General Suggestions for the Method Section• The general goals of the Method section are threefold:

• To lay out your methods so that readers can understand them• To describe your methods in sufficient detail so that they can be

replicated by other researchers• To demonstrate that you have addressed relevant threats to internal

and external validity• Go here and here for examples of complete methods sections.

Not every category described on the next several slides is present. Journals allow flexibility in what headings and subheadings you use as long as the information is present and sufficiently complete for readers to understand what you did and how you did it. Some Method sections are very short, others are more extended

• To obtain a model for how to write your Method section, consult an article from your literature review list of references that is most like the study you propose to do and see how they wrote their Method section

• Your method section should probably be about one-three pages long, depending on the complexity of your study

Writing the Method Section• In writing up your method section, you probably will want to

put everything in the past tense, as if you had already done the study. Then when it comes time at the end of the semester to put all the sections together, you won’t have to change it from future to past tense

• Following are some of the categories that are conventionally found in a Method section. Not all of them will apply to your study• Design• Subjects• Materials

• Apparatus• Measures or

• Independent Variables• Dependent Variables

• Procedures• Development of Coding Scheme

Design• Briefly describe the study design, particularly if it is an

experiment, and the independent and dependent variables. • For example, you might say that the study was a single

factor between-subjects design examining the impact of job category classification (custodial, clerical, and managerial) on attitudes towards job outsourcing by American businesses

• Another example would be: the study was a two-factor repeated measures design examining the impact of two independent variables, number of days of instruction (1, 2, 3) and number of practices per day (1, 5, 10) on student learning of SPSS data entry

Design, cont’d• For a correlational study, you might say: “The study

was a cross-sectional analysis of the strength of association between beliefs about nuclear proliferation and attitudes toward global warming.” Presumably you are not proposing any particular causal ordering so it doesn’t matter what order you put them in

• For a content analytic study, you might say: “This study examined gender display in online personal advertisements, using a new content-analytic scheme based on gender-stereotypic categories of facial gesture and posture present in advertisers’ photographs”

Participants (cases or units of analysis)• If data are collected from human subjects, state the number

of participants, how they were recruited, and provide any available information about their demographic characteristics (age range, mean age, ethnicity, gender, etc)

• Indicate if they were randomly sampled, and if so, describe your sampling frame, if possible (for example, respondents were a randomly drawn sample of all Presbyterian choir directors in the greater Pasadena area (and define that). Describe briefly how you compiled your sampling frame if applicable. Indicate what your response rate was

• If you did an experiment, indicate if participants were randomly assigned to levels of the independent variable

• If they were compensated for participation, describe the type of compensation provided (extra class credit, gift certificate, etc.)

Participants (cases or units of analysis), cont’d• When submitting for publication or conference paper,

leave out any specific mention of the location of recruitment (for example, say “a large private Western university” instead of University of Southern California)

• If your data are collected from human subjects in the form of information from their public or posted self-representations (photographs, videos, messages on SNS, blogs, IM utterances, etc.) provide what information you have about the characteristics that define this subject population and indicate how you selected them, including a sampling frame if you have one

Materials: Apparatus• Apparatus: if you used any sort of physical

device as part of your study, such as laboratory equipment, you can report it under this heading • For example, “respondents’ hand movements

were captured with a Flock of Birds hand tracker.” If you recorded participants’ speech for later transcription and coding, you can report the technical details under this heading such as AV apparatus

Materials: Independent Variables• Under this heading you should provide a full account

of any manipulations that you conducted during the study. For example suppose you were doing a study about the impact of Interviewer Status on interviewee self-disclosure, where you varied the status of the interviewer by using variations in attire. It would be appropriate in such an instance, for example, to include figures in which you show still photos of the “confederate” in each of the three dress conditions (high, medium, and low status).

• Also here you can include a description of any non-manipulated factors that were treated as independent variables with several “levels,” such as ethnicity or marital status

Materials: Independent Variables, cont’d

• Report the categories of the independent variable(s) you used and how you determined how people should be assigned to categories • For example, how did you decide if a prospective

subject was Hispanic? (self-report; member of some existing group known to have Hispanic members? Language in which the respondent requested to complete the questionnaire/interview?)

