psychology research paper assignment

What this handout is about

This handout discusses some of the common writing assignments in psychology courses, and it presents strategies for completing them. The handout also provides general tips for writing psychology papers and for reducing bias in your writing.

What is psychology?

Psychology, one of the behavioral sciences, is the scientific study of observable behaviors, like sleeping, and abstract mental processes, such as dreaming. Psychologists study, explain, and predict behaviors. Because of the complexity of human behaviors, researchers use a variety of methods and approaches.  They ask questions about behaviors and answer them using systematic methods. For example, to understand why female students tend to perform better in school than their male classmates, psychologists have examined whether parents, teachers, schools, and society behave in ways that support the educational outcomes of female students to a greater extent than those of males.

Writing in psychology

Writing in psychology is similar to other forms of scientific writing in that organization, clarity, and concision are important.  The Psychology Department at UNC has a strong research emphasis, so many of your assignments will focus on synthesizing and critically evaluating research, connecting your course material with current research literature, and designing and carrying out your own studies.

Common assignments

Reaction papers.

These assignments ask you to react to a scholarly journal article.  Instructors use reaction papers to teach students to critically evaluate research and to synthesize current research with course material.  Reaction papers typically include a brief summary of the article, including prior research, hypotheses, research method, main results, and conclusions. The next step is your critical reaction. You might critique the study, identify unresolved issues, suggest future research, or reflect on the study’s implications.  Some instructors may want you to connect the material you are learning in class with the article’s theories, methodology, and findings. Remember, reaction papers require more than a simple summary of what you have read.

To successfully complete this assignment, you should carefully read the article. Go beyond highlighting important facts and interesting findings. Ask yourself questions as you read: What are the researchers’ assumptions? How does the article contribute to the field? Are the findings generalizable, and to whom?  Are the conclusions valid and based on the results?  It is important to pay attention to the graphs and tables because they can help you better assess the researchers’ claims.

Your instructor may give you a list of articles to choose from, or you may need to find your own.  The American Psychological Association (APA) PsycINFO database is the most comprehensive collection of psychology research; it is an excellent resource for finding journal articles.  You can access PsycINFO from the E-research tab on the Library’s webpage.   Here are the most common types of articles you will find:

• Empirical studies test hypotheses by gathering and analyzing data. Empirical articles are organized into distinct sections based on stages in the research process: introduction, method, results, and discussion.
• Literature reviews synthesize previously published material on a topic.  The authors define or clarify the problem, summarize research findings, identify gaps/inconsistencies in the research, and make suggestions for future work. Meta-analyses, in which the authors use quantitative procedures to combine the results of multiple studies, fall into this category.
• Theoretical articles trace the development of a specific theory to expand or refine it, or they present a new theory.  Theoretical articles and literature reviews are organized similarly, but empirical information is included in theoretical articles only when it is used to support the theoretical issue.

You may also find methodological articles, case studies, brief reports, and commentary on previously published material. Check with your instructor to determine which articles are appropriate.

Research papers

This assignment involves using published research to provide an overview of and argument about a topic.  Simply summarizing the information you read is not enough. Instead, carefully synthesize the information to support your argument. Only discuss the parts of the studies that are relevant to your argument or topic.  Headings and subheadings can help guide readers through a long research paper. Our handout on literature reviews may help you organize your research literature.

Choose a topic that is appropriate to the length of the assignment and for which you can find adequate sources. For example, “self-esteem” might be too broad for a 10- page paper, but it may be difficult to find enough articles on “the effects of private school education on female African American children’s self-esteem.” A paper in which you focus on the more general topic of “the effects of school transitions on adolescents’ self-esteem,” however, might work well for the assignment.

Designing your own study/research proposal

You may have the opportunity to design and conduct your own research study or write about the design for one in the form of a research proposal. A good approach is to model your paper on articles you’ve read for class. Here is a general overview of the information that should be included in each section of a research study or proposal:

