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Some advice from students on writing up projects case in your department. Generally, people are less fussy about following a particular style for figures and tables. The important thing is that they are well designed, accurate and clearly labelled, and the format is the same all the way through the report. It is worth giving some thought to this. The Results section is the centrepiece of your report and well-presented data will help to make it succinct, clear and professional in appearance. You should start by considering your data and thinking which method will present them to best effect. Note: All the examples shown in this section are in APA format, but, as elsewhere, the data are invented to make the points more clearly. Tables RESEARCH PROJECTS AND DISSERTATIONS 147 My supervisor wasn’t very sure of the best way to analyse my results, so I asked the guy who taught us statistics in the second year and he was incredibly helpful. A friend told me how to analyse my results, but he got it wrong. I wished I’d checked with my supervisor. I worked incredibly hard planning and running my project, and did it extremely well, but I didn’t leave enough time for analysing and writing it up. So the report, which is the main thing the examiners look at, was, I know, not very good. I only got a 2:1 when I hoped to get a first. So leave more time than you can possibly imagine to fiddle around working out the best way to present and analyse your data, and then to proof-read what you have written very carefully. Tables are an efficient way of presenting the exact numerical values, but most people find them quite difficult to interpret, so reserve them for your most important results. Table 5.1 offers an example in APA style. Note: Tables are numbered separately from figures, and the legend appears at the top. Table 5.1 Mean reaction times (RT) in ms and standard deviations (SD) of hockey and netball players performing motor tasks of varying difficulty Hockey Netball Level of difficulty RT SD N RT SD N Low 540 12.20 15 495 9.95 18 Moderate 790 18.73 15 787 23.28 12 High 1150 27.49 12 1240 34.20 15
148 STUDY SKILLS FOR PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS Boxplots Boxplots offer a very good way of visualizing the pattern of the data, showing more of their features than the alternatives. This does mean that they are complicated, take a little practice to interpret, and may not emphasize the particular feature you want to concentrate on in your report. For these reasons they may be used just for an initial exploration of the data before deciding to use a simpler line or bar chart in the Results section of your report. The best rule is to include a boxplot in your write-up only if there is no other way you can make the point you want to make. An example of this is shown in Figure 5.1. Figure 5.1. Boxplots of the effect of different outfits on the attractiveness of a model, rated out of 100. The shaded areas show the middle 50% of the ratings, with the horizontal line in the middle of the shaded area indicating the value of the median rating. The top and bottom horizontal lines, at the end of each ‘whisker’, mark the highest and lowest ratings respectively. The numbers, 40 in this case, along the horizontal (X) axis record the number of participants in each group. The star marks a response by participant 21, which has been classified as an outlier and might be considered for exclusion from the data if justification for doing this can be found. (Maybe participant number 21 had previously seen this outfit on a celebrity she particularly disliked.) This is the detail of how boxplots work, but you hardly need to know any of this to see that although the model is rated more or less the same in both outfits on average, the pattern of responses is very different. There is little variation
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Successful Studying Study Skills fo
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Study Skills for Psychology Student
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For Georgina Brennan, Julia Henders
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viii CONTENTS 4.5 Preparing and pre
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Skills for Successful Study series
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xiv SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE This
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2 STUDY SKILLS FOR PSYCHOLOGY STUDE
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References Aserinsky, E., & Kleitma
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218 INDEX Blindsight, 189 Body mass
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220 INDEX GBR see Graduate basis fo
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222 INDEX Phenomenology, 196 Piaget
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224 INDEX t-test, 209 Turnitin, 84-
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