5.6 Write up your Methods

[Mike Dillinger, PhD]

PLEASE do not call this section your “Methodology”! “Methodology” is something totally different: it’s the branch of the Philosophy of Science that studies scientific methods.

Scientists understand how difficult it is to do reliable experimental research. There are a range of decisions and tradeoffs that have to be made at each step of planning, collection, and analysis. It’s important to show in your Methods section that you’re aware of the potential problems and choices at each step of the process.

Previous sections talked about the different parts of the Methods section. This section focuses on putting them together.

Goals of the Method section
The Method section has several goals:

• To make sure that you know how you will proceed at every step of data collection and that you have documented all of the steps that you did take, for future reference.
• To make sure that the readers have a very clear idea of how you collected your data. In fact, your description should be clear enough for the interested reader to reproduce your experiment and find similar results. This is called replicability. If other people can reproduce (or replicate) your results, then they are more likely to believe your conclusions.
• To convince the readers that you were careful and systematic in thinking through your methods, so that they can believe your results and conclude that you are a clear-thinking, competent professional who does reliable work.

Working toward these goals builds your methodological credibility and makes the reader more likely to accept your results and conclusions.


Parts of the Method section
The outline below shows the standard parts of a Method section. (Imagine that each dash represents a paragraph. Talk about only one topic in each paragraph.) The section titles should be included in your Method section, according to the APA norms. The comments in provide suggestions about what topics to cover in each paragraph. Chapter 1 of the APA Publication Manual (p. 17 ff) provides some more general information about this section.

The Method section usually makes reference to appendices that appear at the end of your paper, so you can consider them to be “parts” of the Method section, as well.

Finally, to help you collect your data more systematically, you need to develop a step-by-step script (like for a movie or play) of what you will say and do at each step in your data collection procedure. This is very important to have but it does NOT appear as a part of a research paper. You should submit the script as a separate document.

So, you’ll be submitting two separate documents:
1) a Method section with appendices and
2) a Script.

Here’s a standard outline for a Method section. There is more information about each section in the other parts of this Task.

Method

      [opening]
Participants
      [describe participants]
Materials
      [describe stimuli]
      [describe testing materials]
      [describe background questionnaire]
Procedure
      [describe procedure]
Design and analyses
      [describe design, measures, and analyses]

[Note: Each appendix starts on a separate page]

Appendix A. Background questionnaire

Appendix B. Consent form

Appendix C. Stimuli

Appendix D. Testing materials

Verb tenses
For the planning phase and writing the Proposal (your next task), all of your Method section should be in the future tense because you’re describing future work.

Ex: The participants will read a story and write a summary of it afterwards.

For the reporting and publication of your study, all of your Method section should be in the past tense because you’ll be reporting on work that’s already been done.

Ex: The participants read a story and wrote a summary of it afterwards.

Writing up your Participants section
To describe the participants in your study, you need to answer all of the following questions.
     What’s the population? Who will you be studying? What kind of people do you want to make general statements about?
     American adults? Young women? Race-car drivers? Crack users? Psych majors?
     What’s the sample? Why these specific participants? How will you choose them? What characteristics should they have to be representative of the population?

• Give each participant a background questionnaire to have evidence that they really do have these characteristics. Ask about characteristics that are relevant for your process.
• Representativity is the most important factor here: do the few participants that you test have the same characteristics of the population, i.e., are they representative of the population? You need to provide evidence and arguments that they are. “Yes” is nowhere near good enough. A background questionnaire is a start.
• Random sampling is a powerful technique to help assure representativity. Ideally, you’d be able to choose your participants in a totally random way from a master list of everyone in your population.
• Generally, in class projects we use convenience sampling: we’re happy to get anyone who will participate. This makes the research more practical, but leads to sacrifices in generalizability.

Will the participants be grouped? How?

Give the groups descriptive names like “Male” and “Female”, not “Group A” and “Group B”. Do NOT use “Group A” and “Group B” (or “Group 1” and “Group 2”, etc.) to refer to groups of participants.

None of your readers will know what you’re talking about! Use more descriptive terms, like Males and Females, the Picture group and the No-picture group, etc. If your readers can’t understand which group is which, they’ll never believe your results and they will conclude that you are too confused to know what you’re doing.

Writing up your Materials section
The materials section of the Methods must include a description of the stimuli, any distractors, and the testing materials. You should describe the materials and explain how you chose them to increase external validity.

A copy of the exact stimuli, distractors, and testing materials that you will use have to be included as appendices to your Method section (except if they are video or audio). They will also appear in an Appendix to the Proposal and to the final research report (again, except if they are video or audio).

Writing up your Procedure section
The following sections describe the parts of your data collection and analysis procedures that you have to specify now.

The Procedure specifies the tasks that the participants will carry out, the setting in which the experiment will take place, and the steps that the experimenter will take to make measurements and analyze the data. When you write up the procedure you need to answer the following questions.

Procedure. What will happen when during data collection and analysis?

• a. Tasks. What will the participants have to do? Why these tasks?
• b. Setting. Where will the participants be tested? Why these tasks?
• c. Measurements. What will you be measuring? How will you be measuring it? Why?
• d. Design and Analyses. How will you organize and analyze the data? Remember that you need to write up the procedure in two different ways: a) a summary of the procedure goes in the Procedure subsection of the Method section. It includes information about tasks, instructions, setting, measurements, and design and analyses. Information about each section follows. b) a precise, step-by-step script including the exact words that the experimenter says, and the actions carried out by the participants, at each point in the experiment. This is NOT included in your research paper, but is essential in planning your experiment.

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