Effective Writing in Psychology. Bernard C. Beins
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A writing project requires that you divide your time between doing research, pre‐writing, writing, adjusting your focus, and developing a thesis statement. Each part is important and is integrated with the other parts. That is, your thesis statement will reflect your focus; your thesis statement and focus should be informed by the work other psychologists have conducted, which you find through research; and, of course, your research, focus, and thesis end up shaping what you write. Furthermore, as we have been emphasizing, this process is not linear. Because of the complexity of academic research topics, rarely will scholars move from research to writing and then not conduct any more research, and rarely will the first version of a thesis statement be identical to the thesis statement in a final draft.
Academic research topics are complex on several levels, and this complexity will shape how you write your paper as well as how you evaluate your sources. Because almost any focal question you pose will have more than one answer, you need to identify different responses and evaluate their strengths and limitations. This evaluation involves analyzing the author's hypothesis, data, conclusions, and discussion sections because, for example, differences in the interpretation of results and the development of experiments can produce multiple perspectives about the same focal question. Although statistics might appear to represent research results in a straightforward manner, numbers can be manipulated or incorrectly interpreted, as Chapter 8 shows. Furthermore, two scholars might interpret the same statistics in different ways, both of which could be logically sound. As writers have noted (e.g., Best, 2001 , 2004), statistics are not simply objective facts; they are the results of decisions authors have made during the research process.
Rather than interpreting results differently, some psychologists might start their research with fundamentally different assumptions about an issue. For example, clinical psychologists may have a general consensus that a combination of pharmaceuticals and therapy is most effective for treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but there are different kinds of pharmaceuticals and different kinds of therapy, as well as different combinations of the two. The assumptions that inform an experiment about treating ADHD will affect the results. Thus, as you read sources, pay attention to the way the authors set up their research and test their hypotheses as well as to how they interpret their results.
Despite the professional disagreements that psychologists (and scholars in all disciplines) might have, most researchers realize that a variety of perspectives is what allows scholarship to thrive. This dialogue is one that scholars engage each time they present a paper or poster at a conference, publish an article or book, or write a paper. They are taking part in a larger conversation about an issue, using disciplinary conventions to produce a credible argument that might enlighten others.
Another factor to consider in research relates to psychology as a discipline. Animals—including humans—are complicated. Thus, psychologists who try to explain nonhuman animal behavior rarely find that there is one simple cause or that every instance of that behavior has the same cause. Behaviors have multiple causes, and what causes a behavior in one circumstance might not have that same effect in another.
To prevent oversimplifying both human and nonhuman behavior, psychologists place quite narrow parameters around their conclusions, emphasizing that the results apply only to a specific population or that the results are valid only under certain conditions. Through these qualifications, psychologists are recognizing the difficulties of developing and supporting an argument. Consequently, when you read sources, pay attention to the boundaries of the research (its focus, or what it includes and excludes) and the researcher's conclusions. Even slight variations in the constraints of different experiments can produce different results and conclusions.
Ethical Writing
Academic integrity is a concept that guides ethical writing and more broadly addresses cheating, plagiarism, and even denying others access to scholarly resources. In this section we offer examples and tips to help you avoid plagiarism but suggest you read your university's policy on academic integrity because, whether intentional or unintentional, plagiarism is a very serious infraction. By plagiarism, we mean the use or representation of someone else's idea or language as your own, which can include:
summarizing someone else's idea without giving that person credit;
using someone else's language without giving that person credit;
using someone else's language without quotation marks, even if you give that person credit for the idea;
taking work that someone else wrote (whether published or not) and presenting it as your own.
Scholars do not consider it plagiarism if you present information that is common knowledge without a citation. That is, if you offer information that you expect an average person would know, such as the temperature at which water freezes or who the fifth United States president is, then you can include that information without needing to cite any sources. However, the margins of common knowledge are not always clear. For example, if your audience is other psychologists, what is considered common knowledge might be different than if your audience is a group of sociologists. Whereas psychologists tend to know that John Watson was central in explaining human behavior through conditioning, sociologists might be less familiar with that knowledge, so it would make sense to include a specific reference to Watson's work if your readers are not psychologists.
Here we hope to offer resources and practices to eliminate the chance that you might unintentionally plagiarize, and we hope this book provides you with resources and tools so that you do not even consider plagiarizing intentionally. You might forget to cite a source when you are writing your paper, or you might have taken notes but forgotten to write down which source those notes are from. Regardless of your intentions, the first example is plagiarism and the second could become plagiarism. Consequently, academic integrity starts when you are in the preliminary research phase and continues through the research and writing process.
To clarify what is considered plagiarism, we offer an excerpt from a scholarly source and a paragraph that attempts to paraphrase the scholarly source (this example is inspired by a University of Kent's psychology department web page at www.kent.ac.uk/ai/students/whatisplagiarism.html). In Figure 2.1 we outline the mistakes in the paraphrased version and then offer a way to rewrite it, which is described in Figure 2.2.
Figure 2.1 Examples of plagiarism.
Figure 2.2 Revision that avoids plagiarism.
Scholarly Excerpt
According to self‐determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985 , 1991), individuals who perform an activity out of choice and pleasure regulate their behavior in a self‐determined manner. In contrast, individuals who participate in different activities out of internal and/or external pressures regulate their behavior in a non‐self‐determined fashion. Throughout the past two decades, much research has shown that self‐determined motivation is a useful concept to understand human behavior (Senécal, Vallerand, & Guay, 2001 , p. 177).
Attempted Paraphrase
For the last