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All right it's time to move to the methods section and in this lecture I'm gonna give you an overview

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of what's gonna happen in this section.

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But first of all, I want to say congratulations because if you already finished your introduction section

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then you have finished the part of the research paper that most people find the most difficult.

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Including myself!

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All right.

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With that said, what are the goals of the method section?

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And essentially the goal is simply to describe what you did to get an answer to your research question.

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So if you did an empirical study that would be describing that study. Or if you did computer simulations

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then that would be describing these computer simulations.

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Whatever you did to answer your research question,

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tell us about it in the method section.

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Now the big question is: what details do you need to include and what details can you omit? And the general

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rule is that other researchers should be able to replicate your research based on the information in

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the methods section.

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So for example: if another researcher wants to replicate your research, does it matter that your participants

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were sitting on a wooden chair.

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Probably not.

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And does it matter that the participants saw a blue dot on the screen.

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Well maybe. Depends on your research and your research question.

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So what you need to include here is a little bit of a judgment call and my recommendation is that if

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you're in doubt of some detail then simply include it.

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And if you face the problem that you have extensive amounts of information... Say, for example, that you

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did a questionnaire with 200 questions then you can include THAT information,

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so the two hundred questions, in an appendix and just refer to that in the method section.

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Okay so this is what a method section is and how it generally works.

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Now let's move to the outline I see in the next lecture.