Reading Reports of Empirical Studies

Psychologists have adopted a common writing style to communicate information to the scientific community in journal articles. This style is called APA style and refers to the guidelines published in the Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (APA). This style has been revised several times; currently psychologists conform to the guidelines of the Fourth Edition, published in 1994.

This module is designed to help you learn how to read reports of empirical research reports published in psychological journals. Only a brief summary of the journal article is included here. You will need to obtain the full-length article from your library.

Three major types of journal articles are reports of empirical studies, review articles, and theoretical articles. Reports of empirical studies are articles summarizing original research. Review articles are further examinations of research that has already been published. Theoretical articles are written to advance theory and they may include both empirical research and reviews of research in order to elaborate the theoretical position.

Many journal articles are reports of empirical studies. In order to learn how to review the literature and elaborate theory, it is important to be able to read and understand reports of empirical studies.

The different sections of reports of empirical studies relate to the different steps of the scientific method.

The Introduction sets the research in a context (it provides the "big picture"), provides a review of related research, and develops the hypotheses for the research. The Method section is a description of how the research was conducted, including who the participants were, the design of the study, what the participants did, and what measures were used.. The Results section describes the outcomes of the measures of the study. The Discussion section contains the interpretations and implications of the study. There may be more that one study in the report; in this case, there are usually separate Method and Results sections for each study followed by a General Discussion that ties all the research together.

A report of an empirical study also includes an Abstract that provides a very brief summary of the research and a References section that contains information about all the articles and books that were cited in the report.