• Introduction: The introduction conveys a clear understanding of what will be done and why. Present the problem, address its significance, and describe your research strategy. Also discuss the theories that guide the research, previous research that has been conducted, and how your study builds on this literature. Set forth the hypotheses and objectives of the study.
• Methods:   This section describes the procedures used to answer your research questions and provides an overview of the analyses that you conducted. For a research proposal, address the procedures that will be used to collect and analyze your data. Do not use the passive voice in this section. For example, it is better to say, “We randomly assigned patients to a treatment group and monitored their progress,” instead of “Patients were randomly assigned to a treatment group and their progress was monitored.” It is acceptable to use “I” or “we,” instead of the third person, when describing your procedures. See the section on reducing bias in language for more tips on writing this section and for discussing the study’s participants.
• Results: This section presents the findings that answer your research questions. Include all data, even if they do not support your hypotheses.  If you are presenting statistical results, your instructor will probably expect you to follow the style recommendations of the American Psychological Association. You can also consult our handout on figures and charts . Note that research proposals will not include a results section, but your instructor might expect you to hypothesize about expected results.
• Discussion: Use this section to address the limitations of your study as well as the practical and/or theoretical implications of the results. You should contextualize and support your conclusions by noting how your results compare to the work of others. You can also discuss questions that emerged and call for future research. A research proposal will not include a discussion section.  But you can include a short section that addresses the proposed study’s contribution to the literature on the topic.

Other writing assignments

For some assignments, you may be asked to engage personally with the course material. For example, you might provide personal examples to evaluate a theory in a reflection paper.  It is appropriate to share personal experiences for this assignment, but be mindful of your audience and provide only relevant and appropriate details.

Writing tips for psychology papers

Psychology is a behavioral science, and writing in psychology is similar to writing in the hard sciences.  See our handout on writing in the sciences .  The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association provides an extensive discussion on how to write for the discipline.  The Manual also gives the rules for psychology’s citation style, called APA. The Library’s citation tutorial will also introduce you to the APA style.

Suggestions for achieving precision and clarity in your writing

• Jargon: Technical vocabulary that is not essential to understanding your ideas can confuse readers. Similarly, refrain from using euphemistic phrases instead of clearer terms.  Use “handicapped” instead of “handi-capable,” and “poverty” instead of “monetarily felt scarcity,” for example.
• Anthropomorphism: Anthropomorphism occurs when human characteristics are attributed to animals or inanimate entities.  Anthropomorphism can make your writing awkward.  Some examples include: “The experiment attempted to demonstrate…,” and “The tables compare…”  Reword such sentences so that a person performs the action: “The experimenter attempted to demonstrate…”  The verbs “show” or “indicate” can also be used: “The tables show…”
• Verb tenses: Select verb tenses carefully. Use the past tense when expressing actions or conditions that occurred at a specific time in the past, when discussing other people’s work, and when reporting results.  Use the present perfect tense to express past actions or conditions that did not occur at a specific time, or to describe an action beginning in the past and continuing in the present.
• Pronoun agreement: Be consistent within and across sentences with pronouns that refer to a noun introduced earlier (antecedent). A common error is a construction such as “Each child responded to questions about their favorite toys.” The sentence should have either a plural subject (children) or a singular pronoun (his or her). Vague pronouns, such as “this” or “that,” without a clear antecedent can confuse readers: “This shows that girls are more likely than boys …” could be rewritten as “These results show that girls are more likely than boys…”
• Avoid figurative language and superlatives: Scientific writing should be as concise and specific as possible.  Emotional language and superlatives, such as “very,” “highly,” “astonishingly,” “extremely,” “quite,” and even “exactly,” are imprecise or unnecessary. A line that is “exactly 100 centimeters” is, simply, 100 centimeters.
• Avoid colloquial expressions and informal language: Use “children” rather than “kids;” “many” rather than “a lot;” “acquire” rather than “get;” “prepare for” rather than “get ready;” etc.

Reducing bias in language

Your writing should show respect for research participants and readers, so it is important to choose language that is clear, accurate, and unbiased.  The APA sets forth guidelines for reducing bias in language: acknowledge participation, describe individuals at the appropriate level of specificity, and be sensitive to labels. Here are some specific examples of how to reduce bias in your language:

• Acknowledge participation: Use the active voice to acknowledge the subjects’ participation. It is preferable to say, “The students completed the surveys,” instead of “The experimenters administered surveys to the students.”  This is especially important when writing about participants in the methods section of a research study.
• Gender: It is inaccurate to use the term “men” when referring to groups composed of multiple genders. See our handout on gender-inclusive language for tips on writing appropriately about gender.
• Race/ethnicity: Be specific, consistent, and sensitive with terms for racial and ethnic groups. If the study participants are Chinese Americans, for instance, don’t refer to them as Asian Americans. Some ethnic designations are outdated or have negative connotations. Use terms that the individuals or groups prefer.
• Clinical terms: Broad clinical terms can be unclear. For example, if you mention “at risk” in your paper, be sure to specify the risk—“at risk for school failure.”  The same principle applies to psychological disorders. For instance, “borderline personality disorder” is more precise than “borderline.”
• Labels: Do not equate people with their physical or mental conditions or categorize people broadly as objects. For example, adjectival forms like “older adults” are preferable to labels such as “the elderly” or “the schizophrenics.” Another option is to mention the person first, followed by a descriptive phrase— “people diagnosed with schizophrenia.”  Be careful using the label “normal,” as it may imply that others are abnormal.
• Other ways to reduce bias: Consistently presenting information about the socially dominant group first can promote bias. Make sure that you don’t always begin with men followed by other genders when writing about gender, or whites followed by minorities when discussing race and ethnicity. Mention differences only when they are relevant and necessary to understanding the study. For example, it may not be important to indicate the sexual orientation of participants in a study about a drug treatment program’s effectiveness. Sexual orientation may be important to mention, however, when studying bullying among high school students.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

