Personality Psychology Research Report

Titles

Abstract

• Titles should be clear and concise and should tell the reader what the report is about.
• Each section of your report (i.e., intro, hypothesis, method, results, and discussion) should all be briefly summarised in your abstract.
• The aim of an abstract is to give the reader a general overview of the paper.
• Certain sections were often excluded from the abstract.
• Specifically, hypothesis testing outcome was stated; however, the IRR results were not included.
• Discussion summary needed improvement. It is not sufficient to state that implications will be discussed.
• The abstract should be on a separate page.

Introduction

• The first paragraph what we were studying and why needed to be expand on in many assignments. This section should have emphasised the importance of study the accuracy of personality impressions. For example, including a discussion of how personality impressions can affect opportunities and expectancies as discussed in Funder (2013).
• The Realistic Accuracy Model and the four moderators were often mentioned in assignments, but in some cases could have been expanded on. However, some reports had no mention of these moderators or factors similar to them that explains what might impact the accuracy of personality assessment via observation.
• Inter-rater reliability (IRR) can be introduced in the introduction; however, this only needed to be brief. Often many words were spent discussing IRR and these words would have been more valuable elsewhere.
• Your introduction should also include a brief discussion of your selected trait, including a discussion of prior assessment/observations of your trait. Some traits had literature regarding behavioural assessment, which is what we would be looking for, others do not have any literature on them, and in this case you should state that there is little research highlighting a gap, making your study important.

Method

• The method section should consist of three sections: Participants, Materials, and Procedure.

Participants

• The participant section could simply consist of one statement about who was in your group.
• In your participants section and throughout the study you should refer to yourself and your group members as independent researchers. You do not need to refer to yourself as students or refer to the course.

Materials

• The materials section was often missing information, or some of the relevant information was included in the procedure section.
• The materials section should include details of what was used for your study. The main two materials being the videos (names and lengths, which can be found on the discussion forum) and your conceptual and operational definitions.

Procedure

• This section should be written clear and concisely, but with enough detail that the study could be replicated from your procedure.
• The cut-offs used (e.g. +/- 1) to calculate inter-rater reliability should be included in the past, many students have not mention the cut-off anywhere throughout their work. If different cut-offs are being used, please provide justification (e.g., high frequency of behaviours).

Reflection

• Important to remember to put a short reflection after the procedure, that references your understanding of the importance of group work and interpersonal skills within that, in the context of trait theory (e.g., identifying different traits from group members based on their contribution to the group and offering examples of their behaviour to back up your knowledge of the trait [i.e., group member 3 appeared to be higher on extraversion, as they often lead conversations and spoke up on tasks]).

Results

• Results should be presented clear and concisely, without including unnecessary information.
• In this section, you need to tell the reader whether your hypothesis was supported and state which captain scored higher, based on the group means for each behaviour.
• Give a qualitative word for IRR scores (e.g., poor, moderate, or good).
• Many students restated statistics (e.g., means, SDs, and IRR) in-text. This is unnecessary and impairs the clarity of presentation. You should simply refer your reader to the tables.
• Tables needed to include raw scores, means, SDS, and IRR.
• The write up for the results: here an example of a good and concise write up
  • Hypothesis testing
    Results indicated that Captain Kirk (see Table 1 for Mean and SD) scored higher on behaviours 1 and 2, but not behaviour 3, compared to captain Piccard (see table 2 for Mean and SD), suggesting Kirk is higher in the trait of XXX. This refuted/supported the hypothesis.
  • Reliability
    For Captain Kirk, the results demonstrated poor/moderate/good IRR for behaviours 1 and 2, but poor/good/moderate IRR for behaviour 3 (see Table 1 for IRR scores). For Captain Piccard, IRR was poor/moderate/good for all three behaviours (see Table 2 for IRR scores).
  • Then tables come after this write up.
• In some cases IRR were not calculated correctly. When working out IRR you should count the number of group members who scored within +/-1 of your scores. Then divide this by the number of group members, excluding yourself. For example, two out of five group members scored within +/-1 of you, so 2/5 = 0.4

Discussion

• Inaccurate conclusions made about what the IRR scores meant or how they were interpreted. Students often made the mistake of giving somewhat random explanations for the results, rather than presenting them in the context of the previous literature that they had discussed in their introductions. E.g., in the intro the 4 moderators were mentioned, so in the discussion, high IRR score could be an indicator of a good trait or good information or if the trait was identified in the intro as being a more difficult trait to observe and someone got high IRR scores, then it might have been the good target or good judge that played more of a role. Similarly, if the IRR scores were low, then using these factors brought up in the intro to explain what they meant in the broader scheme of things was important (e.g., perhaps it was not a good trait, perhaps the indicators were not concrete enough, perhaps there wasnt enough good information etc).
• Limitations often left out (with the two main ones ignored that there was little time dedicated to creating the definitions and that the environments for data collection were not controlled) Common statement was that if there were more researchers it would increase IRR but this isnt the case. If the IRR scores are low, this indicates that they arent concrete enough so adding more researchers into the mix, but keeping the same indicators would actually likely end in further variability.

Quality of written work (including APA 6th or 7th style, structure, grammar, subheadings)

• Numbers that are ten or below should be written out in words (e.g., one, two, three), rather than being written in there numerical value in-text (e.g., 1, 2, 3). The exception is when referring to tables, or for statistics; however, when writing there were five participants in the group this should be written out in words.
• Paragraph structure be wary of long paragraphs that address multiple topics. Paragraphs should address one topic. Linking sentences between paragraphs also improves flow.
• Heading were often not in APA formatting.
• APA style requires work to be written in 12 point font, Times New Roman, with double line spacing.
• An example of an APA table has been included below:

Table 1

Table label

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