, but you should try to get several of these for each point that you are discussing rather than just basing the point around a single article or statement from a textbook. The more literature that you consult and cite the stronger you will be able to make your introduction and discussion sections. You will notice that this sample introduction section introduces the two main aspects of the report by describing some research conducted on them and ends the piece by stating the purpose of the study. A critical evaluation of the material presented would have been good but there was a maximum word count placed on the assignment, which would have added to the difficulty for an inexperienced freshman student in performing the evaluation.

Methods and procedure This section should contain enough detail so that someone else could follow its ‘instructions’ and replicate your study. Again, there is a specific way in which this should be done – this section is broken up into: – – – –

Design Participants Materials Procedure.

Design

This subsection will be very short, usually just a single paragraph, and should give details of the design used. But this is not where you tell the reader about the steps that you undertook to conduct the project; that comes later. It could be a questionnaire

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study, an observation study, maybe an experimental situation, or perhaps you were replicating another study but with a twist (different age group, different culture, etc.). There is other information that you should include here but do pay attention to what your lecturer or tutor says about this section; some will differ in what they want to see appearing in this section. You will have to indicate the independent and dependent variables. For the IV you will also have to state the levels at which it was measured. That might sound like something complicated but all it means is the way in which your IV could be broken down. For example, if gender was an IV in your study then the levels of this IV were almost certainly female and male. If your study was an observation study with a species of animal that may have some neutered individuals among the group (e.g. cats, dogs, horses) then you may have a third gender, but it is highly unlikely that you will encounter this any earlier than your FYP or postgraduate level.

Think about this for a moment. What other independent variables might you have and what levels might they contain?

Many IVs will have levels that you have chosen, for example age and socioeconomic status. There are no obvious levels to these as it is up to you to decide on the categories (levels) that will be included. For age you might decide to break down your IV into 20–29, 30–39, 40–49, 50–59, and so on, but if your study is being conducted among undergraduates then you will find many more students who are aged 18–21 than you will find mature students. If this was the case then it is unlikely that you would use age as an IV because there is unlikely to be much difference between people who are 18, 19, 20 and 21. Even if you do not use age as an IV in your study you will usually ask for the participants’ age anyway or ask them to indicate their age from the different ranges shown above. This is so that you can indicate the age range of your participants in the next subsection: participants. Sometimes students try to include as many potential IVs that they can think of but don’t do this for a lab report. If you include an IV it must be relevant to the research question or hypothesis and then you must use it for your analysis. You don’t ask participants to give you personal information just for fun. So if you ask them to indicate their educational level then you must have a good reason for doing so and you must use the information in your report. In an undergraduate lab report it is likely that you will have an insufficient number of participants to produce the amount of data that you would need for analysing multi-layered IVs. Whether or not you used a control group or made any attempt to control for confounding variables is another piece of information that you must include under design. You will also have to indicate something relevant to the analysis of the results: whether the study used repeated measures (within groups), independent groups (between groups), etc. So what does all this mean? This will be covered in your classes on statistics and research design and there are formal definitions that you will probably have to memorise, however this is what KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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they mean in simpler terms. If you give everyone the same questionnaire but your intention is to compare how men and women answer it, then you will be analysing your DV (their answers) by comparing the scores of the two genders (levels of the IV). Men and women, therefore, become two groups but both did the same test and so you are going to compare these two groups separately, independently. This would be a questionnaire study utilising an independent groups (or between groups) design. Maybe it was not the gender of the respondents that interested you; maybe you wanted to know if performance on the test would be better or worse if they did the test and then did something else (came back a week later, or did some sort of distracter task that you give them or maybe, at more senior levels, after something that they were given to eat or drink) before retaking the original test. You will be comparing their before and after scores and this is an example of a study that used a repeated measured or within groups design. If your study is experimental in design and you are trying to determine whether or not something is having a significant effect on, say, performance or test scores, then you will need a control group. If you just perform your experiment on a single group then how do you know that it was that something you added or manipulated that was affecting their results? You don’t; there could be other explanations. However, if you have a second group that did the same test but without the extra element that you included in the experimental situation then you can compare the results of the two groups. If the experimental group scored significantly differently from the control group then it may have been the extra thing that you included in their test that was producing the difference. Confounding variables are things that are, or may be, having an influence on your results but that you could not have foreseen or prevented. For example, you might be giving participants some musical or soundbased test where they have to discriminate between the different notes or sounds but did you rule out participants who have tinnitus (ringing in the ears), auditory impairments or are tone deaf, and did you make sure that the room in which the study was being conducted was quiet, with no sounds of radios or other noise that might impair performance on the test? When writing your design paragraph do not mention stuff that is not relevant to your study. For example, if it was an observational study you were highly unlikely to need a control group so why mention it? The design section might look something like this: This was a questionnaire study that used a between groups design comparing the attitudes of men and women, smokers and non-smokers, towards smoking in public places.

Participants

As we saw earlier, in studies involving humans you must use the term ‘participants’. If those with whom the research was conducted were non-humans then the term to use is ‘subjects’. This has been the rule for only the past decade or so, hence you may see human participants referred to as subjects in older journal articles or textbooks.

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In this section you must note how many participants you had (for example, N = 30) and you must show the number of these that were male and those that were female (for example, N = 30; m = 14; f = 16). You should also give the age range and mean age of them. You need to state who your participants were (as a group, never by naming them or by giving information that might enable them to be identified) and how they were recruited. If, for example, you were looking at attitudes towards the legalisation of cannabis and your participants came from only first year undergrads, then what you would have found would have been the attitudes of a selection of first year undergrads on the matter. Therefore, your results may have little or no significance beyond these. It is also important to state any incentives offered to your participants as these could have an effect on the type of person your study attracted, or on their motivation to participate honestly. Many studies reported in introductory university text books were conducted with American university students participating for course credits. Therefore they represent, largely, middle- and upper-class Americans under the age of 22 who had to participate in order to pass their course. How representative of the general population are this group or, indeed, any group tested?

Materials

Here you need to identify the materials and apparatus used in your study. For example, you may have merely used pen and paper and a stopwatch recording to the nearest 1/100th of a second. Or you may have used a specific piece of laboratory equipment, in which case you would have to give the make and model. While it is often useful to name the statistics package you used to analyse your data (some packages do things slightly differently from others), it is not necessary to name the package you used to type up the report or to say that you used a PC or Macintosh to do so or that your computer was a Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Acer, etc. That sort of information is irrelevant as it had absolutely no bearing on the study you conducted. It is also irrelevant what colour pens you gave your participants (unless that colour is somehow important in the study) or the size of the envelopes into which you put questionnaires or how much money you had to pay in postage, printing, or photocopying. If you created a piece of equipment or designed a questionnaire for use in your study, then you need to give specific details of how and why this was done. If you used someone else’s questionnaire then you need to talk briefly about it; what is it for, who designed it, what does it measure, what are the factors contained within it, how is it scored? A blank copy of each type of questionnaire or data collection sheet used should be included as an appendix and your materials section of the report should refer the reader to that specific appendix (e.g. see Appendix 1). These appendices must be numbered in the order in which they were mentioned in your report.

Procedure

This is where you describe exactly how you conducted the study itself. You should include sufficient detail so that someone else trying to replicate your work could KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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follow exactly what you did. If stimuli were presented, what were they? If participants had to look at words on a computer screen, what colour were they? What size and type of font? How far did the participants sit from the screen? For how long was the stimulus on the screen? How bright was the screen? What sort of lighting, ventilation, and temperature did the room have? How many trials were presented? What method of response did the participants have to make? How did you ensure that the ethical guidelines for psychological research were followed? Again, if any of these items were not directly relevant to the study then do not mention them. You need to state the specific instructions given to the participants before, during, and after the experiment. If these are lengthy then place them in an appendix and refer the reader to that specific appendix, after giving some examples in the procedure section of the type of instruction given. What was the tester doing during the study? Were you present in the room or elsewhere? Were there several people doing the test at the same time or just one? What did they do? Did they raise any concerns? This last point is important as it could indicate a potential confounding variable. Often experimenters will fail to take into consideration any discomfort or difficulty that the testing procedure or environment may have posed to individual participants. For example, a dyslexic person may have had difficulty doing a timed reading task, or a photosensitive individual may have not been able to look at a bright computer screen or work under fluorescent lights, or someone with a hearing difficulty may not have been able to hear the instructions unless you had read them slowly, and so on. You want to produce a clear and coherent set of instructions, in a regular paragraph format (not bullet points), so that anybody else could pick up your report, follow the steps that you took, and conduct the same study in the same way. Again, leave out any irrelevant information; you should only include those details that are important for the study. I have read lab reports in which students have given me the dimensions of the envelopes in which they posted out questionnaires, the cost of the stamps, the types of stamps that they bought (e.g. so many 40p stamps and so many 5p stamps, etc.) or even the bus that they took to get to university that day and how long the journey took! If I wanted to replicate a study I would not need to know any of this.

Results It may seem like stating the obvious but the results section is where you describe your results. But beware you describe your results you do not interpret them. This section is purely about stating facts. Some common mistakes that students often make with the results section of their reports are: –

– –

they think that this must be a long section (because statistics are made out to be so important and this is the scary section that they’ve been dreading) and so they fill it up by trying to explain their results or by using lots of unnecessary words and phrases they produce graphs or tables and just leave it at that or throw in graphs and tables and say something like ‘Table 1 shows the results of the study’ they paste in graphs and tables for everything!

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You may have thought that the most common error would be getting the statistics wrong but, in my experience, that rarely happens. If you are just learning statistics then the handouts and notes from your lab class will often tell you which statistics you have to perform in your report. This is because the function of the report may be to give you some practice of using that particular test. You were probably taught the mathematics behind the test – many academics think this is important and that you will better understand what you are doing (it was all Greek to me but computerised statistics are no problem at all) – but unless you are going to go on to some postdoctoral research area in which an intimate knowledge of the math behind the statistics is required (usually just to read the results sections of some complicated papers, though many academic psychologists will contact their university’s Statistics Department if they need help with a complex analysis) then what is truly important is being able to do the tests on a computer. You need to know what tests to do and when, how to perform them on the computer, and how to interpret and report the results – and all of that is easy (see Chapter 7). You may also think that the results section of a report should be full of numbers. Sometimes that is somewhat true but in most undergraduate lab reports this section will be all words with just a few numbers. This means that you should use words – text – to state what you found. You start with the descriptive statistics (how many participants, age and gender breakdown, frequencies), identify the significance level that you took (e.g. 1% level or 5% level; i.e. p<.01 or p<.05), then go on to mention the results of any bivariate tests (two variables, e.g. correlation, t-test, Mann–Whitney) and finally the results of any multivariate tests that you performed (e.g. factor analysis, anova, multiple regression), with details of any post hoc tests that you had to do (e.g. Mann–Whitney tests done to find out which items were producing the significant effect in the Kruskal–Wallis test). Of course, if you are doing a qualitative study then your entire results section will consist of words and the nature of various qualitative analyses is that your results section will be much longer than the same section would be in a quantitative report. How you lay out a qualitative results section will depend on the method of analysis that you have used so this part of the chapter will focus on quantitative results sections. To summarise, the order in which you present those results is as follows: 1 2 3 4

descriptives bivariate tests multivariate tests post hoc tests.

If the tests that you performed produced significant results then you must report them and quote the figures, but if they did not produce significant results then you must just say that there was no significant relationship or difference or variation (whatever it was that you were testing) between the variables (identify them); do not quote the figures that you found. The Handy Guide to Inferential Statistics table in Chapter 7 shows you how to report the results of some of the different tests. For example, you wanted to know if there was a significant difference in the mean test scores of men and women so you performed an independent samples t-test: KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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Example 1: There was no significant difference in the total score obtained by men and women. Example 2: Women scored significantly higher than men on the total score obtained (t=25.93; d.f.=1; p<.001).

Graphs and tables are only used for illustration purposes and will come after, not before, the text they are meant to illustrate. You do not need a graph or table for every result, just the main ones – and only if the illustration will clarify what you found or give a visual impression of just how big the difference or strong the relationship was. So your results section should start with text and never a graph or table as these give a pictorial representation of what you have just described in words. Each graph must be given a title and the axes should be identified. The graph’s title should start ‘Figure 1: ’ to indicate the first graph, ‘Figure 2: ’ to indicate the second graph, and so on. A picture or diagram is also called a figure. Tables should also be given a title that explains what is being shown and this will start as above, e.g. ‘Table 1:’. Keep the titles short but to the point. The legend ‘Figure 1: …’ goes directly underneath the figure; the legend ‘Table 1: … ’ goes directly above the table. The following is an example of how a table should look. This was not done with tabs (which can be messy) but by drawing a table, inserting the information, and then removing the gridlines. To do that you right-click on the table, select ‘borders and shading’, and then select the option ‘none’. This table is for illustration purposes only; there is no such thing as the Joe Blogs Personality Questionnaire. If you were describing these results all you would have to say is that locus of control was found to be significantly correlated with self-esteem (rs = .835; N = 37; p < .001) and scores on the JBPQ (rs = .481; N = 37; p <. 05). Self-esteem levels also showed a significant relationship to scores on the JBPQ (rs = .593; N = 37; p < .01). There would be no need for the table in the report. But if you were told to include it, or if you really felt compelled to put in the table, the text description must come first and then the table. It is the same with graphs; you must write the text first and then include the graph, but only if it is going to illustrate something useful. I know I’m repeating myself on this point but it amazes me just how many students keep doing this incorrectly, no matter how often you tell them the right way to use tables and graphs. You do not want to be one of those as you do not Table 8.1 Significant correlations between the locus of control, self-esteem, and the Joe Blogs Personality Questionnaire (JBPQ) locus of control locus of control

self-esteem

.835*** N = 37

Joe Blogs Personality Questionnaire

.481* N = 37

*p<.05; **p<.01; ***p<.001

self-esteem

Joe Blogs Personality Questionnaire

.835*** N = 37

.481* N = 37 .593** N = 37

.593** N = 37

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want to throw away marks. If you include illustrations, i.e. tables and graphs, that just take up space or look pretty rather than tell the reader anything useful then you reduce the impression of your report in the eyes of the reader, which can also lead to a loss of marks. Examples of pointless graphs might include a bar chart showing the number of male and female participants, one showing the educational status of your participants, or a graph showing a correlation between two variables. In the example above I said that all you had to say to describe the results in that table was to write: locus of control was found to be significantly correlated with self-esteem (rs = .835; N = 37; p < .001) and scores on the JBPQ (rs = .481; N = 37; p < .05). Self-esteem levels also showed a significant relationship to scores on the JBPQ (rs = .593; N = 37; p < .01). You should also add a comment to explain what this means. But, you say, did you not tell me that you never discuss your results in this section? Yes I did, but explaining what the numbers mean is not the same thing as interpreting the findings. This difference should be clear from the following examples.

