Читать книгу Effective Writing in Psychology - Bernard C. Beins - Страница 29

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.