All psychological investigations are written in a common format whether they are GCSE, A-level, degree level or professional research.  You may also find similarities with other subjects such as Biology. 

Psychologists usually publish their research in Journals such as The British Journal of Psychology.  Their main purposes are to make other interested parties aware of their methods and findings and crucially to provide sufficient detail to allow for replication.  It is essential that others can check the reliability and validity of the methods and results.  Typically a published article has the following structure.  I shall consider each aspect in turn and explain its contents and format.

TITLE

The title should be concise yet clear enough to give the reader an idea of the investigation's central concerns.  'Memory study' would be too vague whereas 'Testing the Passive Decay Theory of Forgetting from Short-Term Memory using a task similar to that employed by Peterson and Peterson (1959)' would be for too long.  Best also avoid titles which start 'An investigation into...' or 'A study of...'.

General Points

When writing up a report try to be concise yet precise.  Include everything relevant, but do not take 8 pages to describe something that could be explained in a paragraph or two.  Remember that your investigation should have enough information in it for someone else [maybe a few years later] to replicate it exactly, so you need to include sufficient detail.

Write in the third person passive.  In other words do not say 'The participants will be...' say 'The participants were...'.

Write it up as if you were describing someone else's experiment that took place last week, and you were not actually there.  Do not say 'our experiment...', 'I calculated...' or 'we noted...' but say 'the experiment...', 'it was calculated...' or 'it was noted...'.

Include page numbers at the foot of each page.

Do not forget to report ethical aspects of a study where appropriate, such as consent, right of withdrawal, confidentiality and protection from harm, etc.

Your report must be written in your own words.  If you present a report which contains material either copied from books, handouts or other student's work, this is PLAGIARISM and would make you no better than Alastair Campbell!

Now let’s turn to the write up itself: