1. Research question
○ Background and relevance
○ Describe phenomena
2. 2 Hypothesis
○ Should be an explicit statement
○ Describes nature of relationship
○ Describes direction of relationship
○ Contains 2 variables
3. Based on arguments and literature
○ Argumentation for associations between phenomena (2 scientific articles to
substantiate)
METHODS
- Use subheadings in the methods section
- Participants (demographic)
- N participants
- % of males and females
- Range, mean, and SD of age
- % of groups
- Materials/instruments
- What was measured (operationalisation)
- min/max score and interpretation of low/high score
- Describe only variables used
- Usually, full name of scale, reference, number of items, answer options, scale
range, interpretation of low/high score
- Procedure
- How was the study executed (eg approach, collection of data – when where
how)
- Data-analysis
- Usually, software used for analysis (eg IBM SPSS version X)
- What was used to analyze
- Alpha value
RESULTS
- Descriptives
- Average, SDs, % of study variable
- Inferential statistics
- Results of 2 hypothesis tests (report and describe)
- Notes
- Difference: specify direction (more/less)
- Leading zero only written when values can exceed 0 (ie p and r value are written
without leading zero)
DISCUSSION
- Discussion of main results in light of research question and hypothesis
- Interpretation and explanation of results
- 1 limitation and 1 recommendation for future (avoid generalities)