Box 8.3 Comment 1 (the explanation): This indicates that higher self-esteem levels are positively correlated with having an external locus of control and with high scores on traits in the JBPQ. Comment 2 (the discussion): This result was expected as it mirrors what was found by Tom and Jerry (2000). They were the first to relate locus of control and self-esteem, which are known to be highly correlated, to scores on the personality traits examined in the JBPQ.

In the first example you are merely translating the numbers into words, explaining what the figures indicate but without further comment or elaboration. This is what you should do in your results section. In the second example you are trying to relate your findings to what other researchers found and this should only appear in your discussion. I mentioned above that a common error made by students it that they will try to pad out the results section, intentionally or unintentionally, by using superfluous words and phrases. In the example above you will note that I just reported the result; it was clear and concise (if you have taken statistics classes). What you would not do is to write those results as follows: A correlation was performed to see if there was a linear relationship between locus and control and self-esteem. The scores were not normally distributed so a non-parametric correlation was performed. This is the Spearman correlation. Not normally distributed means that the scores did not fall neatly under a bell curve on a histogram graph. The correlation between locus of control and self-esteem had an r-value of .835. The N-value was 37 and the probability was p < .001. A correlation was then performed to see if there was a linear relationship between locus and control KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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and scores on the JBPQ. The scores were not normally distributed so a non-parametric correlation was performed. This is the Spearman correlation. The correlation between locus of control and scores on the JBPQ had an r-value of .481. The N-value was 37 and the probability was p < .05. A correlation was then performed to see if there was a linear relationship between self-esteem and scores on the JBPQ. The scores were not normally distributed so a non-parametric correlation was performed. This is the Spearman correlation. The correlation between selfesteem and scores on the JBPQ had an r-value of .593. The N-value was 37 and the probability was p < .01.

I have seen and graded many lab reports where the results section was presented like this. Apart from the fact that it keeps repeating itself and that this may be the way that you talk yourself through your findings (in your head), the reader has to sift through this large paragraph to find out what the results actually were. This piece took up 200 words whereas the more clear and concise version contained just 38.

Discussion The discussion is another ‘essay’. In this section, which is often a similar length to the introduction (for your FYP it may be longer), begin by briefly describing your results as you did in the results section. This time, however, you should interpret the findings. The structure of the discussion follows this pattern: 1 Restate the hypothesis that was being tested or the research question(s) under investigation. 2 Restate the key findings from your results section. Do your results fit with the hypothesis you were testing or research question you were posing? Remember that you never prove anything, in psychology, so if your results match what you expected to find then they ‘lend support to the hypothesis that … ’ And they only do this if your p-value was significant. If your results are significant then you can state that ‘there was sufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis’. If your p-value is greater than then your results are not significant. If your p-value is between p=.05 then your results are not significant. If your p-value is between p=.051 and p=.06 then you can say that ‘the results were approaching significance’. But you can never talk about results as having been significant just because one group scored more highly than another or because there appears to be a difference between them when you put them into a graph. If the p-value says the result is not significant then it is not significant. Of course if you have conducted a qualitative study then you are not going to be talking about p-values, but you have described key findings in your results section and so you need to restate them here. 3 Discuss how your findings are similar to or different from what was published in the journal articles that you reviewed in your introduction. And it is a discussion, not a bunch of oneliners. If you found out what they did then why and what does this indicate? If you found out something different then why, how might this have happened, what was different about your study that could have led to your results, and what are the implications of your findings? 4 If you got any completely surprising finding that was not covered by the literature in your introduction then comment on why your may have found this unexpected thing. Have a look through journal articles to see if anyone else found what you did and include this literature in your discussion. Sometimes students are told ‘you must never include anything in your discussion that you did not put in your introduction’, and there are good reasons why we tell you this. However, if your study threw up completely something unexpected then there is no reason why you cannot discuss that with reference to academic literature.

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If the surprising finding was something that you really should have considered then you should probably integrate the literature into your introduction section and then discuss your findings in relation to that point in your discussion. However sometimes something will be a complete surprise. When I was an undergraduate I produced a lab report for a class on The Psychology of Women and Gender. It was on gender differences in cartoon appreciation and though participants were asked questions about ten different cartoons the hypothesis was that men would have a significantly more favourable attitude towards Beavis & Butthead than women would. If you are familiar with the cartoon show or the animated movie then you will not be surprised to find that the results supported the hypothesis and that men scored much more highly than did women in their appreciation of the cartoon (‘uh-huh-huh, you said score’). My literature review had focused on the specific angle of what is known as ‘toilet humour’ and the various studies that have shown that many men tend to find it funny whereas many women tend to find it less amusing. But having analysed my data I suddenly found myself having to explain why there was also a significant gender difference in favourable attitudes towards Roadrunner and The Simpsons! You cannot ignore significant findings just because you don’t have any literature lined up for a discussion of them. By the way, this report is the sample one provided in the appendices. 5 Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your study and comment on some directions for future research. Always make sure that you find more strengths than weaknesses; you want to present your report in a positive light. If you feel that the methodology of the study was flawed then make sure that you do not provide a really scathing account as it will make the reader ask ‘So why did you do it that way then if you knew it was so bad?’ If the design was ‘forced’ upon you in a lab practical and you really think that it is flawed, then be diplomatic in your criticism and use published studies of a similar nature to support your position. Instead of saying that ‘This should have been done that way’ try something better like ‘Another approach to conducting this study might have been to …’ You might be absolutely correct in judging the study to have been really badly designed, but you should also consider the possibility that it was designed by someone with much more relevant experience than you have currently and that there may have been specific reasons as to why it was designed in the way that it was.

Don’t forget that the purpose of the discussion section is to discuss your findings and how they relate to what has been done before. It is not, therefore, a rehashing of your introduction. You should also use the combination of your findings with previously published literature in order to draw conclusions and to suggest possibilities for future research. They will be the closing remarks of your discussion.

References Your references section should be done exactly as you would do it for an essay. Pay attention to this section; getting it wrong is such a careless way to lose marks! The way in which you should do your references was detailed in Chapter 4.

Appendices Your appendices should each be numbered and each should start on a new page. A list of the appendices will be included on your contents page. Put a title at the top of each appendix; don’t just stick them in without comment. And make sure that you put them in the order in which you mentioned them in the lab report! If you KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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are unable to put a title on top of the appendix then put a separate page between each one, with the number and title of the appendix on it. In effect you are putting a covering sheet on each appendix.

Some presentation points The same guidelines that were given for the presentation of essays can also apply to reports, so here is just a very short list. You should refer to the related section in Chapter 4. – –

–

–

–

–

As with essays, your written style should be formal and should not refer to I, my, me, we, the reader, and so on. Your introduction should usually be written in the present tense but the rest of the report should be written in the past tense – after all, it is a report of something that you have done and not that you are doing or are about to do. The report should be typed up using a regular font, e.g. Verdana, Times, or Bookman, and should usually be 12 point in size. As I said in Chapter 4, if your lecturer or tutor asks you to print your report in a specific font and size then do it their way – they probably have a very good reason for this. Section headings should be in bold and no larger than 16 point. Subheadings should be in the same size as the rest of the text. You will usually use a smaller font size for tables and graphs. Do not use different colours; your whole report should be in black print unless you are specifically told to do otherwise. The report should usually be in 1.5 line spacing and printed on one side of the page only. Leave a left hand margin of at least 4 cms – this is so that any binding that you may be required to put on your report will not cut off a strip of the text. Pinning your report together with a single staple is often preferred, as those fancy folders in which many students place their reports often have to be taken apart to be able to turn the pages properly and that is both annoying and time-wasting. And a pile of them on a desk never stacks properly; the slightest nudge and they will slide off each other and on to the floor. Don’t forget to put your name and/or student number on the report and also any cover sheet that your university department may require you to attach.

Postgraduate level – what is expected? If you are reading this book then you are probably in the early stages of your studies in psychology. You may not have even given any thought to what you will do when you complete your degree. However many students have asked me, when they were in their first year, just what is required in a master’s and a doctorate in psychology. Most of your lab reports will be the region of 1,500 to 4,000 words in length though some, such as your FYP or a large team project, will be longer. Depending on the requirements of the department in which you are based, your final year project may need to be 5,000 to 12,000 words in length. If that report has the shorter word count then it usually means that you have to submit a separate or preliminary literature review and/or research plan, which also counts towards the final total and

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grade. A master’s thesis will usually be somewhere in the region of 10,000 to 40,000 words in length, while a doctoral thesis will often be between 40,000 to 100,000 words in length. This chapter contains more than 11,000 words. As you might imagine, given the word counts, you will be required to conduct a much larger and more detailed study for your postgraduate degree than you would at undergraduate level. A master’s thesis might be based on a single study that used several different questionnaires or tests with a large group of people, or perhaps with a smaller clinical group. You will not have access to clinical populations for your undergraduate work, mainly because you are not yet qualified to do so. A postgraduate student works under the supervision of a full-time member of the academic staff although you will often be more ‘on your own’ than you would be in any undergraduate research, including your final year project. A postgraduate may also be working as part of a team or research group or they may be working alone; it will depend on the topic and nature of their work. Whereas a master’s thesis may be based on a single study, a doctoral thesis in psychology will usually contain several studies that are separate and yet interlinked. A master’s (MSc, MA or M.Litt) may be done in one or two years, but a doctorate (PhD or D.Phil) will take a minimum of three years full-time and a maximum of five years full-time and seven years part-time. If you decide that you would like to undertake a postgraduate research degree in psychology then you should generate some ideas, perform literature searches, and then draw up a research outline – preferably around the time that you are thinking about what to do for your FYP. Talk to staff members in your department to see if one of them will agree to supervise your work and then make sure that you get the necessary applications and paperwork in on time. Applications for places will usually have closed before you sit your final year exams. You should also watch for any advertisements posted within the department or on websites such as www.jobs.ac.uk to see if there are any doctoral studentships being offered. If you succeed in getting one of these then you will usually have your fees paid for you and also receive money towards your living costs. You may be able to secure funding or a research grant for your postgraduate work separate from any job advert, but you should be aware that the fees for your degree can be quite high and that you will have to cover all the costs yourself unless you can find financial support. Doing a master’s or doctorate can also involve travel costs as you should attend conferences (which can be great fun!) and apply to present some of your work at those academic meetings, and also you may have to travel to gain access to research materials or participants.

Summary This chapter has focused on lab reports and talked you through how you should structure these documents. You will have to write quite a few of them during your undergraduate studies, most likely culminating in your FYP. There is a specific format that you should follow and many of the marks awarded for a report can be

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earned simply by putting the correct information in the correct place. Similarly, if you do not follow the standard format, or any modification to it that your lecturer or tutor may require for a particular assignment, then you are throwing away marks. The introduction and discussion sections often carry the highest proportion of the marks awarded and they are similar in style to an essay, though with some differences. The results section, though the one most often feared by students, can actually be the quickest and easiest section to complete and, other than the abstract, it can often be the shortest section of your report. The abstract is like an executive summary in that it provides a very condensed version of the entire study and its key results and while this section is presented at the front of the report it is usually the part that you will write last.

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9

PRESENTING YOUR RESEARCH

Aims One of the transferable skills that you will develop during the course of your undergraduate degree is the ability to present information in a variety of ways. In earlier chapters I have discussed how to present your essays and reports but you may also be asked to present a poster, work in a group, and present the team’s findings, or be encouraged to present your FYP at a student conference. You may even be encouraged to write up your FYP for potential publication in an academic journal. This chapter will give you some pointers in those directions. By the end of this chapter, therefore, you should know how to: • • • •

present your work in a poster present group work present at a conference prepare a paper for submission to a journal.

What is expected at university? One of the assumptions that comes with having an honours degree in psychology is that you know how to produce professional documents and how to present them as reports, posters, or formal lectures. You may have been lucky enough to get quite a bit of experience at doing at least some of this but this will depend on the structure of your degree and the facilities available at the university at which you are studying. Of course, if you are doing your degree through distance education then you will not get any experience at producing anything other than essays and reports.