American Psychological Association. n.d. “Frequently Asked Questions About APA Style®.” APA Style. Accessed June 24, 2019. https://apastyle.apa.org/learn/faqs/index .

American Psychological Association. 2010. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association . 6th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Landrum, Eric. 2008. Undergraduate Writing in Psychology: Learning to Tell the Scientific Story . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Selecting a Topic

It may seem easy to choose a topic for a research paper, but it can actually be difficult sometimes. In fact, determining a good, solid research question can be one of the hardest parts of writing a strong research paper.

If you are able to choose your topic, find a topic that interests you. If your topic is assigned, try thinking about an aspect of that topic you find most interesting. You’ll be spending a great deal of time working on this paper. Make sure that it’s about something that you really are interested in learning to understand very well.

Keep in mind that your final topic and research question won’t simply come to you by thinking about it. You need to get out there and start digging—through books, through encyclopedias, and through internet sites. Pick a general topic that attracts you, and then roll up your sleeves and start reading. The narrowed topic and research question will only come to you as you wrestle with the material related to that topic.

Now, here’s one of the keys to doing a research paper for a college course. Don’t try to write the history of everything about your topic. Instead, find one small intriguing aspect of your topic and focus on that. A good research paper is not a vast, general history or overview of everything that covers a great deal of information in a very superficial manner. It’s narrowed and focused and goes deep into a limited area of a topic.

By the time you are finished researching and writing, you have become something of an expert on that very narrow topic. Let’s take an example and walk you through the process.

Narrowing Process

Once you have decided what you want to write about, you need to stop and consider if you have chosen a feasible topic that meets the assignment’s purpose.  If you have chosen a very large topic for a research paper assignment, you need to create a feasible focus that’s researchable.

The example we’ll use to demonstrate a narrowing process will be World War II. Suppose you want to write your research paper on World War II.

The material written on World War II has filled whole libraries, so you obviously won’t be able to complete a research paper on all of WWII in just six weeks.

First-Level Narrowing

The first question to ask yourself is: “What aspect of WWII am I interested in understanding better?”

• Strategies?
• Major characters?
• Specific battles?

Let’s say you want to understand more about WWII weapons. OK, what types of weapons were used in WWII?

Second-Level Narrowing

You consult a couple of research articles on WWII weapons and discover that the general categories of weapons at that time were tanks, artillery, and firearms.

Each of these categories includes several dozen to several hundred specific weapons.

Can you cover all of these in one paper? Sure, if you write a sentence on each one. But then you’re not really writing a research paper; you’re writing a list. You need to go deep, not wide.

Third-Level Narrowing

You continue to survey general information sources on WWII weapons. You read a little bit on each of the categories listed in the Second-Level Narrowing section and decide that the one you are most interested in is artillery. OK, but what kind?

• Surface-to-air missiles (SAMS)?
• Machine guns?
• Anti-aircraft guns (Flaks)?

As you continue to poke around, you learn that air defense tactics and the various models of anti-aircraft guns were extremely critical in various battles, so you decide to focus on that.

Fourth-Level Narrowing

Look at your previous terminology: “critical in various battles.” Do you think you’ll be able to do a paper on the role of anti-aircraft guns in all battles of WWII? No, you won’t. So the next logical step is to look at research articles and websites to determine what were some of the major battles of WWII where the use of anti-aircraft guns were critical.

You remember hearing something about “the Blitz” of London, so you look that up and decide to focus on the role of anti-aircraft guns in defending London from German planes.

Narrowing Your Topic

No matter what your topic is, you can follow the same four-level process in narrowing your topic and developing your research question.

