Designing and Reporting Experiments in Psychology Peter Harris
     
 
 
 
Designing & Reporting Experiments in Psychology 3/e
 
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  A. Choosing a statistical test  
  B. Reporting specific inferential statistics  
  C. More on main effects, interactions and graphing interactions  
  D. Rules for writers  
  E. Reporting studies that include questionnaires  
  E1 Studies involving questionnaire  
  E2 Design  
  E3 Questionnaire development  
  E4 Materials  
  E5 Procedure  
  E6 Computer presentation  
  E7 Results  
  E8 Reporting non experimental studies  
  E9 The reliability and validity of your measures  
  E10 An example to help you report studies using Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) measures  
  F. Experimental and nonexperimental data: Some things to watch out for  
  G. Some tips for advanced students to improve your experiments yet further  
  H. Some issues to consider in the RESULTS sections of your later reports and your projects  
  I. Final year projects  
     
 
Related Statistics Books
 
  Pallant, SPSS Survival Manual  
     
  Greene & D'Oliveira, Learning to Use Statistical Tests in Psychology  
     
   
Reporting studies that include questionnaires

 

E6 Computer presentation

A possible exception to what I have said about the procedure in Section E5 of this Web site occurs when you have run what is effectively a questionnaire study but via a computer. This is because interacting with a computer makes the study more like an experiment with events unfolding in sequence and that aspect of an experiment is usually reported in the PROCEDURE. There are no hard and fast rules about this, but if you have used a computer to present your questions, my inclination would be to do the following:

Report the bulk of the questionnaire and its implementation on the computer in the MATERIALS as described previously. However, describe any screens of instructions in sequence in the PROCEDURE, along with your accounts of any other verbal interaction that took place at these stages. The extra control that a computer gives you over the precise timing and sequencing of the material may be a considerable advantage and makes it sit comfortably in the PROCEDURE, a section that describes the unfolding of events over time. However, the main thing is to make clear somewhere in these sections what was said and when.

In this case you would, of course, have to have a section called APPARATUS as well, because you need to describe which type of computer you used. (For more on the distinction between materials and apparatus, see Section 3.3 of the book.)

 

 

 

 

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