This recorded lecture will cover some of the main features of writing an introduction for a research psychological research papers, mental health journals proposal. So what’s the purpose of an introduction. Well it’s kind of like a literature review if you’ve ever done a literature review which is reviewing a bunch of article psychological research papers, mental health journalss and drawing some conclusions from them but it has a central focus. You’re trying to make your case as to why your hypothesis is a great hypothesis and why this study should be done and be done in the way that you’re proposing that it should be done so you introduce the scope and the focus of your specific topic and your reader should know right away. Exactly what your papers about. Not all about one of your topics and all about another one of the topics. But that you’re seeing these two topics as related. It outlines your reasons for the study in terms of arguments and evidence which is taking past findings and organizing them into arguments. So you have themes of support for your hypothesis. A literature review is part of your introduction. And it’s a broad to narrow look at the main areas of your study so you start out very broad about the scope and focus of your specific topic and you get more specific as you bring in related research psychological research papers, mental health journals organized into the themes of arguments and it’s all focused on supporting the hypothesis. That’s your whole main point of your introduction is this is why this is a great hypothesis but in order to you can’t just say that it’s a great hypothesis. You really need to provide a lot of information for your reader. So they understand why it’s a great hypothesis. You also have a chance to include variable definitions and need to include variable definitions about anything that’s central and important to your hypothesis in terms of how you see it conceptually like a conceptual or construct definition and how you propose to measure it very briefly. The most common mistake in writing an introduction is to do an article psychological research papers, mental health journals by article psychological research papers, mental health journals summary so here’s an example. William Bowen and colleagues argued this Liam Downey’s study contradicted Bowen at all and then all about Liam Downey study and then Aniston study.
Here’s all about this and here’s all about this article psychological research papers, mental health journals. So here’s this article psychological research papers, mental health journals. Here’s this article psychological research papers, mental health journals. Here’s this article psychological research papers, mental health journals well. That is not good for a tired. Busy skeptical reader. So you always want to think about tired busy skeptical reader. Who wants you to put it together. In the way that you’re synthesizing it and why those are important within the context of larger themes another piece is that you don’t include specifics. About methods data or results you just include a very brief outline and variable definitions at the end of the introduction to give a thumbnail sketch of how what the study is being proposed but then you get very specific in your methods section to explain all of those details just to reiterate you want to avoid article psychological research papers, mental health journals by article psychological research papers, mental health journals summarization and another example which is less sophisticated than the one on the previous slide is the first article psychological research papers, mental health journals says this and then you explain what the first article psychological research papers, mental health journals says and the second article psychological research papers, mental health journals says this and the third article psychological research papers, mental health journals says this and that’s actually a natural tendency in terms of the way your preparation works where you’re reading something first and you take notes on it and that’s the first thing that you’ve read and you think it might be the most important and the next article psychological research papers, mental health journals that you summarize and so those are that’s a midway point to get to the more sophisticated level of organizing things into themes and arguments also avoid more than the most basic absolutely necessary background information. A way to look at this is to look at article psychological research papers, mental health journalss that you have and look at the purpose of different sentences in the introduction. And you’ll see that there are very few that are devoted to purely background information. Which is the opposite of a lot of papers that you write for college classes that are asked to report all about a certain topic so most of the sentences are reporting findings putting forth claims combined and claims and evidence into one sentence.
And that’s what most of the introduction is you only need a little bit of background information and can really boil down something that might be two paragraphs in an informational paper into one or two sentences to give the reader just enough background information for you to proceed your arguments in terms of framing arguments in your overall theme of your introduction. And what you’re arguing for is what are you trying to figure out from your study and here there’s an example using berry atolls article psychological research papers, mental health journals differences in self-reported disclosure of college experiences by first-generation college student status so Barry and other authors focused on students who were the first person in their family to go to college in their first year of college and their patterns of self disclosure. They were curious about do first-generation freshmen college. Students disclose less about college stress than non first-generation students and do first-generation students have a different support group than non first-generation students. These are overall research psychological research papers, mental health journals. Questions these are not hypotheses yep moving towards a more specific hypothesis to make a prediction a very specific prediction. These authors write that it was hypothesized that college freshmen would differ in their self-reported disclosure of their experiences depending on whether or not they were first-generation status and that you would see that across varying proximity of targets of disclosure and what that means is who was close to them. And what sort of category did they fall into friends. Family members professors and so on but getting really specific into the testable prediction very at all. And that means the at all means and other authors self-reported disclosure will be lower in first-generation freshmen than in non first-generation freshmen. And that is the prediction that they are doing before they go out to collect their data.
So where do you think berry at all went looking for findings that would support their hypothesis and that helped them build their hypothesis. Along the way so remember it’s a back and forth between what’s in the literature and your ideas about how things are it doesn’t work out very well if you force the literature into a pre-existing idea that doesn’t match the literature very well so here we have self disclosures obviously an area because they’re interested in how much freshman self disclosed. They’re interested in the college experience stress related to college attendance. They’re also interested in first-generation status and the type of stress and features that. Come with being the first person in your family to go to college in identifying what makes for good evidence for your argument. It’s not just the first article psychological research papers, mental health journalss that you find but you will find lots of different studies and you will read article psychological research papers, mental health journalss and identify a question central to the study and so one of the big underlying questions. Do people feel that. They can handle stressful life events better when they disclose emotional stress to others. That would be something you could find in the literature and would provide some support for the. Oh for the more specific prediction. So you want to look into sources that answer. The question validate your question idea or provide context or can help you adjust your question so when you have many studies and research psychological research papers, mental health journals findings indicating the same thing or even conflicting things in the same area. You give more credence to the argument. You’re making and showing that the study that you’re doing is worth the time money and effort to do so you’re highlighting past findings in light of how they contribute to your idea for a study so once you’ve found this evidence then you bring it together from as many sources as you can the more evidence for your argument the better and this is why as you build your paper you get more and more sources and then you have more and more of a foundation for supporting your hypothesis to give a visual example to this think about a hypothesis is a big heavy platform and it needs support.