Poster presentations It may come as a surprise to you that university students and full-time academics make posters about serious stuff. If you are going to present any of your work at an undergraduate conference or later on, as a postgraduate or postdoctoral researcher at larger professional conferences, then it is likely that your initial presentations will

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be as posters. Even as a senior academic you may choose to submit posters at conferences as a way of publishing preliminary results, pilot studies, or other studies that were not quite big enough to be accepted as a theatre presentation. You may be required to present your FYP as a poster, in addition to submitting the actual project in a regular report format. Some universities will also have practicals in which a small team of students works together, conducts a study, and then presents it in a poster format at a departmental mini-conference. Academic posters are a common way, therefore, in which the findings from research can be presented. The most common mistake that students make here is pinning up their lab report on a wall. All too often I have seen posters with the full contents of a lab report in 10- or 12-point text glued onto a larger sheet; that is not a poster. Indeed I have also seen many experienced academics producing overcrowded posters that would take at least a minute or three to read (sometimes more!) instead of the tens of seconds that is generally recommended (see Malmfors, Garnsworthy & Grossman, 2003). A good poster will have large print, clear images, and very little text. It is a poster, a visual display, so you should keep this in mind. It is not a lab report or a mini paper. It is supposed to catch the attention, spark interest, and encourage discussion and questions.

Think about this for a moment. What will you usually see in any sort poster? Are they full of text or are they based on visual imagery? How much text is there? What size is it?

If you are preparing a poster make sure that you pay careful attention to the specific guidelines that you are given. Undergraduates are often given a free rein when preparing posters for university assignments but I have never failed to be amazed by the number of academics, even senior ones, who disregard the specific instructions that conference organisers issue for posters. They turn up with their own personal standard format that is too big or the wrong shape to fit on the poster boards that have been provided; it is a bad example to set for students and novice researchers and those posters cannot be considered for any poster prize that may be on offer at the conference. As with lab reports, there will be a proportion of the marks awarded, in a university assignment, for following the required template and, similarly, marks thrown away for ignoring them. Whether or not you are given specific guidelines to follow you should do your best to keep it professional. Therefore there should be no little decorations or overuse of colouring or pictures that add nothing but unnecessary clutter; you are advertising a piece of scientific research, not a party. Similarly, there should be no items hanging off the poster or sticking out of it; it is a poster and not a collage. There are many different ways in which you may be expected to produce your poster so only general points can made here and a general example provided. Some may require that you present only your results, displayed visually in a graph or table and with just a few bullet points of additional information, in large print, to

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accompany these. Others will have a lab report style of structure but with some important differences. Your title should be in a standard lab report format on a conference poster, but if you are designing your poster for a class in university then usually you can be a little more creative, as in the ‘New Age Men Found on Trinity Campus’ title from Chapter 8. Of course if you are told to use only a formal title then do that so that you do not throw away some easy marks. Unless specifically told to do so, you should usually not put an abstract on a poster and you should certainly not include a great long literature review or detailed methods and discussion sections! Instead of an abstract and literature review you might be asked to state the aims and rationale for the work. Methods and procedure will be included but very briefly; just the key information. Results will be stated succinctly and you will include one or more graphs and/or tables. Your discussion will also be very brief and it is likely that your conclusion will be stated as a single sentence. So how would you do this? You use bullet points only. These bullet points will be short, just a few words, and not big long sentences. Why? Posters are supposed to be quick and clear to read as there may be many of them at the same session of a conference, potentially hundreds if it is a major conference. Nobody is going to bother to hang around for more than a few seconds to read your poster and if they see that yours is overloaded with text then they are likely to move on to the next one. The same applies if your print is too small; it should be at least 24-point. A person who would want to read your poster will usually do so from one to three feet away. There may be several people gathered around your poster at the one time and if they have to press their faces close to it just to read your tiny text then they will not bother; they will just move on. Presenting your poster at a conference could be your big chance to meet a future colleague or doctoral supervisor so why blow it by producing a poster that nobody will want to read? The following is a simple summary of some of the things that you should keep in mind when designing your poster. These points are of the sort of length that yours should be: no long sentences! – – – – – – – – – – – – –

follow exactly the guidelines that you have been given for the specific poster you are to present remember that your poster should be visually appealing do not include decorations just for the sake of it it is okay to have a very faded photograph or image as a backdrop do not write long sentences or paragraphs use bullet points only use at least 24-point text use a regular font; no fancy fonts use line and a half spacing avoid using red and green lines on graphs as colour-blind readers will find these hard to distinguish avoid pale-coloured fonts as they may not be easily visible under bright lights avoid printing your poster on shiny paper as this may make it hard to read under bright lights (use a matt finish and not a glossy finish) be concise!

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You may wonder why it is that there should be so little information on a poster, why it is that a good poster will contain a minimum of text. Think about a movie poster. What is its purpose? Think about an advertisement in a bus shelter. What is its purpose? Your poster is an advertisement of your work, not its life story. You want people to stop and look closely at it and to have questions about it. An important part of presenting your poster is how you can talk about it to the interested readers. You must remain with your poster during the session; do not wander off to look at others. You should also have a bundle of A4 copies of your poster so that people can take one away with them if they like. Why? At some conferences the posters are hung the night before the actual poster session and they may remain up for a day or two or for the entire duration of the conference. Obviously you cannot be there every second; you are only required to be there during an assigned period. If you have left a neat bundle of the A4 version of your poster then people can take one and contact you later if they have any queries or comments. You should also pay attention to when it is you are supposed to take down your poster. If you leave it up when it should have been removed then it will be taken and dumped. What a waste of your money! And airport security will have a harder time accepting why you are transporting a large, bazooka-type object with you if there is no poster in it on your return trip home. In addition to whatever sections the organisers require that you display there is some detail that will always need to be included, and precisely how you are to lay it out will be told to you in the official guidelines. Under the title you will include your name and, if you are an undergraduate or postgraduate student, your supervisor’s name and the name of anybody else who collaborated directly on the work. Unlike group projects, however, your name will go first because it is your work. You will have to give the name of the department and university to which you are attached and your email address. You will also include your university’s official logo on one side of the title and your department’s logo (if it has one) on the other side. If your poster is purely for an in-house poster session for a class assignment then you do not have to include logos and email addresses and details of the department and university to which you are attached. You will have to include your supervisor’s name though, which is something that many students forget. There are lots of different types of layouts, depending on the specific guidelines that you have been given, but one such example is presented below. As you will see, there is very little text to be included. Your title will be about 32-point in a regular font, the names and contact details in 18–20 point, and the text of the poster in at least 24-point. This design would be suitable for a poster that must be in landscape format and no bigger than A1 size. If a portrait format had been required then you would use just two columns. Some conferences will require that your poster be of size A0 and in those cases you would include a little more information, preferably short bullet points and relevant visual items. Again, many people will use size A0 as an excuse to paste up a lab report but most people at conferences will not have lots of time to spend at a single poster and so they are likely to grab a copy of the printout and run. The printout may then just

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A sample layout for a poster that is to be presented in a landscape format

join others in a bundle that may never be consulted again; a potentially wasted opportunity for you. Another point to keep in mind about overcrowding your visual presentation with too much text is that it will be almost unreadable on the A4 sized handouts that you provide. So how big is size A1 or A0? I presume that you are aware that standard refill pads, exam booklets and printer paper are size A4 so I will use that size as the template in the table below. Getting your poster professionally printed at A1 or A0 size can be very expensive, especially when you consider that it is something you will use just once; you cannot bring the same poster to different conferences. If you are going to a conference then do try to get it printed professionally but it is not necessary when you are an undergraduate student. Instead you can make your poster on a series of A4 pages that you can laminate and when put together in the correct sequence these will become a single poster of the required shape and size (e.g. landscape size A1). However you choose to print it out, you should design the poster as a single PowerPoint slide and then set the page to the desired size. If Table 9.1 Paper size

Number of A4 pages

A3 A2 A1 A0 KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

2 4 8 16

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you are getting it printed professionally then make a note of the version of PowerPoint you have used and whether you did it on a Mac or PC and let the printers know this; if there is a slight difference in their settings to those on your computer it can alter the details just enough that you end up with print appearing too small or too big, or the graphs move, or you get a big white border somewhere on the final printed page. Designing your poster is only the first step in presenting it at a conference, whether this is a private departmental affair or a professional one. Do not just stand (or sit if you need to) by the poster grinning or looking bored. You are there to talk to interested parties about your work and to fill in the extra information that is not on your poster but which your readers may require. This means that you need to be thoroughly familiar with the contents both of your poster and of your study and that you can speak clearly and confidently when questioned about it. You must be polite and diplomatic, particularly as one or more of the people you meet in this way may be future potential employers. Remember that you are there as a representative of your university and behave accordingly. But do not panic! You are only there to talk about the study that you conducted and if you are a student then you will not be expected to know absolutely everything that has ever been done in your area, even if you are unfortunate enough to get someone who is rudely superior. Most people will be polite and friendly to you and they will ask you questions or seek clarification; they make it easy. Some will be rude, arrogant, and/or somewhat aggressive, but you should remain calm, patient, and polite; do not lower yourself to their level. I once had someone read a poster of mine before asking a single rather enthusiastic question: ‘Oh Trinity College. Cambridge I presume?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘Trinity College Dublin’. ‘Oh. Dublin’, came the rather snooty reply, as he walked off with his nose in the air. Poster sessions at conferences can be a lot of fun and you can meet some very interesting people. You even get the chance, sometimes, to meet people you would never have thought you might meet and also people whose work you have been reading about in journals. I remember one fun poster session at which HRH Princess Anne was chairperson of the afternoon’s proceedings and was brought around to view the posters and talk to the authors. A fellow presenter, who is very well known in his area, professed to be nervous about the prospect of meeting her and asked if he could hide behind my poster when she came our way. You never know who you might meet at a conference!

Group reports and presentations If you are set the task of working in a group, conducting a piece of research and then writing it up in a single report, as opposed to each member writing it up in their own individual report, then there are some points that you should consider. The physical structure of the report is likely to remain the same as if it was an individual lab report, though it is also likely to be a much larger report than a singleauthored one as there will be a team of people writing it instead. Regular team meetings will be necessary and it is important that if any team member is not

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pulling their weight or is not participating then you talk to the staff member who is supervising the exercise. The offending individual is likely to be penalised. When the report is a team one then everybody on the team gets the same grade. Do you want a slacker who did nothing to get the grade that you worked hard for? Issues to do with the design of a team project, the assigning of individual responsibilities, team and project management, and group processes, are beyond the scope of this book, but you should read-up on these before delving into a team project. Here are some suggestions as to how you might proceed with the write-up of a group report: – – – –

– – – – – –

assign a section of the report to each person so that everybody has something to do (this includes the references and formatting) as the introduction and discussion sections are quite long you should break these up into sections identify the word count that will be required for each section so that each topic or section receives equal or appropriate coverage each person must collate the references for their sections (lay them out properly) so that the person who is going to format the references section is not left having to track down and type up the details for every citation after each person has written their part the pieces must be put together in a way that makes the document read as a single-authored report it is recommended that everybody proofreads the whole document each member should also be willing to point out anything that they feel is incorrect, missing, excessive, badly structured, poorly written, or in an incorrect format the group should then amalgamate the suggested corrections and make them individual egos should be put aside (which can be very hard to do) and the group needs to agree on all changes and updates to the report when listing the names of the group members on the front cover of the report you must list them in the alphabetical order of surnames.

Presenting your group report can be done in a number of different ways and which one you choose will depend on the requirements of whoever it is who has organised the presentation session. As a student you will most likely be presenting a group project only within your university department. As a postgraduate or academic you may be presenting it at a conference. If the latter then you will choose one person in the group who will give the talk or stay with the poster. If you are presenting an undergraduate team project within your university department then there are several ways in which this may be done:

Poster presentation We have already talked about poster presentation but just remember to make sure that you do not stand around in front of the poster and thereby prevent anyone else from getting close enough to be able to read it! Stand to the side but be certain that all of your group is near to hand, as even though you should all be familiar with the

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entire content of the report and the poster you can direct questions to each person who was directly responsible for each part of the report.

One person gives a formal talk If the presentation has to be in the format of a lecture then there will be a set time limit and you must stick to this. The group will collaborate on the structure of the talk and on the accompanying PowerPoint slides, but only one member of the group will give the talk. A general rule of thumb for determining how many slides you will need is this: a maximum of one slide per minute of the talk. Of course if some slides will take more than this to discuss then reduce the total number of slides accordingly. After the talk there will be a few minutes assigned for questions and answers. If it is required that only the speaker deals with the questions then make sure that you are thoroughly prepared to discuss any and every part of your report. However, if the Q&A session is to be directed at the whole team then they must be sitting behind or to the side of the podium and facing the audience while the lecture is being given. The questions may be directed at the speaker, who will pass them on to the appropriate person on the team, or they may be directed at the team with the expectation that someone will answer. Do not all speak at once! It is a good idea that the person responsible for the appropriate part of the report answers the question and only if they appear stuck or have forgotten something should another team member speak up. This is a class exercise so you are not expected to dress up for the occasion.

The group gives a formal talk Sometimes it will be required that the entire group participates in the formal lecture and this takes a lot more practice, as I’m sure you can imagine. What you do not want to happen is for there to be gaps in the talk as one speaker goes to their seat while the next person gets up and makes their way to the podium. If you do this then the audience will lose interest quickly and you will not look professional. Each member of the team must be thoroughly familiar with the entire presentation so that they know when to get up quietly and move into position behind the current speaker and also so that they can fill in should a member of the team fall ill or be otherwise unavailable on the day. So when one speaker has finished their piece s/he steps to the side while the next speaker steps forward. The previous speaker then quietly retakes her/his seat. Usually each member of the team will speak but if you have a large group or if you only have a lectern while the computer equipment is on a separate table to the side, then you may assign a team member to look after the slide presentation. This is a class exercise so you are not expected to dress up for the occasion. You should also avoid gimmicks such as everybody being dressed the same or wearing a hat or something else designed to catch the attention; these can distract the audience from what is important – the content of your presentation.