Try following these steps once you have settled on a general topic:

• How many different aspects of this topic am I able to list? You may want to consult research articles or web pages to get you started here if you are stuck. Write down the list.
• Of those aspects listed above, which am I most interested in learning more about? Write down one or two and follow steps 3 and 4 for each one. You may find that you come up with more than one interesting research question. Then you’ll need to choose!
• Of the aspect that most interests me, what elements of it am I able to find information about in research articles or on a web page? (Notice that you may need to repeat this step more than once to really get down to a workable limited focus.) Make a list.
• What relationships between these elements are suggested by combining them using what, when, where, why, or how words? [1]

The following video [2] [3:42] describes how to narrow down a research topic to be more manageable and specific.

Want to learn more?

Check out these helpful resources to continue to learn more about selecting a topic and narrowing your focus:

• Narrowing a Topic

This page provides helpful tips and recommendations for narrowing your topic so that it becomes manageable.  The page outlines the necessary steps for narrowing your topic, as well as provides an interactive activity allowing you to practice identifying narrow topics.  Additionally, this page describes the importance of narrowing your topic.  The page concludes with a detailed example of an undergraduate student narrowing down her topic for a research paper.

• Webpage : Great Psychology Research Paper Topics

This link provides a long list of psychology categories, such as social, clinical, experimental, criminal, cultural, etc., with each category hyper-linked to specific research topic ideas.  This is a great place to start if you are having a hard time selecting a topic.

• Adapted from Excelsior Online Writing Lab (OWL). (2022). Narrowing & developing. Retrieved from owl.excelsior.edu/research/narrowing-and-developing/. Licensed under CC- BY 4.0. ↵
• PfaulLibrary. (2012, Sept. 19). Choosing a manageable research topic. [Video File]. Streaming Service. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/BDuqfJQhFeM. Licensed under CC-BY. ↵

PSY-250 Research Paper Guidelines and Resources Copyright © by David Adams. All Rights Reserved.

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PSY101 General Research: Sample Papers

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How to Find Psychology Sources for Research Papers

Tips for finding reputable experts

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

So now that you've chosen a topic for your research paper, it's time to find trustworthy, verifiable psychology sources to guide your explorations and support your claims—not always an easy or straightforward task. Follow these steps to find reputable psychological sources.

1. Find Basic Background Information

At this stage, you're mostly looking for introductory information, but many sources contain information on the sources they used.

For example, when reading any study or evaluation, note the sources cited in these readings so you can look into them further during the next phase of the research process.

Finding sources often involves following a trail of leads, starting with general information and drilling down to more specific ones.

2. Use Your Library

The next step is to visit your library in person or online. The basic background research from the previous step should have yielded hints on what to look for. If you get stuck, ask a librarian for assistance.

When you've located some books on your topic, browse through the references listed in each. Think of the bibliography in each book as a guide to possible sources.

Finding a Good Research Topic

The ideal research topic is neither too broad nor too narrow: Too general a topic, and you'll probably be overwhelmed by too much information—but too specific means too little information.

For example, " substance use disorder " is too wide a topic to fully cover in a limited number of pages. To narrow it down, think of specific questions people might have, such as "How does drug use affect the health and well-being of college students ?" Often, this yields a topic to delve into fully.

3. Use Online Databases to Access Periodicals

PsycINFO, PsycNET, EBSCOhostOnline, and other relevant databases are typically available through your library or educational institution. If you're not sure how to access them or perform a search, seek assistance from a librarian.

4. Search for Online Sources

Check with your instructor about acceptable or preferred kinds of online sources. These might take the form of forums, blogs, informational websites, or articles from journals, newspapers, and magazines.

Some publishers offer free access to full-text articles .

5. Critically Evaluate Each Source

Carefully investigate each source to determine if it's credible and appropriate for your paper. Note the authors, publisher, sponsors, and age of the information,

6. Create a Working Bibliography

Even if your instructor doesn't require a bibliography, It can be a very helpful tool. A bibliography is a list of all the sources you might use in your paper. For your personal use, briefly annotate each entry in your list with a description. As you outline your paper, refer back to your working bibliography for sources that back your arguments, analysis, and claims.

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A Few More Tips for Finding Psychology Sources

In general:

• Work from the broad to the specific—from general resources down to more specific references such as journal articles .
• Keep track of where you got your information. Maintain careful notes or a working bibliography so you can cite each source in your paper properly.
• Don't be afraid to ask a librarian for help. Many libraries offer assistance through social media, email, and chat, but you can call if you feel most comfortable doing so.

 A Word From Verywell

Although finding psychology sources for your papers can be challenging, breaking the process down into steps can make it a lot less daunting. Most importantly, don't be afraid to ask your instructor or library staff for help—it's what they do.

American Psychological Association.  Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association  (7th ed.). Washington DC: The American Psychological Association; 2019.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."