Contents

430 PART V: Analyzing and Reporting ResearchTips on Writing an Abstract Writing a good abstract is challenging. The bestway to meet this challenge is to write it last. By writing the abstract after youhave written the rest of the report, you will be able to abstract, or paraphrase,your own words more easily.IntroductionObjectives for the Introduction The Introduction serves three primary objectives:1 to introduce the problem being studied and to indicate why the problemis an important one to study;2 to summarize briefly the relevant background literature related to thestudy and to describe the theoretical implications of the study; and3 to describe the purpose, rationale, and design of the present study with alogical development of the predictions or hypotheses guiding the research.The order in which you address these objectives in your paper may vary, butthe order we describe here is a common one.As mentioned, the Introduction includes a summary of related researchstudies. This review is not intended to provide an exhaustive literature review.Instead, you should carefully select those studies that are most directly relatedto your research. In summarizing these selected studies, you should emphasizewhatever details of the earlier work will best help the reader understand whatyou have done and why. You must acknowledge the contributions of other researchersto your understanding of the problem. Of course, if you quote directlyfrom another person’s work, you must use quotation marks (see Chapter 3 foradvice about citing others’ work).Reference is usually made to the work of other researchers in one of twoways. Either you refer to the authors of the article you are citing by theirlast names, with the year in which the paper was published appearing inparentheses immediately after the names, or you make a general referenceto their work and follow it with both the names and the year of publicationin parentheses. For example, if you were citing a study by Lorna HernandezJarvis and Patricia V. Roehling that was published in 2007, you would writeeither “Jarvis and Roehling (2007) found . . .” or “Recent research (Jarvis& Roehling, 2007) showed that. . . .” Complete bibliographical informationon the Jarvis and Roehling paper, including the journal title, volume number,and specific pages, would appear in the References section. Footnotesare not used to cite references in a research report in psychology. We suggestthat you review in Chapter 3 the discussion of ethical issues related tociting references for your work (see Reporting of Psychological Researchsubsection).In summary, the problem under investigation, related research findings, andthe rationale and design of your study should be introduced in a clear, interestingmanner.