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The group gives a more theatrical or inventive presentation When I was an undergraduate team project presentations were considered to be fancy if we used PowerPoint instead of an overhead projector. Now things have moved on considerably and the group that uses PowerPoint is probably giving the formal talk. Some universities will allow a free rein with group presentations and invite people to take a more inventive or creative approach. These presentations have become very sophisticated due to easy access to video recording and editing technologies and I have seen some that almost felt like being at the live broadcast of a professional show. If you are allowed to present your work in this manner then be aware that it takes a great deal more work than does making a formal presentation, and also that there is the danger of getting carried away with the performance and forgetting about the purpose. Even the most theatrical of presentations must cover all sections of the report and leave the audience in no doubt as to how the study was done, why it was done, what it found, and what the implications are of these findings. These performances are not done as farce or by clowning about; they are very professional yet not the sort of presentation that you would ever be called upon to give in a truly professional academic setting. Of all the presentations that I have seen in this style one stands out and I hope that by giving you a brief outline of what went on that you will get a clear picture of what I’m talking about. The project, which had been conducted over nearly six months and by a team of around eight undergraduates, had investigated an important psychological issue relating to a particular professional body in Ireland. The lights dimmed as the team took their initial places and then a spotlight came on on one student who was in a suit and seated at a table to the left of the stage area. The opening jingle and images for RTÉ1’s (the main Irish television channel) Six-One News programme played on a large screen and then the sole student welcomed viewers to this special edition of the Six-One News which was going to be devoted to a major research project (the specific topic and key finding was given) that had recently been conducted by the team in Trinity College Dublin. We were directed to the screen for the first part of this special report and then the names and images of the team flashed up together with an hilarious sequence of opening credits accompanied by the music of The A-Team, introducing each of the team members by their real name and project nickname. There were no explosions or stunts with cars but it was done in a classic eighties style with a few seconds of movement followed by a still of the person posing or even leaping through the air. The special report included a ‘live’ broadcast from outside Dublin Castle (it was pre-recorded but carefully choreographed and some of the passers-by in the background were clearly curious as to what was going on). The newsreader in front of us ‘in the studio’ was questioning the team member who was on location with the microphone. There was also a series of in-studio interviews featuring other team members who were playing different roles, representing different people (in uniform when appropriate) who had been interviewed as part of the study and were giving their opinion in their own words (as had been quoted in the transcripts in the printed report). It was slick, professional, covered everything that KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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it had to cover, and completely hilarious. The written report was said to have been just as professional and it was no surprise to hear that the team received first-class honours for their work.

Conference presentations If you are going to present your FYP at a conference then it is most likely that this will be at a student event. You will almost certainly have to present a poster and you may also have to give a short talk, often no more than 15–20 minutes. As a postgraduate you will also present posters but you may get the opportunity to give either a short or a full theatre presentation. This means that you give a formal lecture on your work. There will be a deadline by which you must apply to the conference organisers to be considered as a potential presenter. If you are applying to present a poster or talk then you will often just be asked to submit the abstract, title, and authors in advance. Occasionally you will be asked to submit a mini paper in which you must produce a cut-down version of the entire report in a single A4 page or perhaps up to 1500 words in length (approximately three pages). This means that you will have to have completed the study and written it up many months before the presentation date, which is something that students often do not realise. The conference may be in April but your abstract or mini-paper may have to have been submitted in November of the previous year. Once the organisers have reviewed all the applications they will make a decision as to which presentations best suit the themes of the meeting and they will contact you to let you know if you have been selected to present a poster, to give a short theatre presentation or a full lecture, or if your application has been turned down. If your work catches the eye at one conference, or if your supervisor or examiner likes your FYP or graduate thesis and has good connections, you may be invited to give a full lecture on it at another conference. Conferences are expensive; you will have to pay a registration fee, transport costs and accommodation and meals – but if you are an invited speaker (full lecture) then it can be all expenses paid, which is very nice. Some people will go to a lot of trouble and expense dressing up for these events, trying to look ‘professional’, but this is not necessary. Just be clean and tidy and not too casual. So, no jeans (other than black) or tee-shirts or sweaters with logos or pictures on them, no big chains or belts and excessive jewellery, no sneakers, no shorts, no flip-flops, no mini-skirts, no low-cut, cropped or backless tops, and no hipsters (unless you are going to wear a long top or jacket that eliminates the underwear show every time you sit down or bend over). And do not spray yourself liberally with aftershave, scented deodorant, body spray, or perfume or people may just stay away from you and your poster. You do not want to be remembered as the person who looked like they were going to a football match, beach, concert or night club, who smelled like a perfumery or who showed so much flesh and underwear. You do want to be remembered for your work and your personality. You will be assigned a specific time slot during a session that will probably contain three or four other presentations. There will be a chairperson who will introduce the

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speakers and who will monitor the time. Often there will be a lights system in operation; when the orange light in front of you comes on you will have about two to five minutes left (depending on the conference) and when the red light comes on you must stop as your time is up. Sometimes there will be no lights but the chairperson holds up a card, which you are supposed to see out of the corner of your eye while you are focusing your attention on your talk and the audience in front of you. If you go over time then there will not be any left to allow for questions and answers and you may be delaying the rest of the session, which is not a popular thing to do. Your structure should follow the usual sequence of an academic report (see Chapter 8) but the most important part of your presentation will be your results, discussion, and conclusions. You must, of course, also give a brief introduction as to how and why you conducted the work but do not dwell on this as you will run out of time. Your audience will make notes and will ask you questions at the end of your presentation. Here are some tips: – – – – – – – – – – – – –

have no more than one slide per minute of the talk (probably fewer) speak slowly and clearly make eye contact with the audience do not read from a prepared script do not overload your slides with text (use short bullet points) practise your talk so that the slides can serve as cue cards make sure that you have a printout of your slides in front of you, just in case the projection system breaks down don’t be afraid to let your enthusiasm show if you usually use your hands to punctuate points then don’t feel as if you need to hide them behind the lectern; just be yourself do not use slang do not use any of those irritating and repetitive phrases such as ‘you know’ or ‘then we did’ or ‘in this study’ do not ask the audience any questions or give them tasks to perform try to make your talk accessible to as many of the audience as you can by avoiding overly technical lingo (you can put that on your slides) or presuming that everyone knows what your acronyms mean; there may be fellow students present or audience members who are not familiar with your area of research so don’t bore them by going over their heads.

Publishing papers It is unlikely that you will publish a paper as an undergraduate though you may be able to publish a paper based on your FYP. This can take so long between submission to publication that you will probably have graduated before it happens. Some university departments will tell their students that they can submit review papers for publication but the reality is that an undergraduate is highly unlikely to get published and that few have the time or expertise necessary to produce a publishable review paper. If you are seeking a career in academia then it is important that you publish as many papers as possible, as it is a researcher or lecturer’s track record KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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of publishing that usually determines whether or not they will get a lecturing post or receive research grants. Another reality is that you could conduct lots of studies, write them up into very good journal articles, and yet get none of them published; that is very frustrating. You will also find, as a postgraduate student or beyond, that you cannot conduct all of the work you want to do without funding, unless you happen to be very wealthy and can pay for all the costs out of your own pocket. If you have a study that you would like to publish then here are some tips: –

– – – – – – – –

until you have published a few papers it is best to look at the journals with the lower impact factors (it’s a numeric system that awards a score to each journal based on a variety of criteria; the top journals have the highest IFs and you can find these out by performing a google search for the terms ‘impact factor psychology journal’) choose journals that publish papers on your topic read the guidelines for authors, which are available on the website of each of the publishers (some companies publish several different journals); these will differ between publishers structure your article in the specific style that those guidelines request, including formatting (if you don’t then it can be rejected immediately) read other articles that have been published in the journal(s) you have chosen to see how they structured or phrased their report do not expect to be able to a publish a paper that merely replicates another study; it must be novel in some way make sure that your paper is in the standard report format while observing any minor differences that the journal(s) of your choice applies (e.g. combining results and discussion) if your paper is rejected then study the feedback and use it to improve on the paper so that you can submit the revised version to a different journal if you are at a conference and happen to meet a senior academic who is an editor of a journal in your area (do not hunt them down or pester them!) then don’t be afraid to discuss your work with them. You never know, they may be interested and suggest that you email them or submit a paper to their journal, which may be considered for publication (if it meets the required standard and format).

Summary In Chapters 5 and 8 we discussed how you should present your essays and lab reports. In this chapter we have looked at how to present your research as a poster, as a group presentation, at a conference, or in a journal. Some of the issues discussed here may not apply to you until your postgraduate years but they are topics that you should consider carefully if you are planning on a career in academia. In addition, many undergraduates are required to give presentations of one sort or another on their FYP or other projects that may crop up over the course of their degree.

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APPENDIX 1:

THE SAMPLE ESSAYS FROM THE EXERCISE IN CHAPTER 4 , WITH COMMENTS

1

Essay 1: The value of qualitative methods in psychology ‘Be gone foul demon!’ cry the extremist experimental psychologists. ‘Only that which can be measured with numbers is of relevance to us scientists’. ‘Only that which can be concretely shown to exist is of value’. What poppycock.! Without qualitative methods in psychology the field, or science if you wish to call it so, would be a laughably closed-minded endeavour, claiming to explain or help to explain the richness of humanity and yet failing miserably to provide us with anything more valuable than details of reaction times and processing speeds, responses to stimuli and the number of times that one scratched one’s nose during a conversation. These are, no doubt, all fascinating and exciting events but they tell us no more about what it means to be human than typing into a word processor and printing the results tells us anything about how a computer works. Humanity is about life, living, emotion, cognition. It is about millions of unique experiences, feelings and ideas stored within millions of individuals scattered around the globe. One cannot deny voice to these considerations and claim to adequately explain the human condition. Psychology purports to be the science of the mind but the mind is much more than the sum of its parts, reaction times and processing speeds. Without the use of qualitative methods in complementing the necessary quantitative analyses, psychology cannot succeed in this mission. In presenting this argument I will first look at what is meant by qualitative research and then show, by example from several different fields of study within psychology, the value of such methodologies. Qualitative research consists, say Banister and colleagues, of three things. It is an attempt to capture the sense that lies within, that structures what we say about what we do. It is an exploration, elaboration 1

These essays are reproduced and annotated with the permission of the author.

Comment [S1]: This may be an attention-grabbing opening but it is not really appropriate here. If these are genuine quotations then the citation should be cited, along with the page number on which they can be found. What is an extremist experimental psychologist?

Comment [S2]: The position of the writer is clear but the tone is biased and there is no evidence presented to support this position.

Comment [S3]: Grammatical error: this is a split infinitive. The verb is to explain, not to adequately.

Comment [S4]: Avoid using I. It would have been useful if you had defined qualitative methodology at the outset rather than producing what was effectively a rant against the quantitative approach.

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and systematization of the significance of an identified phenomenon. It is the illuminative representation of the meaning of a delimited issue or problem. There is no single qualitative methods, and quite different aims will be accomplished by different interpretative approaches. (Banister, Burman, Parker, Taylor & Tindall, 1994, p3). For example, administration of a paper and pencil test that asks participants to describe their feelings or opinions towards, say, the admittance of mature students to university, may be suitable and appropriate for one setting whereas the analysis of answers given in a face-to-face interview may be more useful for, say, investigating what illness really means to an individual. Why the different methodologies? Simply, in the first example opinions are requested and required but heartfelt feelings are not really necessary. If, however, one really want to gain some insight into the patient experience, one needs to employ a methodology that allows for the emotion and feeling to be communicated. The face-to-face interview is invaluable here. Merely administering cold, sterile questionnaires, for example, that can be processed and analysed by a computer is, in these examples, going to miss the point. So can findings from a qualitative study be generalisable? Not necessarily. So what then is the value of the study? My statistical analyses, large samples, emotionless questionnaires, sterile processing and dehumanisation leaves me able to draw inferences about meaningful processes within the general population and are, therefore, of use. True, but human beings are not depersonalised automatons whose behaviour, moods and thought processes can be predicted, labelled and neatly packaged. There are, as I’ve shown, times when the more human touch is required. One of the features of quantitative methodologies is that they try to eliminate the room for subjective interpretation of findings, and therefore to attempt to produce a clear and unmediated representation of the object of the study. What is quantitative data? It is information that can be meaningfully represented in numerical form. (Coolican, 1994) For example, should one decide to investigate the frequency with which undergraduates stay late in university computer rooms and the stage of the academic term during which these late night vigils are most likely to occur, one could do the following. First record the instances of this occurrence throughout each academic term. Then enter the tallies into a computerised statistics programme for analysis. Using these computer-generated results, one can confidently predict during what periods university computer facilities will be under most strain at 2am. Of course statistics can only lend support for or against hypotheses – they never ‘prove’ anything. It is only possible to confirm or reject the null hypothesis, that gem of scientific research meaning merely that one hypothesises the results will not be significant. Given this shortcoming of

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Comment [S5]: This makes a valid point but you should develop it with reference to studies that have examined the most effective way to obtain this information. Comment [S6]: Avoid using my, me and I.

Comment [S7]: You have mentioned but not shown. To show or demonstrate your point you would need to have provided at least one concrete example, with reference to the academic literature. Comment [S8]: The word data is a plural so your question should be ‘what are quantitative data?’

Comment [S9]: The citation should always go before the full-stop, not after it.

