Purpose
: This assignment acquaints you with reading a scientific article and with scientific writing. Being able to read and properly summarize scientific articles will help you when you write papers, research proposals, and lab reports in other psychology classes.
1. The Research Article to use for this Homework Assignment:
You will write a summary of an article you select from the following:
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Peter Fischer and Tobias Greitemeyer, 2006. Music and Aggression: The Impact of Sexual-Aggressive Song Lyrics on Aggression-Related Thoughts, Emotions, and Behavior Toward the Same and Opposite Sex appearing in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 32, Issue 9, Pages 1165-1176.
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NOTE:
I encourage you to discuss the article and assignment with others. However, the writing must be your own. Likewise, copying or paraphrasing sentences from the article is not acceptable.
2. Read the article. Identify key points: the research topic, purpose and hypotheses (if any), what was done, the results, and how the researchers interpreted the results. Highlighting or underlining these points as you read will help you find them more easily when you write.
3. Write the summary. The summary should be a condensed version of the article, not an abstract (abstracts are more concise). Avoid lifting sentences from the article. Use your own words. You will lose points for using quotes.MAKE SURE that you properly cite the authors of the assigned article by name/date at least once withinyour summary (SEE EXAMPLES AT THE END OF THIS HANDOUT).
4. Try to follow these General Length Guidelines, within the overall 1 to 1.5 page limit:
Approximate number of sentences per topic:
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2-4: Background (Describe the context for the study.)
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1-2: Specific purpose(s) of the study
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4-7: Method (Who and how many participated? What variables were examined? What was
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the research design – in other words, what conditions or groups were compared, if
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any? What was the procedure—what did the participants and researchers do?
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2-5: Results (Describe the key findings.)
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2-4 Discussion (According to the authors. What do the results mean? What are the
implications of the findings? What are the limitations of the study? What are future
directions for this research topic?)
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SECTION D: WRITING TIPS FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT:
1. Be sure to identify the main goals/purposes of the study. If the study had many goals, you can limit your description to the three major goals.
2. Be sure to identify the hypotheses of the study, if any. If a study has many hypotheses, try to state them succinctly. Suppose an author writes: I hypothesized that 1) males would behave more aggressively than females; 2) teenagers would behave more aggressively than children, and 3) individuals with low self-esteem would respond more aggressively than individuals with high self-esteem. This can be reduced as follows: The authors hypothesized that males, teenagers, and people with low self-esteem would behave more aggressively than females, children, and people with high self-esteem, respectively.
3. Be sure to cover the results and discussion. Students often provide too much detail on methodology and devote too little space to the results and discussion.
4. Don’t copy phrases verbatim and do not use quotes. If you can’t use your own words, you need to read the article again to make sure you understand it. Also, avoid the trap of relying on the article abstract.
5. Be specific. Vagueness is deadly in scientific writing, especially in summaries. When describing the method of the study, make sure you state who the participants were, how the study was performed (the procedure), and what materials or information were collected.
6. Be direct. Avoid hedging. In other words, don’t use language that suggests you’re not sure of what you’re saying, e.g., The purpose of the study seems to be. or I think the results show that.
7. Avoid inflated claims. When you discuss the results (Results & Discussion), don’t overstate what they showed or their importance (e.g., These results proved that eyewitness testimony is not accurate ).
SECTION E: HOW TO READ THE STATISTICS IN THIS ARTICLE
Some statistical terms in this article may already be familiar to you. Other statistical terms and symbols may be unfamiliar to you and that you can ignore for now.
In general, use this strategy when reading the Results section of the article: Ignore the complicated statistical terms you don’t know and instead pay attention to what the authors are saying about the results in English .
The purpose of the statistics is to reinforce the points that the authors are describing in their sentences.
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