• If you use measures in more than one language be sure to describe your translation procedures including backtranslation if any

Materials: Independent Variables, cont’d• Also under the heading Independent Variables you should

include descriptions of any scales or surveys which you used in a correlational design as an independent variable (i.e., you are arguing that it is causally prior), including questionnaires that were used to classify people into levels of the independent variable. Report previously established alpha reliability and validity coefficients where available. Go here for quick and easy reliability analysis-if you do your own you will report this in the Results section rather than in Method

• Also under this heading list and describe any measures that you took to exclude alternative explanations, such as testing people for covariates. If you thought that demographic characteristics such as age might partially explain variation in your dependent variable, loneliness, then you may have collected demographic data on your subjects to use as a covariate, as we did with the “educational attainment” variable earlier in the semester

Materials: Dependent Measures• Under this heading you would provide details about how you

measured the variables you were treating as dependent variables (effects, outcomes) in your study

• Suppose for example that “loneliness” was your dependent measure. Tell the reader if you measured it using the UCLA Loneliness scale, and if so with which version (short, 21-item) and which languages; if you measured loneliness by self-reports of number of friends or frequency of social interaction; if you used a diary method, or some other procedure. Refer the reader to an Appendix where they will find copies of the items, unless it is a very well-known scale. Provide a brief reference to the place where you found the scale, preferably the original source, and list that source in your references. (this also applies to measures of independent variables)

• If you used Likert-type items (strongly agree to strongly disagree) or semantic differential scales, you can say so and then just provide a table of the statements (“I often feel lonely”) or bipolar adjectives that you used (“happy/sad”, etc.)

• If you used interviews to obtain data, describe the interview setting and protocol.

Materials: Dependent Variables, cont’d• For scales like Likert-type or semantic differential indicate how

many “steps” were used (5, 7, etc). Where possible, report the known validity and reliability of measure, any procedures that you undertook to establish these can be reported under Results • You can say, for example, “Loneliness was measured with

the 21-item version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale, which has a published validity coefficient of .xx with measures X and Y and a known reliability of .xx. Then in your Results section you can say “Reliability of the UCLA Loneliness Scale obtained in the present study was high (alpha = .90)”

• Make it clear which measures are your independent variables, dependent variables, and which ones you measured because you thought they were potential confounding variables or covariates

Materials, cont’d

• Generic “Measures” or “Variables” category• You would use this category to describe

all of your measures as above if you were not treating them as IVs and DVs but simply doing a cross-sectional analysis and you were not suggesting a causal order. Then you would eliminate the separate IV and DV sections

Procedures• Describe in chronological order the procedures used• For a content analysis, describe your procedures for

capturing or logging the data and transcribing it • Describe your procedures for “unitizing” it (segmenting

audio, video, or text into “units” such as time units, conversational units like the turn or utterance, frames, etc) for applying your coding scheme and report the unitizing reliability (Guetzkow’s U)

• For an experiment, describe exactly what happened from the time they were chosen for the experiment to the time that they left the experiment• How they were contacted• The circumstances under which they arrived at the

testing location • How informed consent was obtained if applicable

Procedures, cont’d• Also include in the Procedures section

• What instructions were given to subjects (sometimes you might want to include these, in a block quote, italicized)

• How the manipulations if any were introduced • How questionnaires were organized and administered (for

example, did you rotate any of the items, or any of the questions in terms of order or direction of the scales to reduce order effects)

• Any physical steps you took to maintain control, such as • Ruling out extraneous variables (for example, in a learning

experiment excluding subjects who upon reporting to the test site seemed not to be able to understand the consent form and/or comprehend directions

• Excluding or accommodating subjects who were unable to read• Excluding cases of posted messages from your corpus of

messages to analyze because they appeared to be spam or were likely to be fictitious or designed to attract “flames”

• Your debriefing procedures; how you gave and received post-study information from the subjects

Procedures, Coding Scheme Development• If you did a content analytic study you will want under

Procedures to include a section on “Development of the Coding Scheme”

• Go here for an exemplary Method section (p. 49) describing the development, refinement, and establishment of inter-coder reliability of a new coding scheme• This is a model of how to develop a coding scheme. If the

hyperlink doesn’t work (you need to be browsing from a .usc domain), the reference is: Golish, T. D. (2003) Stepfamily Communication Strengths: Understanding the Ties That Bind, Human Communication Research, 29, 41-80. We read this for Larry’s class.

• Presumably you will have explained how you obtained, transcribed and unitized your data corpus earlier under Subjects and Procedures

Procedures, Coding Scheme Development, cont’d• In the “Development of the Coding Scheme” you

should describe • How you immersed yourself in a subset of the data

corpus and relevant literature to come up with a preliminary set of categories,

• How you tested those categories against as yet unexamined samples, and refined your categories through an iterative process.

• How you created a coding manual for your coders. • Your training process for coders, how you determined

coder reliability, and how inconsistencies were resolved (see this excellent review article)

• What your obtained values of kappa (the inter-coder reliability coefficient) were; go here for quick and easy kappa computation