Final Project: Introduction, Literature Review, and Methods Section 6 PAGES

Final Project: Introduction, Literature Review, and Methods Section

Turn in the proposed methods section for your research paper as well as your introduction and literature review.

The introduction and literature review should address your research question: why it is important, and how prior research does or does not support your hypothesis, as well as providing a background on what we know about this topic. 

Please refer to the material on the components of a research paper provided in Module 1 as you work on this document. 

Your methods section, in addition to covering the subheadings of participants, instruments, and procedure, must include a fourth subheading called ethical issues and note any ethical issues that need to be considered, as well as how they would be handled.

Be sure to include a title/cover page and a reference page formatted in APA style.

Submit your response to the M4: Assignment 2 Dropbox by Wednesday, December 4, 2013. Your response should be at least four pages, double spaced, long. All written assignments and responses should follow APA rules for attributing sources. Confirm the latest edition number with your instructor.

Topic is (Influence of Music on Worker Productivity)

Components of a Research Paper (1 of 4)

  Module 1

You have become familiar with some terms used in psychology and their usage in research. Along with common terms, psychological researchers also follow a specific format—APA format—prescribed by the APA, and according to which every research paper that is an experiment of some kind will have all these elements:

• Title page
• Title
• Author's name/institutional affiliation
• Running head
• Abstract
• Introduction—there will be no subtitle
• Method
• Participants
• Apparatus/instrumentation
• Procedure
• Results
• Discussion
• References
• Appendix
• Author's note

Let us begin with the introduction section.

Introduction

Authors use the introduction—also called the literature (lit) review—to posit their arguments. The authors provide a background on the subject, so that the reader understands the direction they wish the research to take and why. This background assumes some level of sophistication in the reader. Therefore, the basic elements of the issues may not be explained. The authors assume the readers know something about the topic already. The purpose of the research is clearly articulated in this section.

A good introduction will have at least one hypothesis that the reader can easily connect to the problem. The researcher will explain the implications of the study and relate it to what has been done before. A good introduction makes the reader want to know the answer to the research question. To write the introduction section of a scholarly paper, you need several skills such as knowing how to use the library resources in order to search electronic and manual databases to find what other researchers have published about your topic.

You need to become familiar with important journals in the field. Journals are magazines that, instead of articles, have experiments. The main difference between journals and magazines is that journals are "peer reviewed." That is, each journal article is critiqued by experts in the field, and if these experts feel the author or authors did a good job, they will recommend that the article be published. This is no small feat. For example, according to some sources, for every 100 articles submitted to the Journal of Applied Psychology, about six are published! This process ensures that people use only the work that other experts recommend.

In addition to journals, it is important to know how to use handbooks. They are rich sources of general information on a variety of topics. For example, there is the Handbook of Social Psychology and the Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Handbooks such as these have chapters devoted to topic areas, such as persuasion or test development. Therefore, such handbooks are a valuable starting point in any literature review.

As you develop your introduction, you will be required to read critically. Each article or chapter will be different in its level of accuracy, scholarship, and applicability to your question. You will need to understand how to sift through large amounts of information and select what is properly presented and relevant. You will then have to summarize it in a form that the reader can use and understand.

As you review these articles and chapters, you will be required to judge whether proper methodology was applied to the research, whether or not the argument was constructed in a sound, logical manner, and if the author has presented sound evidence in support of the theory.

Now let's move on to the method section.

Method

The method section of a paper is similar to a recipe. Any researcher reading your method section should be able to duplicate what you have done, and hopefully he or she will come up with the same results. If you think of it as a recipe, you will write a good method section.

This section should be written ethically as well. Everyone must participate willingly, no harm must come to the participants, and no unjustifiable deception should be used.

Although it is the most straightforward part of the whole research process, it requires the broadest set of skills and abilities.

Some skills required for the method section are listed below:

• Ability to define your population of interest

• Ability to sample that population properly

• Familiarity with descriptive statistics

• Knowledge of and access to the necessary apparatus, equipment, or instrumentation, including written tests or assessments

• Ability to conceptualize your idea and translate it into concrete measurement methods—also known as the ability to operationalize

• Understanding of reliability and validity

• Knowledge of experimental designs that will allow you to test your hypothesis

• Knowledge of statistical methods to allow you to test whether your results are by chance or can be duplicated
• Understanding of how to control extraneous variables to isolate your variables of interest from the factors that may confuse your results

Results

In the results section, you report the outcome of your statistical tests without evaluating them. You present your information in a clear, unambiguous manner, and point out whether it supports your hypothesis, disconfirms it, or does neither.

To write this section, you need a thorough understanding of statistical methods, including types of tests, statistical significance, power, effect size, and computer programs—such as SPSS, SAS, or Microsoft Excel–used to analyze quantitative data.

Discussion

In this section, the implications of the results are interpreted and discussed.

The section answers the following questions:

• What did I contribute here?
• How did my study help to resolve the original problem?
• What conclusions and theoretical implications can I draw from my study?
• What are the practical applications of these results?

In the discussion section, you talk about, evaluate, and suggest reasons for your results. You describe what you have contributed to the literature on the topic and whether it helped resolve the problem you discussed in the introduction section. You address the practical applications of your results. You may also address the limitations of your study and further questions raised by your results.

To write the discussion section of your paper properly, you need the ability to critically analyze and interpret your data. You also need to present both the strengths and weaknesses of the design and the execution of your experiment. Here, as in the introduction section, critical-thinking skills are important. You must be able to examine your study, compare it with past research, and integrate your results into the body of knowledge collected for topic of research.

Now let's look more carefully at what goes into each of the main sections of a research paper.

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