APPENDIX

1

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quantitative methodologies, the accusation by those extremist experimental psychologists that a fundamental flaw of qualitative research is that it ‘proves’ nothing, suggests that a fundamental insecurity lurks behind their veil of certainty. So what then is qualitative data? It consists of any information, gathered during research, which has not (yet, at least) been quantified in any rigorous way. (Coolican, 1994, p384) So my collection of reaction times waiting to be analysed are qualitative? No. These would be quantitative – data awaiting, or already having gone through, the process or number crunching (or statistical analysis). Qualitative data is analysed not for its mathematically rigid qualities but for its meaning and content. Take, for example, the following from a team research project entitled ‘Patient Psychological Care in the General Hospital Setting’ (Brogan, et al, 1999). When trying to learn something about the experience of illness and need for patient psychological care, which is more meaningful, the cold, statistical analysis or the qualitative perspective that follows? ‘It can be clearly seen from this table that the overall percentage of patients meeting the criteria for a diagnosis of M.U.S. is 3.8%’. ‘...there were days when she raged and days when she was in despair and days when she was in tremendous silence and days when she hated me and days when she loved me. Everything was intense’. Clearly this is a case when the qualitative provides a more meaningful statement than the quantitative. In this study, the team investigated the level and type of psychological care being provided to patients in the general hospital setting in Dublin. Questionnaires could have been designed or statistics computed to show numbers of hospitals, practitioners, clinicians, providing psychological care but a study of purely this nature would have missed out on the richness of human experience. That experience sampled was the perceptions and feelings of both practitioners and patients alike with regard to the actual human experience of this situation. The description of one doctor of having a psychologist working in his pain clinic as being like ‘manna from heaven’ or the deep emotion experienced by some patients as ‘soul pain’ say more than any statistical analysis ever could. So what fields of study within the umbrella of psychology benefit from the integration of qualitative methodologies with the more traditional quantitative ones? The list is a long one but includes such fields as communication and language, gender studies, social psychology, personality theory, thinking and health psychology. We shall take a brief look at each in turn. Communication is arguably the most fundamental aspect of all interactions between animals, including of course, humans. It comes in numerous guises including spoken words, body language, intonation, posture and gesture, and so on. How can something so vague and KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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Comment [S10]: The tone is very dismissive of quantitative methodologies but you have not presented any evidence to support your position. Who are these extremists of whom you speak? This argument is not logical.

Comment [S11]: The citation should go before the full-stop, not after it.

Comment [S12]: Elaborate on this. Identify some of the different qualitative methods and give a brief comment on what they do and how they work. Comment [S13]: The first time you cite a source you must give all of the names. Only use et al for the second and subsequent citations.

Comment [S14]: Good quotes but they appear to be talking about completely different things so can you really compare them like this? You should always give the page number when quoting directly from a source.

Comment [S15]: Yes, it may have done so but different methods are suitable for different studies. Perhaps the questions for which answers were sought were more suited to a qualitative approach than a quantitative one, but even so this does not invalidate the quantitative approach.

Comment [S16]: That depends on what the question was. Comment [S17]: You still have not told me what qualitative methodologies are or given me any examples of them. Comment [S18]: This is far too many areas to examine in a short essay. You would have been better to choose one or two and to use them as a theme for the essay, showing how qualitative methods and quantitative methods could be applied to some interesting questions and then evaluating the approaches.

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that relies on a such a high level of individual intuition be studied by churning out reams of statistics? So what if x% of us gesture with our hands while talking and y% remain motionless, for example. A more qualitative analysis of the observed human interaction might tell us that hand gestures by the speaker were used to add emphasis to the meaning of the words, for example, or that facial expressions indicated the degree of attention that the listener was engaged in, pieces of information that are inherently more useful as a description of the processes that were going on during the encounter. Of course, that is not to say that the statistical information was not also of use. I merely stress once again that one cannot make use of the statistical in many circumstances without the added flavour of the qualitative. Gender studies have become an increasing popular area of study, with a prominent argument in the field being the androcentric nature of psychology. Psychology’s theories and definitions have traditionally been based on the male perspective with the female case seemingly as a deviation from the male (for example, see Freud). This is the reason why feminist psychologists have been to the fore of the qualitative movement, recognising that women’s unique experience of what it is to be female within a male-dominated environment can only be adequately studied using qualitative methodologies. Social psychology is a different story as it derives arguably as much benefit from the more quantitative approach as it does from the qualitative. For example, the nature of most attitude studies is such that merely an indication of belief, scored in a standard five-point scale, is adequate. In case of more searching investigations in which the degree of convictions may be informative, application of more qualitative methodologies, such as asking participants to explain their feelings in writing, would be more appropriate. The very term ‘personality theory’ is suggestive of qualitative methods. Freud, Adler, Jung and Rogers, for example, did not need to recourse to the realms of mathematics in order to formulate their theories of the nature of humanity, and one would seriously doubt any of their more modern counterparts did either. The cognitive science of thinking, one of the major fields in cognitive psychology, relies heavily on quantitative methods. However, some areas of research within the field rely largely on the qualitative approach, for example research into the phenomenon of daydreaming. Health psychology, a relatively new and rapidly growing field within psychology, is largely dependent upon qualitative data. A key topic in this field is the investigation of the relationship between culture and health, an area that would obviously be rendered fairly meaningless should qualitative values and methods be discarded. This paper has only taken a cursory glance at the areas within psychology where use of qualitative methods of analysis can prove invaluable: to provide examples from further branches of the field would be to risk repetition. The message should, however, be clear. If

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Comment [S19]: Your example is somewhat vague. What was the research question in the study? Perhaps you could have used an example from a published paper and evaluated the approach taken in its analysis.

Comment [S20]: This paragraph is very vague and does not really contribute to the topic that is supposedly to be discussed. Comment [S21]: Why?

Comment [S22]: This paragraph is jumping all over the place and does not tell me anything about any of the fields that you mention.

Comment [S23]: Indeed it has! You have not told me anywhere in the essay what qualitative methods actually are, how they work and how they are analysed. And you need to have done these things to have been able to answer the question that was posed in the essay title.

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psychology wishes to continue to grow and develop as a science, it must be willing to embrace its proverbial black sheep, qualitative methodologies. Live long and prosper O foul demon!

References:

Banister, P., Burman, E., Parker, I., Taylor, M. & Tindall, C. (1994). Qualitative methods in psychology: a research guide. Buckingham: Open University Press. Coolican, H. (1994). Research methods and statistics in psychology (2nd ed.). London: Hodder & Stoughton. Woolgar, S. (1988). Science: the very idea. Chichester: Ellis Horwood.

Comment [S24]: It is a good idea to close with something that ties into the opening of the essay but this statement is not really useful. What is the foul demon? Funny that you should choose a famous Vulcan phrase (‘live long and prosper’) as I doubt they would have been impressed by the lack of logic in your presentation☺

Comment [S25]: Three references is much too few for an undergraduate essay in psychology!

Overall comment This essay reads like something that was slapped together in a hurry to meet the requirement of having to hand in an assignment. There is no evidence that the writer knows anything about qualitative methodologies as s/he never tells us anything about them, how they are used and how they are analysed. Consequently, the writer has been unable to demonstrate the value of the approach and so has produced a very poor essay. The tone is so dismissive of quantitative methods, even though there is not really any indication given of what these are either, that the essay is almost amusing. Does the writer even know what these are? An undergraduate student is supposed to write academic essays, not something that will get a few laughs. The structure of this essay is weak as the introduction does not really introduce the topic clearly or identify a reasoned position that will be defended, the main body of the essay darts all over the place and fails to develop a single point, and there is no concluding section, just a final statement and quip. This essay would probably earn a mark somewhere between 38% to 55%, depending on the generosity and mood of the marker and the level at which the student was studying at the time (e.g. first year).

Essay 2: Is nightwork a hazard to health? ‘...the human body and mind are meant to sleep at night and be active during daylight. Some workers can adapt to working continually during the night but even among these certain health disorders are prominent’ (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997, p. 274). Despite this, increasing numbers of people are being asked to work at night. If one makes the switch to working only at night and sleeping by day then the body may acclimatise, just as it would if changing time zones. KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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Comment [S26]: Starting with a quotation can be a good idea. This one is correctly displayed and correctly referenced.

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However, for many night work is an irregular feature of their occupational timetable with night shifts alternating with day. This is where the problems arise. Even so, the recently broadcast Irish documentary Léargas reported that an estimated 20% of the Irish workforce now work at night. This essay will look briefly at why nightwork has become such a busy employment area, the organisation of shifts, the effects on the body’s circadian rhythms and the health difficulties associated with nightwork. Increased demands for productivity and changes in lifestyle over the past fifty years or so have seen more and more people finding work at night. The availability of electricity was largely responsible. World War II also played a large part in this revolution as demands for munitions was high and continual, offensive and defensive missions were often carried out under cover of darkness and greater strain was placed on the emergency services than ever before. That is not to say that there was nobody working night shifts before then, on the contrary. As long as there have been facilities providing care for the sick there have been people working through the night. Most of the common farm animals give birth to their young at night so large and busy farms usually have people working during the night throughout the annual calving, lambing and foaling seasons. Public houses didn’t have to close and hotels are usually open 24 hours a day. Newspapers too have staff working at night. The main difference today is that there are so many people from all walks of life working at night with about 20% of the Irish population engaged in night work (Léargas, RTÉ, 1998). As more companies and businesses take on night staff there is a knock-on effect. As the afore mentioned documentary also pointed out, the more people that are working in, say, offices and factories at night, the more taxis, coffee shops, garage shops and night-clubs will be made available, hence more night-time staff required. The duration of the night shift varies though many businesses work on a three-shift rotation. A common European shift organisation sees the early shift on from 0600-1400hrs, the late days shift from 14002200hrs and the night shift from 2200-0600hrs (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997, p. 269). The 8-16-24hrs shift system is commonly used in America and Kroemer and Grandjean point out that this seems to have advantages, both physiological and social. Each shift allows the family at least one meal together and also provides times for enough sleep for persons working the early and late day shifts (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997, p. 270). Of course not everywhere in Ireland operates to these times. Many Irish nursing homes, for example, operate shifts of 0800-1400, 1400-2000 and 2000-0800, no doubt due to the fact that the workload is considerably lighter during the night shift. Some organisations operate on a two-shift system, usually two 12-hour shifts (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997, p. 270). Again

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Comment [S27]: Many TV programmes are not really suitable for reference in an academic essay but if it is a current affairs documentary then it is perfectly okay to mention it.

Comment [S28]: The introduction is clear and concise and this final statement makes it clear how the paper will proceed.

Comment [S29]: Good point. The writer has established that night shift working is not a new phenomenon but has shown why it has become a topic of academic interest now.

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there are variations as, for example, the day shift on some Irish horse farms is from 0800-1700 with an hour off for lunch in the middle of the day, while the night shift, consisting mainly of security and foaling staff, are on from 1800-0700. In Europe periodic rotation of shifts is the general rule but in America it is not uncommon to work the same shift all year round (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997, p. 270). Certain social advantages can be found in this arrangement though Mott, Mann, McLoughlin and Warwick (1965) and Kroemer, Kroemer and Kroemer-Elbert (1994) found that in the long run continuous nightwork is not acceptable, either on social or medical grounds, to at least two out of ten people who engage in it. Kroemer and Grandjean (1997) point out that until the 1960s it was considered that the intervals between shift rotation should be as long as possible and that recommendations for rotation every three or four weeks were based on the idea that people need several days to change their biological rhythm and that adaptation to the new shift can take place only if several weeks are allowed. However, they continue ‘we know that this interpretation is misleading because the work-free weekend partly negates the just initiated adjustment’ (p. 270). They further point out that adaptation is not complete, even after several weeks and that daytime sleep of many workers on night shift remains inadequate, both quantitatively and qualitatively, for a long time. Sleep is crucial to a healthy body and mind so anything that disrupts it has obvious detrimental effects. Pilots on long-haul flights also run into similar problems. If they are crossing time zones regularly, they are regularly exposed to what is popularly known as ‘jet lag’, the term used to describe the lack of wellbeing experiences after long-distance air travel (Hawkins, 1987, p. 56). The body’s rhythms and cycles are disrupted just as they are if working at night and, as Hawkins also points out, disturbances of sleep, bowel elimination and eating habits may occur. ‘Lassitude, anxiety, irritability and depression are often reported’, he continues. ‘Objectively, there is evidence of slowed reaction and decisionmaking times, defective memory for recent events, errors in computations and...a tendency to accept lower standards of operational performance’ (Hawkins, 1987, p. 56). The various bodily functions of both human and animals fluctuate in a 24-hour cycle called the diurnal or circadian rhythm (diurnal = daily; circa dies = approximately 1 day) (Kroemer & Grandjean, 1997, p. 259). Under normal circumstances the body has some idea of the time of day by observing various time-keepers or zeitgebers. These time-keepers are regular features of our daily experience which indicate time, for example, changes from light to dark, or social contacts. If all zeitgebers are removed a person automatically shifts to a day spanning somewhere in the region of 22 to 27 hours (Kroemer & KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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Comment [S30]: The working hours that may represent the different shifts have been highlighted, noting differences that may occur in different industries. It is usually necessary to provide citations for such details but if the writer has practical experience or if the information is something that is factual but will not appear in any academic source, then this is fine. This writer did have direct experience of working in one of these areas.

Comment [S31]: This is perhaps too long of a quotation for such a short essay. Paraphrasing or stating the gist of it, while giving the same citation, would have been sufficient.

