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OK so let's create an outline for your methods section. And the first step of creating an outline is

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always to find out: what are the headings? What things do we need to include and for what things do you

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need to find bullet points for?

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So for example for the introduction section we had the headings: importance, literature review, and your

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research.

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So now the question is what headings do we need to use for the method section? And what the headings

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are will of course heavily depend on your research.

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So I want to give you two advices that can help you to find out what the headings for your methods section

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could be.

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First of all check the guidelines of your target journal.

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Very often your target journal will already be specialized for a certain type of research and they may

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have guidelines on what sections you need to include and then you can just use their headings to create

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your outline.

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Another thing you can do is to check research articles with similar research and ideally research articles

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that are published in your target journal. And then once you know what needs to be included for your

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particular research,

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so once you know the headings, you can start putting bullet points under each of these headings.

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Okay so there are various types of research and I cannot go through all of them so I'm gonna go through

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one type of research that I'm very familiar with and that I think will be applicable to many people,

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which is empirical research with human participants. And even then there can be a lot of differences

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from research to research

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but the most common subsections that you find in the method section are: first "participants" - who took

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part? "Design" - what groups did you use?

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What conditions did you have? "Materials" -

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What did you use to conduct your study? The "procedure" - What happened and in which order? And sometimes

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you also see a section on "data analysis". And these subsections could be the headings of your outline.

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So let's zoom into each of these. So your outline could start with a participant's heading. And things

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you could list under that heading would be the sample size and also the number of male and female participants,

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the mean and standard deviation of the age of the participants, how the participants were compensated,

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whether they received course credit or payment or whatsoever, and every other information that is relevant

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such as for example education or clinical conditions.

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For example if you conducted a study on depression then it can make sense to mention whether your

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participants were depressed.

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Okay then the next heading could be "design". And things you could list here are the between-subject factors

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that you have.

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So basically the groups you divided participants into. The within-subjects factors that you have. For

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example, if you measured depression at the beginning of the treatment and the end of the treatment then

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you could have the within subject-factor "time": whether you're measuring before or after the treatment.

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And of course your dependent variable. The next heading could be the materials.

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So these are all the things that you used to conduct your studies such as for example technical instruments.

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So for example if you used an MRI scanner then you would want to describe the MRI scanner. Or it could

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be questionnaires.

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And remember that if you have extensive questionnaires or generally extensive information then you can

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add that in an appendix. Images that you showed to participants or that are relevant in some way. Sounds

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that you showed to your participants.

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It can even be something like smells.

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It really depends on what your study is.

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For example, if you're investigating the brain areas involved in smelling then you may need to describe

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the smells that you used.

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So anything that you used in your study gets included here.

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Then, the next heading could be the "procedure" and the procedure is basically a description of what happened

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and in which order.

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So for example how many parts or phases did your study have?

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Did you for example have a training phase?

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What different phases Did you have in your study?

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You can also mention whether you randomized things. For example, whether you randomly divided people

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into groups or conditions or whether you counterbalanced the order of something.

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So everything that is about "what happened when?" belongs into the procedure. And then another heading could

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be data analysis although that depends a little bit. If you used something really really simple such as

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for example a t test then you don't really need to explain that. You can go straight to the results and

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just say in one sentence that you used a t test. But if you used something more unconventional or more

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complicated then you can describe that in the method section under a data analysis heading.

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So here you describe how you analyzed the data.

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What were the steps and what did you do in each step?

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Everything that is relevant to understanding how you analyzed the data.

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Okay if you want to see an example you can download the "methods outline and writing template". On the

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first page, you will see a sample of an outline.

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So this is a sample for the fictional depression paper that we discussed earlier.

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And here we can see that this study had 43 participants of which 12 were male and the participants were

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patients of the psychiatric clinic X and they were diagnosed with a major depression and so on and

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so on. So if you want to see an example then you can have a look there and in the next lecture I will

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show you how you can turn that into text.

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I see in the next lecture.