Abstract

Less than 150 words, this section should explain what your paper/study is about and what you found.

Introduction

This section should review prior evidence: what do we know? You can use the four sources of evidence here: scientific literature primarily, but also evidence from practitioners, stakeholders, and the organization. Explain why what you’re studying is important.

Theory and Hypotheses

In this section, your primary goal is to explain why you expect to find what you think you’ll find, and then say what you think you’ll find. For example, if you have three hypotheses, you would explain for each of them the logic behind why they would work, and then make the formal hypothesis. So there would be theorizing about how peanut butter tastes and how it makes things taste better, and then Hypothesis 1: Peanut butter is positively related to the deliciousness of sandwiches. Then there would be more theorizing about peanut butter amount, how too little leads to one thing and too much leads to another, and then Hypothesis 2: The amount of peanut butter has a curvilinear relationship with the deliciousness of sandwiches. Then there would be theorizing about how crunchy peanut butter is tasty but not quite as tasty as smooth and then Hypothesis 3: Participants will rate the deliciousness of smooth peanut butter higher than crunchy.

Methods

In this section, there are a few subsections.

Sample Here is where you write about your sample: some descriptive statistics (sample size, what percentage is male/female, average age, who were they as a group, i.e., Stetson students, people at a mall, a survey sent out via email to a convenient sample, etc).

Data Collection. Here, you talk how you collected the data (archival? Survey in Qualtrics?), where you got your data from, and why it’s appropriate for the question you’re asking. If it’s easier, Sample and Data Collection can be one section.

Measures. This is where you talk about how you measured things, especially what scales you used. You should include what the name of each measure/scale is (for example, you might have measured Optimism) and where you got it from (it might be the International Personality Item Pool or from a journal article that you would cite).

Analyses and Results

Analyses. Here is where you talk about how you calculated what you calculated. For most of you, it’s going to be some variation/expansion of, “I used SPSS, and performed multiple regression (or linear regression), and examined correlation tables there.”

Results. Here is where you talk about things in a very straightforward format. (Something like…”Hypothesis 1 proposed that peanut butter was positively related to sandwich deliciousness. Regression results support Hypothesis 1 (β=.24, p<.01)” or something like “Hypothesis 3 predicted that respondents would rate smooth peanut butter as more delicious than crunchy. However, Hypothesis 3 was not supported (β=.24, p=.67)”

Discussion

In this section, you talk about what all of this means. What are the implications of your research? And what questions should people research in the future based on what we now know? What does this mean? If you didn’t find the results you hypothesized, why do you think this is true? What could or should people do with this information? And what are the limitations of your study? In this section, you really get to interpret and show your thinking.

Conclusion

A brief, one paragraph wrap up: here what we did, here’s what we found, here’s what it means.

That’s the main body of the paper, students. But, you do need to include an Appendix. Your appendix for this paper should have three sections, all outlined below.

References

In APA format, an alphabetical list of references for your paper

Tables and Figures

For my class, you should have 1) a correlation table, 2) your regression results, and a box and arrow diagram showing your relationships.

I also want to see: a logic model and a PICOC. This wouldn’t normally be in most papers as explicitly as this.