| Tips
for Reading a Psychology Journal Article
Professional psychology articles usually follow a format to make it easier for the reader to find information about the study. I have outlined the types of information to be found in each section of the empirical article below. For the purposes of this class, you should pay particular attention to the introduction, the method section, and especially to the discussion. You can skim through the results section. Although the abstract summarizes the entire article, it does not give you enough information to be able to discuss the design of the study. Abstract. Many articles have an abstract that summarizes the contents of the article. The abstract is useful when you are looking for articles because it gives you a rough idea of what the researcher was doing. Then, if the article sounds interesting, you can obtain the full article. Do not rely on the abstract to give you enough information to fully evaluate the study or to tell you all the results or to put those results into context. Introduction. In this section, you should find the reasoning behind the study that was conducted. It does not have a separate heading and begins after the title of the study and the abstract (if present). Psychological research typically builds on previous research in some way. The author should review the relevant literature on past research, noting contradictions or missing pieces, and use these as a basis for proposing a study and a set of hypotheses to be tested. Sometimes the purpose is replication of previous research, but usually some additional hypotheses are generated and tested as well. Other times, studies may be exploratory research where particular hypotheses are not proposed. Method. The Method section contains the details of how the hypotheses were tested. In other words, what did the researchers actually do? There should be enough information given for other researchers to be able to replicate the study. This section includes information on the participants in the study, the materials/measures used, and the procedure. There may also be a section on the research design. If this is a qualitative study (where participant interviews are analyzed), a data analysis section may also be included in the Method section. Results. The results section reports the findings of the study, including any statistical analyses that were performed. This section may be daunting to a beginning student as (thanks to computers) most quantitative research nowadays utilizes rather complicated statistical analyses. If you don’t understand the analysis that is being performed, you can look for summary sections that tell you what the analysis found. Look at the tables or figures to get a feel for the pattern of the results. One thing to remember about statistical tests is that “significant” does not mean “meaningful.” “Significant” has to do with the results of a statistical analysis, but “meaningful” is an interpretation of the researcher and/or reader. Discussion. In this section, you should find a summary of the points the author was trying to make and a discussion of how the results address those points. The author should also try to explain any discrepant findings (those that don’t fit the hypotheses). There should be a critique of the study, that is, what does the author recognize as shortcomings in this particular study (remember, there is no perfect study)? And there should also be some speculation as to what would be the next step in studying this topic. last
updated 1/14/01
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