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Grandjean, 1997; Hawkins, 1987). While this situation is extremely unlikely to crop up in normal daily live, it is important to note this discrepancy in any case. The first scientific reports concerning biological oscillations appeared in the literature more than 200 years ago but since 1950 there has been an acceleration in research in this field, which has results in the creation of a new sub-discipline, chronobiology (Hawkins, 1987, p. 59). By the late 1970s it became clear, for example, that control of a substantial part of the body’s rhythms resides in the suprachiasmatic nuclei of the hypothalamus in the brain (Hawkins, 1987, p. 60). A typical example of a rhythmic body system is oral temperature. This temperature rises during the day and falls at night. Sleep normally occurs when the temperature is falling and waking occurs when it is rising (Hawkins, 1987, p. 60–61). Various researchers, for example Klein, Wegmann and Hunt (1972), have found that cognitive and psychomotor performance and also reaction times show the same type of peak and dip pattern as that of body temperature. This variation is in addition to any effect from sleep deprivation. Much research has been done on the effect of disturbed sleep. Vigilance and calculation tasks have been shown to be significantly impaired and mood adversely affected, for example, simply by displacing the sleeping period by two to four hours (Taub & Berger, 1973). Despite this it will often be found that the person just transferring to the night shift will launch straight into the job, rather than being given lighter and less responsibility-laden tasks for the first days, until they have had the opportunity to adjust. A study by Minors, Healy and Waterhouse (1994) surveyed 43 student nurses before and immediately after their first eight weeks of nightwork. Although their general health status was not found to have differed significantly, they did show a significantly greater deterioration in interpersonal relationships while on nightwork. Strain put on interpersonal relationships can result in difficulties in other aspects of an individual’s life and can lead to problems in the working environment. A Finnish study, by Harma, Hakola and Laitinen (1992), looked at the relationship between age and the circadian adjustment to nightwork in three groups of shift-workers, those aged 19–28, 30–44 and 53–59. They found that aging decreased circadian adjustment to nightwork. The same researchers (1996) found that women adjust more quickly to nightwork than do men. The negative effects of working at night do not appear to be as pronounced if the person has chosen to work at night and the period of night work is long term. A British study by Barton (1994) examined the impact of choosing to work at night on individual tolerance to shift work. She had 587 participants, all nurses and midwives, and came to the conclusion that the results obtained offer support for the

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Comment [S32]: Some useful studies that show evidence that the student has done some research around the topic.

Comment [S33]: A good point. There could have been a temptation to focus only on the research that shows night work is detrimental to health – other sides should always be considered.

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maintenance of permanent night-shift schedules and that this has implications for the future design of shift systems. A Welsh study by Adeniran, Healy, Sharp, Williams, et al (1996) found, on the other hand, that there was some validity in a shiftwork model of affective disorders. They found that concentration, interest, energy, sleep and appetite were significantly disturbed during nightwork, and that there was an increased perception of recent criticism from others. Nightwork is very much a part of modern human living in many parts of the world and it is highly unlikely that the practice will disappear in the foreseeable future. Therefore the task for human factor investigators, employers and psychologists is to be aware of the problems that can be caused by working at night, to find ways to compensate for these problems and difficulties as much as possible and to offer understanding and assistance to any night shift workers who seek help. There is much evidence that points to nightwork being a hazard to health. However, it must be said that the hazardous effects, in terms of long term health of the individual, do not affect all night shift workers. Many of the hazards come from slowed responses, calculation and concentration difficulties and occasional lowering of standards that one experiences while working when the body wants to sleep. The effects that working at night can have on the system can be summed up by the findings of an Italian study carried out by Costa in 1996 in which it was concluded that shift work, particularly night work, can (1) disturb circadian rhythms of psychophysiological functions, beginning with the sleep–wake cycle, (2) interfere with work performance and efficiency over 24 hours, with consequent errors and accidents, (3) strain family and social relationships, and (4) impair sleeping and eating habits and result in more severe disorders of the gastrointestinal, neuropsychic and cardiovascular functions.

References

Adeniran, R., Healy, D., Sharp, H., Williams, J.M.G., et al. (1996). Interpersonal sensitivity predicts depressive symptom response to the circadian rhythm disruption of nightwork. Psychological Medicine, 26(6), 1211–1221. Barton, J. (1994). Choosing to work at night: a moderating influence on individual tolerance to shift work. Journal of Applied Psychology, 79(3), 449–454. Costa, G. (1996). The impact of shift and night work on health. Applied Ergonomics, 27(1), 9–16. Hakola, T., Harma, M.I. & Laitinen, J.T. (1992). Relation of age of circadian adjustment to nightwork. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Ergonomics and Health, 18(2), 116–118. Hakola, T., Harma, M.I. & Laitinen, J.T. (1996). Circadian adjustment of men and women to nightwork. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Ergonomics and Health, 22(2), 133–138. KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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Comment [S34]: Final two paragraphs are a clear concluding section though the final summing up should have reflected the good and the bad rather than just one side.

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Hawkins, F.H. (1987). Human factors in flight. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Klein, K.E., Wegmann, H.M. & Hunt, B.I. (1972). Desynchronisation of body temperature and performance circadian rhythm as a result of outgoing and homegoing transmeridian flights. Aerospace Medicine, 43(2), 119–132. Kroemer, K.H.E & Grandjean, E. (1997). Fitting the task to the human: a textbook of occupational ergonomics (5th ed.). London: Taylor & Francis Ltd. Kroemer, K.H.E., Kroemer, H.B. & Kroemer-Elbert, K.E. (1994). Ergonomics: how to design for ease and efficiency. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Minors, D.S., Healy, D. & Waterhouse, J.M. (1994). The attitudes and general health of student nurses before and immediately after their first eight weeks of nightwork. Ergonomics, 37(8), 1355–1362. Mott, P.E., Mann, C., McLoughlin, C. & Warwick, P. (1965). Shiftwork: the social, psychological and physical consequences. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Taub, J.M. & Berger, R.J. (1973). Performance and mood following variations in the length of time asleep. Psychophysiology, 10(6), 559–570.

Comment [S35]: References are done correctly and of a sufficient number for an undergraduate essay.

Overall comment This is a good essay that shows clear evidence that the writer did her research. Several aspects have been considered and though this has left little room in which to develop each area fully the writer has made a good attempt within the restricted word count. Some more recent studies would have been useful though this essay was written in the late 1990s when access to online databases of journal articles was not as prevalent as it is now, so accessing papers would have been more difficult. There is a clear introduction section that gives some background to the board topic and makes it clear how the paper will proceed. The main body is reasonably well organised and there is a clear concluding section; the final two paragraphs. This essay would most likely have got a 2:1 in the first or second year of an undergraduate degree in psychology, with the specific mark depending on the department’s standard or that of the individual marker.

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APPENDIX 2 :

A SAMPLE REPORT , WITH COMMENTS

1

Title: Gender Differences in Cartoon Appreciation: Beavis & Butthead Rarely Score with the Gals Abstract Fifty-two participants (m=24; f=28) completed a short questionnaire examining attitudes towards a series of ten frequently broadcast cartoons. It was hypothesised that men would have a significantly more favourable view of the cartoon Beavis & Butthead than would women and the findings supported this premise (t=3.02, df=45, p<.01). When all ten cartoons were examined together the data revealed no significant gender difference in overall cartoon appreciation (t=1.36, df=18, p<.20). Other cartoons which showed a significant male bias, at the one per cent level, were Roadrunner (t=3.55, df=50, p<.001) and The Simpsons (t=2.73, df=47, p<.01). None showed a significant female bias.

Index 1.0 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3

Introduction Method Subjects Procedure Scoring

3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3

Results Brief Statement of Findings Overall Results Beavis & Butthead

page 3 4 4 4 4 5 5 5 6

Comment [S1]: Clear abstract of barely the right length. What are the implications of these findings?

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3.3.1 Quantitative Analysis 3.3.2 Why They Didn’t Like Beavis & Butthead The Other Cartoons 3.4.1 Those With No Significant Gender Difference 3.4.2 Those With Significant Gender Difference

6 6 7 7

4.0

Discussion

9

5.0

References

10

3.4

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8

Appendix 1 – The Questionnaire 11 Appendix 2 – Reasons Given for not Liking Beavis & Butthead 12

1.0 Introduction Cartoons are such a popular form of entertainment for both adults and children alike that there are, in addition to several hours a day on regular television channels (for example, SkyOne), channels dedicated solely to the screening of this animated form of programming (for example, Cartoon Network). Early morning and afternoon slots aimed at younger viewers broadcast a variety of cartoons daily ranging from those featuring action heroes (for example, Johnny Bravo) to ones which centre around animals (for example Tom and Jerry). In recent years there have been created cartoons aimed solely at the adult market and these, for example Beavis & Butthead and South Park, are screened after 10pm at night. The world of the cartoon character is a world of make-believe and yet coffee-break conversations have been debates of the merits of any number of actions of, or situations in which these fictional characters find themselves – just like any soap opera. For example, the two-part episode of The Simpsons entitled Who Shot Mr Burns? not only generated fierce arguments at office coffee-breaks in Dublin after the screening of part one, but bookmakers took bets on the predicted guilty party (for the record it was 500-1 outsider Maggie, the baby). Catchphrases from various cartoons have found their way into everyday conversation. For example, how many times have you heard someone exclaim ‘doh!’, ‘mmm, doughnuts’, ‘heh-heh’ (when somebody does something silly), ‘uh, huh-huh’, or ‘this sucks’? This just goes to show how influential cartoons can be in people’s lives. Derks and Arora (1993) investigated gender differences in cartoon appreciation using a number of cartoons that were selected as low or high in sexuality and low and high in humour. They had 990

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Comment [S2]: Nice examples but it would be great if you could also include some academic ones rather than just colloquial ones.

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participants (m=414 ; f=576), all undergraduates, and found that males showed a consistent tendency to rate female-deprecating sexual material as funnier. Hemmasi, Graf and Russ (1994) found that each gender tended to find jokes that were disparaging to the opposite sex to be more amusing than jokes aimed at their own sex (N=144; m=63, f=81). Beavis & Butthead is a cartoon that portrays women as sex symbols to be lusted after; the life-aim of the two boys is to ‘score’ with ‘chicks’, preferably ones who are scantily clad and have ‘big thingies’. The hypothesis behind this study, therefore, was that males would have a significantly more favourable view of the cartoon Beavis & Butthead than would females.

Comment [S3]: Clearly stated and in the correct place.

Comment [S4]: The correct sections should be, in order, design, participants, materials and procedure.

2.0 Method 2.1 Participants There were 52 participants (m=24; f=28) with a mean age for males of 25.8 years (range 18–55 years) and of 22.4 years (range 18–53 years) for females. All had completed a minumum of one year of third level education and were selected on this basis (taken as an indication of above average intelligence). They included undergraduates, graduates, postgraduates, and two people who had a PhD.

2.2 Procedure A short questionnaire (Appendix 1) was designed to ascertain participants’ attitudes towards a series of ten frequently broadcast cartoons. The cartoons selected were a mixture of new and old and were selected on the basis that they were likely to be viewed by adults. Five were largely animal-based and five people-based. The questionnaire was in two parts. The first required the participant to indicate whether familiar or not with each cartoon, to signify whether or not the cartoon was liked, and if not liked, why. Asking participants for their favourite characters was merely to disguise the real question, and this was not used in any analysis. The second part required the participant to rate each cartoon on a five-point scale ranging from Like Strongly to Dislike Strongly. They filled out the questionnaire either on a one-to-one basis on in a classroom setting and there was no reward provided for participation. Individual, gender and cartoon means were obtained and a series of t-tests calculated, by hand. Negative comments provided by subjects were also examined.

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Comment [S5]: What were the cartoons?

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2.3 Scoring

Comment [S6]: This should be included within procedure.

Each questionnaire was scored as following: 1) 5 points for Like Strongly, 4 points for Like Somewhat, 3 points for Neither Like Nor Dislike, 2 points for Dislike Somewhat, and 1 point for Dislike Strongly. 2) Subjects only received scores on those cartoons with which they were familiar. 3) A total mean score was calculated for every subject. 4) A total mean score by gender was calculated for each cartoon.

3.0 Results 3.1 Brief statement of findings It was hypothesized that men would have a significantly more favourable view of the cartoon Beavis & Butthead than would women and findings supported this premise (t=3.02, df=45, p<.01). When all ten cartoons were examined together data revealed no significant gender difference in overall cartoon appreciation (t=1.36, df=18, p<.20). Other cartoons which showed a significant male bias, at the one per cent level, were Roadrunner (t=3.55, df=50, p<.001) and The Simpsons (t=2.73, df=47, p<.01). None showed a significant female bias at the one per cent level.

Comment [S7]: This line is more suitable for the start of the discussion section than the results. You should start your results section with the descriptives before reporting the results of bivariate tests.

3.2 Overall results t was expected that there would be no significant difference between the genders in terms of overall level of appreciation of cartoons and findings supported this premise (t=1.36, df=18, p<.20). The proximity of the gender means for each cartoon is illustrated in Figure 1 below.

Comment [S8]: If the result is not significant then do not quote the figures.

Mean score

5 4 3 2 1 0 T&J Figure 1

R

TS

B&B

SP KOTH Cartoons

SD

S&TP

BB

R&S

Cartoon appreciation mean scores comparing males (dark line) with females (lighter line)

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The mean score over all cartoons was X=3.48 with an overall male mean of X=3.72 (s=.07) and overall female mean of X=3.25 (s=.07).

3.3 Beavis & Butthead Comment [S9]: Umm isn’t that what you’ve already been talking about?

3.3.1 Quantitative analysis There was a 44.3 per cent difference between the mean male score (X=3.09) and the mean female score (X=1.72) for the target cartoon Beavis & Butthead. Of the 52 respondants, 2 males (8.33% of males) and 3 females (10.71% of females) were unfamiliar with the cartoon. The percentages of each gender who liked and disliked the cartoon is shown in Table 1. Nobody ticked the category Neither Like Nor Dislike.

Table 1

Comment [S10]: This is some of the descriptives and it should have gone at the start of the results section.

