Like the introduction, the Discussion provides direction about research possibilities. The Discussion section is shaped like a triangle, starting narrowly (at the top of the triangle), restating whether the hypotheses were supported. Then it broadens to relate the findings of the research to the work cited in the Introduction. The Discussion typically ends with a section on Limitations and Future Directions. If the work is applied, there also may be a specific section called Recommendations or Implications for Practice.
Results: Title of the section in a manuscript where the results are presented; in American Psychological Association (APA) style, the word Results is centered and bolded.
Discussion: Title of section in a manuscript when you interpret the results, centered and bolded in American Psychological Association (APA) style.
The Discussion section provides material to consider for research projects. When authors are relating their work to the existing literature, they talk about their findings being consistent (or not) with this literature. If not, then conflict exists. This conflict provides the opportunity to conduct further research to try to resolve the discrepancies. Limitations are a fruitful area to direct future research because the authors point out the shortcomings of their work; you can try to address these shortcomings, such as better measures or a more heterogeneous population. Returning now to an idea from Michael Shermer (1997) in Chapter 1, overreliance on authorities, don’t be afraid to criticize research that has been published. Beyond the limitations identified by the authors themselves, you may identify other drawbacks to the work; these provide the opportunity for new research projects.
Future Directions also point to research opportunities. Researchers may not be explicit about the directions the research could take, to protect their own “next steps.” At the same time, they may speak in more general terms about possibilities, such as using different age groups or more current measures.
The seventh edition of the APA Publication Manual contains tables that specify standards for reporting Quantitative (Table 3.1), Qualitative (Table 3.2), and Mixed Methods (Table 3.3) research for all sections of a manuscript (Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion). These tables not only provide a roadmap for researchers to make sure they include all of the expected information in their manuscript, but they are also helpful in the planning stages of the research to make sure the necessary steps are taken to obtain the expected information (e.g., types of recruitment, length, and follow-up; transcription processes used for qualitative data).
Revisit and Respond 2.5
Explain what information you should keep track of in each of the following sections: Introduction, Method, Results, and Discussion.
What are the three sections of the Method?
What is the internal consistency of a measure?
What is the shape of the Introduction? The Discussion?
Why are the Limitations and Future Directions sections important in developing research ideas?
Keeping Track: ILL, Mendeley, and RefWorks
Interlibrary loan (ILL) books typically must be returned to a lending library within two to three weeks. Your own handwriting may not provide an accurate record of material in these books. Instead, if you are using quotations from books, photocopy the pages from which you are quoting; having these pages will enable you to check the accuracy of the quotations you use.
Mendeley and RefWorks may be useful to the researcher but for different reasons. Mendeley is a free reference manager, and you can easily download and install it on your computer. Returning to our theme of tradition and innovation, Mendeley involves working on “tradition.” It is easy to be overwhelmed with articles you have accessed, and unless you print out the articles (which would be expensive), you need a way to retrieve these articles without redoing your database searches. Once you have downloaded a full text article to your desktop, you can add it to your Mendeley library, which you can organize by topic headings. You can then retrieve your articles from your Mendeley reference manager by author name, author keywords, publication, or your own tags. Within Mendeley you can create folders for specific topics, which is especially helpful if you are writing something that covers a range of topics or working on more than one project. If you use quotations in your writing, it is wise to recheck those quotations before submitting a manuscript. Using Mendeley, you can easily access the full text paper against which to check the quotation.
Mendeley: Free reference manager for organizing and subsequently accessing downloaded articles.
RefWorks is primarily used by students as a bibliographic management tool. Most students in the social and behavioral sciences will be asked to learn APA style (2020) for providing citations and references. APA style is challenging to learn because there are many rules that deal with such issues as the use of ampersands, commas, italics, volume and issue numbers, and digital object identifiers. To make it more challenging, in APA style, the format of citations in the text is different from the bibliographic form in the References section. Unlike Mendeley, there is a cost to RefWorks, but institutions typically have purchased a license to the software, and users logged on to the institutional system can use RefWorks free of charge. In theory, using RefWorks should create error-free bibliographic citations and references. Trying this on the Andrade and Devlin (2015) article, the citation was close but not error-free.
Try This Now 2.5
If you do not have Mendeley on your desktop, consider downloading and installing it.
Andrade, C. C., & Devlin, A. S. (2015). Stress reduction in the hospital room: Applying ulrich’s theory of supportive design. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 41, 125–134. doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2014.12.001
Can you detect the error? Try This Now before reading further.
The “U” in Ulrich (a proper name) was not capitalized in the RefWorks version. In addition, users of APA style need to know what fonts and font sizes are recommended (choices include both sans serif options such as Calibri in 11 point and serif fonts such as Times New Roman in 12 point). See Section 2.19 of the APA manual (2020) for a complete list of options. Importantly, use the same font for text throughout your paper! Further, APA style (Section 9.35) recommends that authors follow the International DOI Foundation formatting, which is https://doi.org/xxxxx (where “xxxxx” refers to the DOI number, which starts with “10”). The advice in this book is that you learn APA style well enough to detect these kinds of errors.
Confounding or Third Variables: Refining the Research Question and Closing the Research Gap
Even when we ask questions that seem to have a high likelihood of producing strong relationships, they may not. Why? The gap between the variables of interest may be wide; as a result, other variables or factors that have not been measured may be better explanations of the relationship than those we have included. An extraneous variable is one that exists in the context of the study but is not being measured. There may be hundreds of extraneous variables for any given study, such as the time of day the study is taken, the age of the experimenter, the class year of the participants, or the weather outside. Extraneous variables are not automatically a problem. The real issue is whether these variables could provide an alternative explanation for your results. In an experiment when an extraneous variable changes systematically with the variables you are studying, it becomes what is known as a confounding variable (also called a third variable, usually in the context of correlation) (see also Chapters 3 and 7). Confounding variables are those the researcher failed to measure or control that provide alternative