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40 | A2 PSYCHOLOGY: THE STUDENT’S TEXTBOOKand women there were and the age range. Youshould also indicate how the sample was identified,perhaps using an advertisement for a volunteersample, or the phone directory for a randomsample. It may also be appropriate to indicatewhere the research was conducted and from whatcountry the participants came. You must be verycareful to make sure that the participants remainanonymous as this is their right, and it is also oneof the principles of ethical research. This is fromBeaman and Holt (2007):Eleven students of … University volunteeredto participate in this study. All participantsreported normal hearing levels and normal orcorrected-to-normal vision. All had English astheir first language.Apparatus and stimuli: In this section researcherswould indicate the apparatus they used in theirresearch. If they used certain sounds, or visualstimuli, then they would give details of these, perhapsindicating how each was produced.Sounds were digitally recorded on MiniDiscand presented from a Sony MiniDisc player at acomfortable listening level to students throughSennheiser HD570 headphones. Listeninglevels were set to a comfortable level with atest recording before the experiment beganand kept at the same level for the durationof the experiment. Stimuli were presentedon a Pentium Class PC running Windows XPand MS PowerPoint software. …using CoolEdit sound editing suite (Syntrillium SoftwareCorporation).Procedure: This section of the report is particularlyimportant for those wishing to replicate theresearch. It is here that researchers show exactlywhat they did.Each participant was tested individually in aquiet room. The irrelevant sound was presentedcontinuously … throughout the presentation… directly from the digital recording. Participantswere instructed to ignore anything theymight hear and were reassured they would notbe tested on it in any way. In each trial … theseven numbers were presented in successionon a VDU. After the presentation the instruction‘recall now’ was presented. Participantsrecorded the numbers manually on responsesheets provided, writing from left to right.They were asked not to omit any responsesand, if they could not remember a particularitem, to write down their best guess and moveonto the next item. They were asked not to goback and amend previous answers if they feltthey had made an error. The visual instruction‘Push space for next trial’ cued participants toprogress through the experiment.5. The resultsAfter researchers have identified their method, theresults are presented. The presentation of resultsmay be in the form of descriptive statistics, tables,graphs and also inferential statistics. In the caseof Beaman and Holt (2007) a more complicatedstatistic called an ANOVA (Analysis of Variance)has been used. Excerpts from the results of thisresearch are shown below.… analysis of variance (ANOVA) … showed asignificant effect of … speech condition on themean number correctly recalled…, p
DATA ANALYSIS AND REPORTING INVESTIGATIONS | 41irrele-vant sound stream and that anythingwhich acts to reduce the number or extentof these changes will reduce the size of thedistraction effect.The words in the irrelevant stream in theseexperiments were not, so far as can be ascertainedby passive listening, rendered unintelligibleby the process of adding reverberation,although no formal tests were carried out onwhether the relative levels of intelligibility variedbetween the conditions and that remains alimitation of the current study.The present results are inconsistent with theview that it is always helpful, when aiming tooptimise cognitive efficiency, to reduce the levelof reverberation within the environment……These experiments are the first to demonstratethat intrinsic factors of particular environmentscan modify the extent of auditory distractionobjectively observed in such environments.Concluding remarks can be brief and clear. Theysummarise what the researchers feel can sensiblybe concluded from their results.In conclusion, we have established that reverberationcan reduce the auditory distractioneffect produced by irrelevant speech.At the end of the discussion you might decide toidentify other things that could now be investigatedthat relate to your research.Further research looking at the subjectiveexperience of such noise should, in addition,lead to a greater understanding of how auditoryenvironments can be made more conducive toefficient cognitive function both objectively andsubjectively.7. ReferencesThe final section is a reference list. Here theresearchers give full details of the other research inbooks or academic journals that they have referredto in their investigation. This is very useful forthose reading the work as they may be interestedto extend their reading to the articles and booksindicated by the researchers who wrote the paper.The reference section from Beaman and Holt(2007) includes the following:1. Ruddle, R. A., Payne, S. J., & Jones, D.M. (1998). Navigating large-scale ‘desk-top’virtual buildings: Effects of orientation aidsand familiarity. Presence: Teleoperators & VirtualEnvironments, 7, 179–192.This is a research paper by Ruddle, Payne andJones. It was published in 1998, in the seventhvolume of an academic journal called Presence:Teleoperators & Virtual Environments on pages 179to 192.2. Ruddle, R. A., Payne, S. J., & Jones, D. M.(1999). Spatial knowledge and virtual environments.In J. M. Noyes & M. Cook (Eds.),Interface Technology: The Leading Edge (pp.135–146). Baldock, England: Research Studies.This is a chapter of a book called InterfaceTheory: The Leading Edge. The book was editedby Noyes and Cook, and was published in 1999by a company called Baldock, based in England.The chapter was written by Ruddle, Payne andJones and is titled “Spatial knowledge and virtualenvironments”.3. Wann, J. P., Rushton, S. K., Smyth, M., &Jones, D. (1997). Rehabilitation environmentsfor attention and movement disorders. Communicationsof ACM, 40, 49–52.This is a short article, written by Wann, Rushton,Smyth and Jones in 1997, called “Rehabilitationenvironments for attention and movement disorders”.It appeared in volume 40 of an academicpublication called Communications of ACM, onpages 49–52. ACM stands for Association of ComputerMachinery.Extract from A2 Psychology: The Student’s Textbook © Nigel Holt and Rob Lewis ISBN: 9781845901004 www.crownhouse.co.uk
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