Percentages of each gender who liked and disliked Beavis & Butthead

1. Like strongly 2. Like somewhat

male

female

41.67

0.00

8.33

14.29

3. Dislike somewhat

12.50

17.86

4. Dislike strongly

29.17

57.14

1 & 2 combined (like)

50.00

14.29

3 & 4 combined (dislike)

41.67

75.00

The split of male opinion of Beavis & Butthead was fairly even with exactly half liking the cartoon and 41.67 per cent disliking the show. This contrasted with the female of whom just 14.29 per cent responded favourably. Of these, none ticked the Like Strongly category whereas 41.67 per cent of males did tick this category. Indeed one male placed three ticks in the box. In all, 75 per cent of the females indicated their dislike for the cartoon with 57.14 of these ticking Dislike Strongly. One female placed three ticks in this box. The male mean score for Beavis & Butthead was X=3.09 and the female mean score was X=1.72 (t=3.02, df=45, p<.01).

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3.3.2 Why they didn’t like Beavis & Butthead A total of 20 females and 10 males gave comments as to why they disliked Beavis & Butthead. The overall trend of the female reponses was that the cartoon is stupid, vulgar, boring, annoying, irritating, unfunny and one which is designed for teenage boys. Those who elaborated on why they found the cartoon irritating focused on the constant chuckling of the two boys – throughout the entire cartoon Beavis chuckles heh-heh in a high-pitched voice while Butthead chuckles huh-huh in a deeper voice. The overall female negative opinion of the cartoon can best be summed up by the comment of one 44-year-old who said “appeals to puerile adolescent male behaviour which it glamorises”. The 10 males who commented negatively did so in a largely similar vein to the females though none commented to the effect that it was designed for teenage boys. The constant chuckling was mentioned by several while the vulgarity of the cartoon was also noted. It was also described as being unfunny and annoying. One described the cartoon as being “gross” while another responded by using one of the many catchphrases from the show “it sucks, huh-huh”. One additional male who liked the cartoon also had a comment to add: “toilet humour – universal!”

3.4 The other cartoons Comment [S11]: Don’t use a capital letter for every word.

3.4.1 Those with no significant gender difference Of the ten cartoons investigated seven showed no significant gender differences at the one per cent level. Two of these seven, South Park (t=2.37, df=36, p<.05) and Scooby Doo (t=-2.23, df=48, p<.05), would have been considered as significant had the five per cent level been applied instead of the one per cent level as a measure of significance. In the case of Scooby Doo it was females who showed a preference. The t-tests and probability figures for the seven are shown in Table 2 below. Table 2

Comment [S12]: You should have made some mention in your procedure section of why you were taking a 1% level instead of the 5% level of significance.

Comment [S13]: Non-significant results should never be included.

t-tests and probability figures for the non-significant cartoons

cartoon Tom & Jerry

t 1.80

df

P

50

<.10

South Park

2.37

36

<.05

King Of The Hill

1.70

31

<.10

Scooby Doo

−2.23

48

<.05

Sylvester & Tweety Pie

−1.66

46

<.20

Bugs Bunny

−0.13

49

n/a

0.39

18

n/a

Ren & Stimpy

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3.4.2 Those with significant gender differences In addition to the target cartoon Beavis & Butthead, two other cartoons showed a significant gender difference, Roadrunner (t=3.55, df=50, p<.001) and The Simpsons (t=2.73, df=47, p<.01). For Roadrunner, 14 males ticked Like Strongly, 7 Like Somewhat, and only 3 did not like the cartoon. All males were familiar with the cartoon. All 28 females were familiar with the cartoon but only 17 liked it (8 Strongly), 3 were ambivalent and 8 did not like it (3 Strongly). This produced an 18.4 per cent difference in the gender means. For The Simpsons, 22 males and 27 females were familiar with the cartoon. Of the males 18 ticked Like Strongly, 2 ticked Like Somewhat, 2 were ambivalent and none disliked the cartoon. Of the females 13 ticked Like Strongly, 6 Like Somewhat, 1 was ambivalent and 7 disliked the cartoon (4 Strongly). This produced a 20.1 per cent difference in the gender means.

4.0 Discussion The finding that males have a significantly more favourable view of the cartoon Beavis & Butthead than females, was as expected though the significant differences found for Roadrunner and The Simpsons were a surprise. Expectations with regard to Beavis & Butthead were founded both on personal observations, casual conversation, and on the afore mentioned studies by Derks and Arora (1993) and Hemmasi et al. (1994). The humour in the cartoon comes almost entirely from sexist behaviour and language and from toilet-humour, and these earlier studies have shown that females appreciate this type of humour less often than males. As to the factors leading to the significant gender difference found for both Roadrunner and The Simpsons one can only speculate. “Boring” and “repetitive” were two adjectives that females applied to Beavis & Butthead and these can certainly be applied to Roadrunner also. The plot of every episode is the same; the coyote tries in vain to catch the roadrunner, instead getting himself blown-up by his own explosives, run over by large vehicles, or flattened by a series of large slabs of rock. The Simpsons is a television sitcom centred on an ordinary family living in an ordinary town somewhere in America. The father, the hopelessly lazy and incompetent Homer Simpson, is the safety officer at the local nuclear power plant, run by Montgomery Burns and his gay assistant Waelyn Smithers. Homer’s ten-year-old son Bart is a town bad boy, in a harmless sort of way. Eight-year-old Lisa is top of KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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her class and driven to succeed academically, while her infant sister Maggie has yet to speak and does little other than fall over and suck on her soother. Wife Marge Simpson holds the family together. The cartoon also focuses on the lives of a number of the locals. With regular sitcoms so popular amongst women, it is hard to understand why The Simpsons should find so little favour. It would be interesting to see how well the results of this study would hold up if a larger sample was used or if non-third level educated individuals participated. Given the influence some cartoons appear to have on everyday language and conversation, it must be asked if young men are acting out what they see in, say, Beavis & Butthead. Further research is suggested.

5.0 References

Derks, P. & Arora, S. (1993). Sex and salience in the appreciation of cartoon humor. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 6(1), 57–69. Hemmasi, M., Graf, L.A. & Russ, G.S. (1994). Gender-related jokes in the workplace: sexual humor or sexual harassment? Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 24(12), 1114–1128.

Comment [S14]: Short but at least it focuses on what you found. Further discussion in relation to research is needed.

Comment [S15]: Lots more than this is needed!

Overall comments This is a fairly good report and the original did have the appendices attached correctly. It also had a funny full-colour front cover. Of course every major section started on a new page in the printed report! There are only two references and that would not be acceptable in an undergraduate report submitted today. However, at the time this report was written the internet was a new phenomenon for the general public and the only computerised access to journal articles that the author had was a DOS-type database of abstracts; these were the only two relevant studies that could be accessed at that time and under those circumstances. A similar report, written now, would have to include a much longer list of citations. The introduction and discussion sections are also very short but there would have been a strict word count imposed on the assignment. The procedure section is not presented in the correct format and the results section’s parts are in the wrong order. Different departments have different approaches to grading lab reports with some awarding a mark based on overall impression and some awarding marks for every little thing, such as ‘stated the IV and DV, 2 marks’. This report would earn a mark of 60–75%, depending on the grading system being implemented and the year in which the student was based.

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Huesmann, L.R. & Eron, L.D. (1986) ‘The development of aggression in children of different cultures: Psychological processes and exposire to violence’. In L.R. Huesmann & L.D. Eron (eds), Television and the Aggressive Child: A Cross-national Comparison. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hughes, R. (1994) Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America. London: Harper Collins. Jenni, D.A. & Jenni, M.A. (1976) ‘Carrying behavior in humans: Analysis of sex differences’, Science, 194 (4267): 859–860. Kendall, P.C. & Hammen, C. (1995) Abnormal Psychology. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Klein, K.E., Wegmann, H.M. & Hunt, B.I. (1972) ‘Desynchronisation of body temperature and performance circadian rhythm as a result of outgoing and homegoing transmeridian flights’, Aerospace Medicine, 43 (2): 119–132. Kostelnik, M.J., Whiren, A.P. & Stein, L.C. (1988) ‘Living with He-Man: Managing superhero fantasy play’, Young Children, 41: 3–9. Kroemer, K.H.E & Grandjean, E. (1997) Fitting the Task to the Human: A Textbook of Occupational Ergonomics (5th edn). London: Taylor & Francis. Kroemer, K.H.E., Kroemer, H.B. & Kroemer-Elbert, K.E. (1994) Ergonomics: How to Design for Ease and Efficiency. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Lefkowitz, M.M., Eron, L.D., Walder, L.O. & Huesmann, L.R. (1972) ‘Television violence and child aggression: A follow-up study’. In G.A. Camstock & E.A. Rubenstein (eds), Television and Social Behaviour (Vol. 3) Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. Lewis, R.D. (1996) When Cultures Collide: Managing Successfully Across Cultures. London: Nicholas Brealey. Liebert, R.M. & Schwartzberg, N.S. (1977) ‘Effects of mass media’. In M.R. Rosenzweig & L.W. Porter (eds), Annual Review of Psychology (Vol. 28). Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews. Littlewood, R. (1992) ‘Towards an intercultural therapy’. In J. Kareen & R. Littlewood (eds), Intercultural Therapy: Themes, Interpretations and Practice. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific. Malmfors, B., Garnsworthy, P. & Grossman, M. (2003) Writing and Presenting Scientific Papers (2nd edn). Nottingham: Nottingham University Press. Manstead, A.S.R. & McCulloch, C. (1981) ‘Sex-role stereotyping in British television advertisements’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 20: 171–180. McGee, S. & Smith, H.V. (2004) ‘Accompanying pre-weaned Thoroughbred (Equus caballus) foals while separated from the mare during covering reduces behavioural signs of distress exhibited’, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 88 (1–2): 137–147. Minors, D.S., Healy, D. & Waterhouse, J.M. (1994) ‘The attitudes and general health of student nurses before and immediately after their first eight weeks of nightwork’, Ergonomics, 37 (8): 1355–1362. Mott, P.E., Mann, C., McLoughlin, C. & Warwick, P. (1965) Shiftwork: The Social, Psychological and Physical Consequences. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Piaget, J. (1970) ‘The stages of the intellectual development of the child’. In P.H. Mussen, J.J. Congor & J. Kagan (eds), Readings in Child Development and Personality. New York: Harper & Row. pp. 291–302. Reber, A.S. & Reber, E.S. (2001) The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology (3rd edn). London: Penguin. Rowntree, D. (1976) Learn How to Study (2nd edn). London: Macdonald & Co. Russell, D.W. (2002) ‘In search of underlying dimensions: The use (and abuse) of factor analysis in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28 (12): 1629–1646. Showalter, E. (1987) The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980. London: Virago. Silverman, D. (2004) Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice (2nd edn). London: SAGE. Smith, J.A. (2008) Qualitative Psychology: A Practical Guide to Research Methods (2nd edn). London: SAGE. Swartz, L. (1998) Culture and Mental Health: A Southern African View. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.

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Taub, J.M. & Berger, R.J. (1973) ‘Performance and mood following variations in the length of time asleep’, Psychophysiology, 10 (6): 559–570. Weiss, R.S. (1998) ‘A taxonomy of relationships’, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 15: 671–683. Williams, A., Dobson, P. & Walters, M. (1989) Changing Culture. London: Institute of Personnel Management. Woolgar, S. (1988) Science: The Very Idea. Chichester: Ellis Horwood.

Useful websites

www.altavista.com www.amazon.co.uk www.blackboard.com www.cuil.ie www.easymaths.com www.ebay.co.uk www.facebook.com www.google.co.uk www.groundedtheory.com www.jobs.ac.uk www.moodle.com www.myspace.com www.secondlife.com www.skype.com www.surverymonkey.com www.thebookdepository.co.uk www.transana.org www.turnitin.com www.twitter.com www.wikipedia.org www.yahoo.co.uk www.youtube.com

Ethics in Psychological Research * For the UK: http://www.bps.org.uk/the-society/code-of-conduct/ * For the Republic of Ireland: http://www.psihq.ie/DOCUMENTS/Code%20of%20Professional%20Ethics.PDF

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INDEX

argument 20, 31, 33, 55–7, 59, 61, 68–70, 72–81, 85, 87, 94, 97, 100, 126, 129, 186, 188–9, 197 central argument 69, 72–3, 77, 79, 85, 94, 100, 126 evidence to support 20, 56–7, 59, 129, 188 fallacies 74, 97, 100: ad hominem 74; ad hominem tu quoque 74, 97; appeal to authority 74; appeal to ignorance 75; appeal to pity 75; appeal to popularity 75; appeal to tradition 75; confusing cause and effect 75; false dichotomy 75; hasty generalisation 75; post hoc 75–6; red herring 76; slippery slope 76; straw man 76 formation 61, 73–6, 81 bivariate statistics 19, 54, 75, 140–7, 150, 159, 166–9, 201 binomial test 141, 146 chi-square 141, 145, 159 correlation 19, 75, 140, 143–5, 150, 166–9: Kendall’s tau-b 141; Pearson 141, 145; Spearman 141, 145, 169 Mann–Whitney U test 141, 145–6, 150 one-way anova 141–2, 146–7 t-test 141, 144–5, 166, 199, 201: independent samples 141, 145; paired samples 141, 145 Wilcoxon signed ranks test 141, 145 computer skills 1–21, 25–6, 29–30, 39–43, 48–9, 66, 96, 115, 132, 137, 143–4, 157, 177–9, 181–2, 185, 206 Adobe Acrobat 1, 5, 18 Adobe Reader 1, 5, 17–18 blogs 7, 48 email 3, 5–6, 19, 26, 29, 39, 43, 49, 66, 177, 185 file extensions 4–6 keyboard shortcuts 1, 8, 11–3, 132 logging in/out 2, 6, 19, 42–3

computer skills cont. Microsoft Excel 1, 3, 5, 13, 15–6, 18, 144 Microsoft PowerPoint 1, 5, 16–7, 19, 26, 178–9, 181–2 Microsoft Word 1, 3–5, 8–14, 16–8, 20, 96, 144, 157 naming files 4–5, 18, 143–4 organising files 4–6, 14–5, 18, 132, 143–4 passwords 2, 19, 39, 42 PDA 29–30 PDF 5, 17–8, 20, 30, 42–3, 137 saving files 3–5, 8, 11, 13–5, 17–9, 30, 39, 42–3, 115, 143–4 search engines 6–7, 41: AltaVista 6, 41, 206; Cuil 6, 206; Google 6, 41, 185, 206; Yahoo 6, 41, 206 Skype 40, 206 social networking sites 7, 40 USB key 3, 6, 14, 143 using a network 1, 3, 25 Windows Explorer 14, 143–4 critical evaluation 23, 47–8, 51, 54–5, 60–1, 67–71, 76, 80–1, 84–5, 95, 105–6, 116, 119, 129, 161 descriptive statistics 139, 141, 145, 166, 199–200 disability viii, 1, 22, 26, 28–30, 65, 98, 104, 106, 129–30 assignments 65, 98 disability services (in university) 1, 26, 28–9, 98, 129 exams 29, 104, 129–30 lectures 26, 28–30 studying 22, 104, 130 dissertation 15, 114, 134, 152 distance education viii, 19, 22, 39–41, 44, 52, 134, 174 acquiring reading materials 19, 39–40 contact with other students 39–41 making a quiet place 41 research 52, 134, 174 Skype 40 virtual study groups 40 working with course units 39–40

