Method Section Draft

Please review Lecture 6 before you start working on this assignment.

The Method section should be double-spaced and strictly following the APA format (including
the section title). Please tightly follow the method section writing guide below and edit/correct
your writing using the grading rubric detailed at the end of this document.

Method Section Writing Guide

PURPOSE
 To describe how you will conduct your study with enough detail so that a reader can
evaluate the validity of your procedures and so that they could replicate or extend your
results.
 The Method section is like a “recipe” for science: it tells the reader how you will go about
investigating your hypothesis. While there are many ways to go about collecting data in this
recipe for science, the goal is to come up with a sound method that doesn’t turn into a
“recipe for disaster.”
 One thing to keep in mind while designing your proposal: what sort of methods have other
people used in the past? If you are building on earlier work with a similar hypothesis, using
established methods is the way to go. If your method is improving on past methods, tell the
reader about this improvement.

FORMAT: Divided into 3 sections: Participants, Materials (measures / apparatus), and

Procedure

Participants
In this section you describe the people who will be in your study. This includes:

Population sampled: Who participated? (e.g., adolescent girls serving as inpatients in their
first week of hospitalization for anorexia, pregnant women in their third trimester who
received no previous prenatal care)

Demographic description of participants:

• Gender (proportion of males and females in your study)
• Age (average age AND age range)
• Ethnicity: what will the ethnic configuration of your sample be? For an example of
different ethnic group descriptors see www.census.gov
• Socioeconomic status: what is their occupational status? Annual household income?
• Marital status (if applicable)

Location: Where are participants from?

• Urban, suburban, rural?
• Region of the country (e.g., Long Island, New York)
• Public or private schools? College or elementary school?
Selection process: How were they selected?
• How will you recruit for your study (newspaper advertisements, radio announcements,
school visits, random-digit dialing, etc.)
• How will you compensate your participants? (course credit, paid, etc.)
• How will you select your final sample? (i.e., eligibility requirements – who was eligible
and who was not; screening measures – cutoff score on a measure, presence or absence
of an attribute; how you assigned participants to different groups, if applicable)

Materials
This is where you describe the “equipment” you will use to collect the data. In this section,
you will also describe how you OPERATIONALIZED all of your variables (in other words, how
did you define your variables in a specific and concrete way so that they could be measured
and quantified?)
• For example, what do you mean by “aggression”? How will you assess “aggression”? Is it
either there or it’s not (2 levels)? Or, does aggression exist on a continuum and may be
measured on a scale (for example, scale from 1-10, 10 levels)? Are there different types
and levels of aggression (e.g. physical abuse, verbal abuse, mild, moderate, and severe
levels of both physical and verbal abuse)? What is the best way to measure this?
Interview? Questionnaire? Behavioral observation?

This includes:
Describing the measures and/or the apparatus you will use to test participants
For questionnaires and interviews, you need to:
1. Provide the name of the survey/interview and cite the original author(s) of the
scale/interview in parentheses
2. Provide basic information about the scale/interview (what it measures, number of
items, subscales)
3. Provide information about the reliability and validity of the scale (alpha or other
reliability and/or validity information available). Reliability is the degree to which a
test produces similar scores each time it is used, or the stability or consistency of the
scores produced by an instrument.
4. Has the scale ever been used in your population before? If so, what is the range of
expected mean scores based on these studies?
5. Did you modify the scale in any way? If so, describe how.
**Your measures should be based on established rating scales, structured clinical
interviews, etc. You should search for what has been used in the past in order to
get details of these measures. Depending on your study, you may have to modify
the measures in order to get all the information you want. However, you may
have to create your own questionnaire in order to get more factual information
(i.e., number of arrests, number of suspensions, etc.)
6. If your study uses machinery (computers, stop watches, tables, chairs, eye-trackers,
etc.) include this information
For behavioral observations:
1. Explain your coding process
 2. What behaviors did you look for?
3. Was it videotaped? Audiotaped?

Procedure
This is where you lay out exactly what you will do and how you will do it at a level of detail
so that a stranger could walk in off the street, read your procedure, and be able to perform
the study. Thus, this is where you provide step-by-step instructions of what participants do
in your study.

What was the study design?

• Cross-sectional or longitudinal (if so, at what points in time were the data
collected?)
• Correlational or Experimental
• Describe the variables
Describe where and how (step by step!!) the study took place
• Describe the treatment/procedure given to each individual (or group if
comparing groups) chronologically and in step-by-step detail
• What procedures did you employ to make sure the data were collected
systematically to reduce any experimenter and or participant bias?
• Describe control procedures: methods that attempt to hold constant all variables
and conditions other than those directly related to the hypothesis being tested
(e.g., room temp, restricted age or experience of participants)

Grading Rubric for Method section:

See comments on document for more information
Criterion Points Notes
Participants Subsection  
          N
          Demographics 1.5/1.5
          Screening Criteria
          Recruitment Methods
Materials Subsection  
          Describes measures (if any)
          Describes apparatuses (if any) 1.5/1.5
          Citations w/ where any materials
came from (if applicable)
Procedure Subsection  
          Enough info to replicate the
study (experimental design; 1.5/1.5
variables controlled for; detailed
description etc.)
Writing Quality/APA formatting 0.5/0.5  
Incorporated Instructor Feedback? This will not be graded for draft but
1.0/1.0
(Only applies to final paper) will be for the final paper.