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Presenting Your Research

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Research is complete only when the results are shared with the scientific community.

-American Psychological Association

Imagine that you have identified an interesting research question, reviewed the relevant literature, designed and conducted an empirical study, analyzed the data, and drawn your conclusions. There is still one more step in the process of conducting scientific research. It is time to add your research to the literature so that others can learn from it and build on it. Remember that science is a social process—a large-scale collaboration among many researchers distributed across space and time. For this reason, it could be argued that unless you make your research public in some form, you are not really engaged in science at all.

In this chapter, we look at how to present your research effectively. We begin with a discussion of American Psychological Association (APA) style—the primary approach to writing taken by researchers in psychology and related fields. Then we consider how to write an APA-style empirical research report. Finally, we look at some of the many other ways in which researchers present their work, including review and theoretical articles, theses and other student papers, and talks and posters at professional meetings.

This text was adapted by The Saylor Foundation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License without attribution as requested by the work’s original creator or licensee.

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11.1 American Psychological Association (APA) Style

1. Define APA style and list several of its most important characteristics.

2. Identify three levels of APA style and give examples of each.

3. Identify multiple sources of information about APA style.

LEARNIN G OBJE CTIVE S

What Is APA Style?

APA style is a set of guidelines for writing in psychology and related fields. These guidelines are set down in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA,

2006). [1] The Publication Manual originated in 1929 as a short journal article that provided basic

standards for preparing manuscripts to be submitted for publication (Bentley et al., 1929). [2] It was later expanded and published as a book by the association and is now in its sixth edition. The primary purpose of APA style is to facilitate scientific communication by promoting clarity of expression and by standardizing the organization and content of research articles and book chapters. It is easier to write about research when you know what information to present, the order in which to present it, and even the style in which to present it. Likewise, it is easier to read about research when it is presented in familiar and expected ways.

APA style is best thought of as a “genre” of writing that is appropriate for presenting the results of psychological research—especially in academic and professional contexts. It is not synonymous with “good writing” in general. You would not write a literary analysis for an English class, even if it were based on psychoanalytic concepts, in APA style. You would write it in Modern Language Association (MLA) style instead. And you would not write a newspaper article, even if it were about a new breakthrough in behavioral neuroscience, in APA style. You would write it in Associated Press (AP) style instead. At the same time, you would not write an empirical research report in MLA style, in AP style, or in the style of a romance novel, an e-mail to a friend, or a shopping list. You would write it in APA style. Part of being a good writer in general is adopting a style that is appropriate to the writing task at hand, and for writing about psychological research, this is APA style.

The Levels of APA Style

Because APA style consists of a large number and variety of guidelines—the Publication Manual is nearly 300 pages long—it can be useful to think about it in terms of three basic levels. The first is the

overall organization of an article (which is covered in Chapter 2 “Getting Started in Research” of the Publication Manual). Empirical research reports, in particular, have several distinct sections that always appear in the same order:

1. Title page. Presents the article title and author names and affiliations.

2. Abstract. Summarizes the research.

3. Introduction. Describes previous research and the rationale for the current study.

4. Method. Describes how the study was conducted.

5. Results. Describes the results of the study.

6. Discussion. Summarizes the study and discusses its implications.

7. References. Lists the references cited throughout the article.

The second level of APA style can be referred to as high-level style (covered in Chapter 3 “Research Ethics” of the Publication Manual), which includes guidelines for the clear expression of ideas. There are two important themes here. One is that APA-style writing is formal rather than informal. It adopts a tone that is appropriate for communicating with professional colleagues—other researchers and practitioners— who share an interest in the topic. Beyond this shared interest, however, these colleagues are not necessarily similar to the writer or to each other. A graduate student in California might be writing an article that will be read by a young psychotherapist in New York City and a respected professor of psychology in Tokyo. Thus formal writing avoids slang, contractions, pop culture references, humor, and other elements that would be acceptable in talking with a friend or in writing informally.

The second theme of high-level APA style is that it is straightforward. This means that it communicates ideas as simply and clearly as possible, putting the focus on the ideas themselves and not on how they are communicated. Thus APA-style writing minimizes literary devices such as metaphor, imagery, irony, suspense, and so on. Again, humor is kept to a minimum. Sentences are short and direct. Technical terms must be used, but they are used to improve communication, not simply to make the writing sound more

“scientific.” For example, if participants immersed their hands in a bucket of ice water, it is better just to write this than to write that they “were subjected to a pain-inducement apparatus.” At the same time, however, there is no better way to communicate that a between-subjects design was used than to use the term “between-subjects design.”

APA Style and the Values of Psychology

Robert Madigan and his colleagues have argued that APA style has a purpose that often goes unrecognized (Madigan, Johnson, & Linton, 1995).[3] Specifically, it promotes psychologists’ scientific values and assumptions. From this perspective, many features of APA style that at first seem arbitrary actually make good sense. Following are several features of APA-style writing and the scientific values or assumptions

they reflect.

APA style feature	Scientific value or assumption
There are very few direct quotations of other researchers.	The phenomena and theories of psychology are objective and do not depend on the specific words a particular researcher used to describe them.
Criticisms are directed at other researchers’ work but not at them personally.	The focus of scientific research is on drawing general conclusions about the world, not on the personalities of particular researchers.
There are many references and reference citations.	Scientific research is a large-scale collaboration among many researchers.
Empirical research reports are organized with specific sections in a fixed order.	There is an ideal approach to conducting empirical research in psychology (even if this ideal is not always achieved in actual research).
Researchers tend to “hedge” their conclusions, e.g., “The results suggest that…”	Scientific knowledge is tentative and always subject to revision based on new empirical results.

Another important element of high-level APA style is the avoidance of language that is biased against particular groups. This is not only to avoid offending people—why would you want to offend people who are interested in your work?—but also for the sake of scientific objectivity and accuracy. For example, the term sexual orientation should be used instead of sexual preference because people do not generally experience their orientation as a “preference,” nor is it as easily changeable as this term suggests (Committee on Lesbian and Gay Concerns, APA, 1991). [4]

The general principles for avoiding biased language are fairly simple. First, be sensitive to labels by avoiding terms that are offensive or have negative connotations. This includes terms that identify people with a disorder or other problem they happen to have. For example, patients with schizophrenia is better than schizophrenics. Second, use more specific terms rather than more general ones. For

example, Mexican Americans is better than Hispanics if everyone in the group is, in fact, Mexican American. Third, avoid objectifying research participants. Instead, acknowledge t

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