Construct a RQ to guide your project
Provide a solid introductory paragraph ending with the RQ
Find the literature
In the body of the introduction, identify important literature and theory. Keep in mind that whatever constructs you are testing, you should be talking about those things!
For example, if I am investigating gender and social media use, I need one section on gender, one on social media, and one of both (if available). These are good subheaders to use in your introduction.
Rule of thumb, one paragraph per reference!
Don’t forget to define your constructs (preferably by citing through literature)
Construct your hypothesis
Remember to be specific to what you will be testing!
Provide a summary of introduction and end with your hypothesis.
Select your variables from the dataset (keep it simple!!!)
You can’t do everything! Make this easier on yourself and select only a few variables.
Write your method
Participants
Who were your participants? Aside from gender, age, race, what else may be important for you to describe?
Materials
Survey items you are using.
For the sake of this paper, pretend that the survey you ran included ONLY THE QUESTIONS YOU ARE USING and the demographics.
Make sure to describe the variables (i.e. operationally define). For example, I would not just say “survey” because how could someone replicate that without knowing what I asked and how I measured it?
Procedure
What the participant did from start to finish (tip: this will be super short!)
Write your results
Operationally define what the numbers mean! For example, social media use was measured on a scale from 1 (no use) to 5 (heavy use). So when I show the means/standard deviations, they are meaningful!
Provide descriiptive analysis
Mean/SD for continuous level variables (i.e. like age, weight, etc.)
Frequencies (or percentages) for categorical variables (i.e. like gender, etc.)
NOT REQUIRED: but you can run correlations, or other things if you so choose.
Minimum of one tables or bar graphs, make sure you follow APA style!!!
Write your discussion
What are the implications of your findings and did you support your hypothesis?
How does it support or refute things from your introduction?
What are the limitations? And based on that, what are the future directions?
What is the overall broader conclusion?