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exams cont. tips for disabled students 129–30 ‘what if I knew everything’ game 116–8

doctorate (PhD) viii, 15, 41, 48, 55, 60–1, 84, 133, 151, 153, 158, 166, 171–3, 176, 198 essays, viii 6–7, 9, 11, 13–4, 17, 19–20, 23, 25, 28–9, 31, 33–4, 36–7, 41, 45–6, 50, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63–92, 94, 97, 104–5, 112–9, 129, 131, 153, 160, 169–70, 173, 186–195 course work 19, 37, 61, 65–6, 131 critical 23, 31, 46, 50, 55, 57, 59, 61, 68–71, 81, 160 descriptive 46, 61, 64, 67–71, 78, 81, 118, 129, exams 33, 45, 61, 63, 65, 67–8, 70, 72, 76, 81, 94, 97, 104–5, 112–9, 131 plagiarism 1, 18–9, 31, 61, 63, 66–7, 72, 101, 206 presentation 9, 11, 13–4, 17, 36, 72, 74, 171, 173–5 references 20, 29, 31, 41, 57, 61, 65–6, 73, 76, 82–3, 160, 170 sample essays 36, 66, 84–92, 186–197 structure 56, 61–2, 64–5, 72–4, 76–83: conclusion 81–2; introduction 77–80; main body 80–1 ethics in psychology 7, 21, 52, 137, 139, 142, 157, 206 approval 7, 21, 137, 139, 142, 157 guidelines 137, 206 exams viii, 6, 19, 23–5, 27, 29–34, 36, 44–6, 55–7, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67–8, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 81–2, 84, 93–7, 99, 101, 104–131 accommodations (disability) 29, 104, 129–30 breaking down the question 72, 104, 123–6 checking for errors, omissions, readibility and bloopers 126–9 doing the exam 31, 33, 36, 55, 63, 65, 72, 74, 76, 78, 81–2, 84, 93, 99, 101, 104–5, 116–8, 131 essay 33, 45, 61, 63, 65, 67–8, 70, 72, 76, 81, 94, 97, 104–5, 112–9, 131 instruction terms 129 multiple choice questions (MCQ) 104–12 preparation 23–5, 27, 29–33, 36, 44, 56–7, 59, 101, 104–16, 131 reducing stress 119–21, 131 time management 121–3, 131 KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

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feedback 23, 37, 46, 101, 185 final year project (FYP) 7, 15, 114, 134–6, 138–9, 144, 149–50, 152–3, 157, 162, 169, 171–2, 174–5, 183–5 grades viii, 19, 31, 36–7, 45–6, 61–70, 72, 74–6, 78, 80, 82, 84, 93–4, 98–9, 101, 104–6, 110–9, 121, 123–4, 126–9, 131, 133, 141, 152–4, 167–70, 172–3, 175–6, 180, 183, 191, 195, 203 first class honours viii, 36–7, 62–3, 68–70, 72, 78, 80, 105, 112, 114, 119, 126, 183, 195 second class honours, first division (2:1) viii, 62–3, 68–70, 72, 76, 78, 80, 112–3, 119, 121, 126, 195 second class honours, second division (2:2) viii, 62, 67–70, 76, 78, 80, 105, 113, 126, 129, 191 third class honours (pass) 62–4, 67, 75–6, 78, 110, 113–4, 117–8, 127, 133, 153, 164, 191 fail 19, 31, 62–7, 75, 78, 99, 101, 110, 112, 115, 117–8, 127–8, 133, 191 grammar 10–2, 93–6, 100, 103, 149 journal articles 4–6, 18–9, 22, 30–2, 34–5, 39, 41, 45–60, 66, 73, 77, 93, 97, 101–2, 153, 155, 158, 161, 163, 185 analysing 30–1, 34, 37, 45–60, 156, 169, 185 citation 82–3 databases 19, 41–2, 196, 205: Academic Search Premier 42; Blackwell Synergy 43; Cambridge Journals Online 43; EBSCOhost 42; Informa World 43; JSTOR 43; Oxford Journals Online 43; Project Muse 43; PsycARTICLES 42; PsycINFO 42, SAGE Journals Online 43, Science Direct 43; SpringerLink 43; SwetsWise 43; Taylor & Francis Journals 43; Wiley Interscience 43; Wilson OmniFile Full Text 43 e-journals 42–4 searching viii, 4, 20, 22, 39, 42–4 learning style viii, 22, 34–7, 39, 112 method of loci 35 VARK 34: visual 34–5, 39; aural 34–7, 39; read/write 34, 36–7; kinasthetic 34, 36

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master’s degree 41, 48, 61, 67, 153, 158, 171–2 Microsoft Excel 1, 4–5, 13, 15–6 coding variables 15–6 database 15 graphs 16 Microsoft PowerPoint 1, 5, 16–7, 19 posters 16 printing 17 producing charts/images 17 Microsoft Word 1, 3–5, 8–14, 17–8 adding words to the dictionary 11 editing tables 9–10 fractions 14 grammar check 10 headers and footers 9 importing graphs 13 inserting page numbers 9 inserting tables 9 keyboard shortcuts 1, 8, 11–3 opening files 8–9 printing 13–4 saving files 4 searching in multiple files 14 spelling check 10 textboxes 10 unusual or accented characters 14 motivation viii, 22, 37–8, 41, 44, 164 multivariate statistics 47, 54, 75, 100, 141–3, 146–7, 166 ANOVA 142, 146–7, 166 cluster analysis 142 Cochran’s Q 142–3, 147 factor analysis 47, 54, 100, 142, 147, 166 Friedman test 142, 147 Kruskal–Wallis test 142, 146, 166 multiple regression 142, 166 post hoc tests 75, 141–2, 146–7, 166 NETTACT approach 30, 32–3, 35 note-making viii, 20, 22–31, 33–6, 39–40, 44, 46–7, 66, 73–4, 99, 107, 122, 166, 184 condensing notes 22, 31, 36, 47, 73–4, 99 lectures 23, 25–8, 33, 35, 44, 74, 107, 129, 166, 184 recorded lectures 28, 35, 39–40 numeracy 93–4, 102–3 online survey tools 1, 20–1 plagiarism 1, 18–9, 31, 61, 63, 66–7, 72, 101, 206 turnitin.com 1, 18–9, 66, 101, 206

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posters 15–6, 134, 154, 174–81, 183, 185 presentation viii, 5, 9, 11, 13–7, 26, 36, 72, 74, 83, 93–4, 98, 134, 153–4, 167, 171, 173–185 conference 183–4 essays 9, 11, 13–4, 17, 36, 72, 74, 94, 98, 171, 173–5 posters 15–6, 134, 154, 174–81, 183, 185 reports viii, 83, 153, 167, 171, 173–5, 179–182 qualitative research 53–4, 56–7, 85–8, 132–3, 138, 144, 147–51, 166, 169, 186–190 approaches 133, 138, 144, 147–50 case studies 149 discourse analysis 149 focus groups 148 grounded theory 150 interviews 148 structured methods 149 thematic analysis 149 references 1, 4, 15, 20, 24, 29, 31, 36, 41–3, 57, 61, 65–6, 73, 76, 81–3, 88, 92, 102, 105, 122, 129, 153, 157, 160–1, 170, 180, 190, 194–5, 197, 203 APA format 20, 82–3 citation 4, 20, 24, 31, 42–3, 82–3, 88, 92, 105, 190, 194, 203 databases 1, 4, 15, 20: EndNote 4, 20, 42–3; ProCite 20, 42–3 essays 20, 29, 31, 41, 57, 61, 65–6, 73, 76, 81–3, 160, 170 reports 153, 157, 161, 170, 180 reports viii, 3, 6–9, 11, 13–5, 17, 19–20, 25, 31, 34, 36–7, 41, 46–8, 53, 55–7, 59–61, 67–8, 73, 77, 82–4, 93, 96–7, 114, 129, 132–6, 138–9, 141–2, 144, 149–176, 179–185, 198 doctorate (PhD) viii, 15, 41, 48, 55, 60–1, 84, 133, 151, 153, 158, 166, 171–3, 176, 198 dissertation 15, 114, 134, 152 final year project (FYP) 7, 15, 114, 134–6, 138–9, 144, 149–50, 152–3, 157, 162, 169, 171–2, 174–5, 183–5 grades 68, 153, 173, 175–6, 205 master’s degree 41, 48, 61, 67, 153, 158, 171–2 presentation viii, 9, 11, 13–4, 17, 83, 96–7, 144, 153, 167, 171, 173–5, 179–182 references 20, 31, 57, 82–3, 153, 157, 161, 170, 180

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references cont. structure 56, 77, 141–2, 152–71: abstract 158–159; appendices 170–1; contents 157–8; discussion 169–70; introduction 160–1; methods and procedure 161–5; references 170; results 165–9; title 154–7; thesis 3, 8, 15, 73, 114, 134, 144, 152–3, 158, 172, 183 research design viii, 7, 20–1, 31–2, 51–5, 58, 75, 85–7, 91, 134–9, 142, 150, 154–8, 160–6, 168–70, 172, 187, 189, 193, 196, 198–9 confounding variables 137, 162–3, 165 dependent variable (DV), 135–6, 145–7, 154–6, 158, 162–3, 203 ethics in psychology 7, 21, 52, 137, 139, 142, 157, 206: approval 7, 21, 137, 139, 142, 157; guidelines 137, 206 hypothesis 52, 55, 134–6, 138–9, 150, 158, 160, 162, 169–70, 198: null hypothesis 86, 135, 169, 187 independent variable (IV), 135–8, 145–6, 154–6, 158, 162–3, 203 participants 7, 21, 32, 52–5, 58, 75, 85, 87, 91, 134–9, 142, 148, 150, 154–8, 161–66, 168, 170, 172, 187, 189, 193, 198 reliability 53, 129, 138 research question 51–2, 55, 134–6, 139, 150, 158, 160, 162, 169, 189 subjects 53, 136, 154–6, 158, 163, 198, 199 supervision 21, 51, 73, 114, 134–5, 139, 142, 151, 172, 176–7, 180, 183 timeframe 138–9 validity 55, 91, 129, 138, 193

statistics 1, 4–6, 15–6, 20, 36, 47, 54, 75, 100, 132, 135–9, 140–7, 151, 154–6, 158, 162–3, 166, 168–9, 199–200, 203 bivariate 54, 141–2, 145, 166, 199 coding variables 15–6, 145–6 dependent variable (DV) 135–6, 145–7, 154–6, 158, 162–3, 203 descriptive 139, 141, 145, 166, 199–200 dichotomous 143 independent variable (IV) 135–8, 145–6, 154–6, 158, 162–3, 203 multivariate 47, 54, 75, 100, 141–3, 146–7, 166 nominal 141, 143 normal distribution 47, 140–42, 168–69 ordinal 141–2, 147 raw data 4, 15 SPSS 1, 4–5, 15–16, 20, 132, 141, 143–7, 151 studying viii, 1, 11, 22–5, 27, 30–7, 39–41, 44–6, 49–52, 63–4, 66–7, 73, 84, 102, 107, 110, 112, 114, 126, 130, 133–4, 137, 154, 164, 174, 189 distance education viii, 22, 39–41, 44, 52, 134, 174 expectations 11, 49–50, 63, 114 learning styles viii, 22, 34–7, 39, 112: method of loci 35; VARK 34; visual 34–35, 39; aural 34–7, 39; read/write 34, 36–7; kinasthetic 34, 36 motivation viii, 22, 37–8, 41, 44, 164 NETTACT approach 30, 32–3, 35 6 W’s model 31–2, 46, 73 SQ3R approach 30–1 study group 23: virtual study group 40–1

6 W’s model 31–2, 46, 73 SPSS 1, 4–5, 15–6, 20, 132, 141, 143–4, 145–7, 151 coding variables 15–6, 145–6 Handy Guide to Inferrential Statistics in SPSS 145–7 organising output 132, 143–4 saving files 4 SQ3R approach 30–1

thesis 3, 8, 15, 73, 114, 134, 144, 152–3, 158, 172, 183

KEY RESEARCH AND STUDY SKILLS IN PSYCHOLOGY

virtual learning environment (VLE) 1, 18–9, 40 Blackboard (WebCT) 18, 40 Moodle 18–9, 40 Second Life 18 turnitin.com 18–9

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Research Methods Books from SAGE

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Research Methods Books from SAGE

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The Qualitative Research Kit Edited by Uwe Flick

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