So if there’s that one article psychological research papers, mental health journals that you thought was really cool and you really liked that would be like one brick supporting this huge heavy platform and that would not provide enough support for your hypothesis. What you really want are pillars of support for this big heavy platform and those are different article psychological research papers, mental health journalss. Now you wouldn’t be expected to have as many article psychological research papers, mental health journalss as there are bricks in these pillars but. I hope you get the idea that you’re organizing these are they share different themes and so ultimately these bricks would be maybe different colors. Each pillar would be different because those bricks would have something to do with each other. They would all be related to one theme so maybe in this paper one of the things would be stress and self disclosure and that would be one pillar that would provide partial support for the overall hypothesis. And then there would be something about first-generation college students and stress and for in so those would be make up the different pillars and then there would be lots of evidence within each pillar. Not just one finding from one article psychological research papers, mental health journals because you can see how that would not be very good support and the hypothesis. The big heavy platform would fall right down. So as you’re finding article psychological research papers, mental health journalss you’re summarizing them and understanding what what’s in there. You begin to synthesize and start organizing the article psychological research papers, mental health journalss into themes or putting those bricks into their little pillar categories so true synthesis involves drawing on multiple sources and relating them to each other and before bringing them together. You have to summarize them and paraphrasing and then that does two things for you one. Of course that helps you understand the article psychological research papers, mental health journals better and then it actually if you summarize all the way into your own words and your own sentence structure then you already have pieces that you can pull out and and then add them to the overall argument that you’re using so that process of summarizing can really help when you go to write a full introduction and you’re facing the introductory paragraph start off broad so you give a one introductory paragraph that outlines the main topics that you’re going to cover and your main topics are not that if you’re looking for a relationship between two different variables it’s not each variable separately.
It’s your topic is the relationship between those two variables and so any normal paper inter paragraph you introduce main topics and so Barry at all you would guess in their introduction they would cover not just self disclosure and all about self disclosure college stress and all about college stress. They would cover self disclosure college stress first-generation status all together. So you introduce the idea of your research psychological research papers, mental health journals to the reader and you’re going to make a statement about what the introduction is going to form the reader about so sometimes. It’s hard if you don’t understand your topic very well so always go back to your hypothesis. And what the center of the study is all about what are the factors that need to be outlined and what is the broader research psychological research papers, mental health journals question that lends itself to the specific prediction. So pause this lecture and take a moment to read through this first paragraph of the berry a tall article psychological research papers, mental health journals and look for those features that were discussed about what goes into a first paragraph notice that there are citations throughout the first paragraph. A common mistake people make sometimes is to think that the opening paragraph is general. So you don’t need citations but you see that you need citations all the way throughout. That’s a different recorded lecture but just notice how this is used in a first paragraph. Here’s the first paragraph of the study with those big key pieces that the reader will expect to find more about in this paper so you see about college experience as a stressful life event.
Relevant social networks disclosure of college experiences as a means of stress reduction first-generation college students receiving social and emotional support. And there’s a little bit more detail that they do more from their parents and then their college peers and then down at the bottom a very broad statement about the purpose of the study and that is a nice thing to hand to a reader on a silver platter so they know exactly what the purpose of the study is about so rather than a tendency that to read three paragraphs about self-disclosure and then three paragraphs about college stress and then three paragraphs. And you don’t have enough room to do that. And that’s not the way that these papers are written. So it’s a very concise and precise way of expressing the purpose of the study. So you see. The purpose of the study is to explore the differences in disclosure of college related experiences and proximity of relevant social networks in comparison to other college freshmen. So it’s different style of writing than textbooks but it is very precise and it’s a efficient a very efficient way to get a lot of information in a short place and once you get more used to reading these. If you aren’t already then you’ll see that you actually get to cut out a lot of extra time and just get right to the point so past that first paragraph. You’re going to support your arguments by giving evidence informing the reader of the main topics showing results of previous studies organized within themes pointing out strengths of weakness and research psychological research papers, mental health journals done in these areas. It’s even stronger in a paper to find contradictory evidence and then address it and use the glue of logic to explain why it’s still a good study despite some people having found some contradictory evidence. Because you’ve found a lot of evidence that does support your study and then sell it to me so it’s showing the reader that there is a need for your research psychological research papers, mental health journals.
Synthesize make educated inference based off of multiple sources. It indicates how much you understand about a topic. So by understanding your article psychological research papers, mental health journalss in the first place summarizing paraphrasing and then synthesizing and then making inferences about the themes then that is a deep level of knowledge about the paper and the more you understand it the easier. The paper is to write. So you’re breaking down information by main topic so these different areas. These are potential pillars of support to find article psychological research papers, mental health journalss that form the bricks. College is a stressful life event. First-generation college students stress stress. Disclosure those different categories of information and you might find that multiple article psychological research papers, mental health journalss address multiple pillars. But you pull out that part from that article psychological research papers, mental health journals and put it in that argument rather than talking about the whole article psychological research papers, mental health journals all at once including lots of different themes that would then leave it for the reader to put together and wouldn’t show much knowledge and would be much more difficult to read. You also want to talk about benefits so in this. The act of disclosing details stressful life event reduces the stress enhances both academic success overall health. So that can show how important that research psychological research papers, mental health journals is. And most things that you will be writing about will have certain things where you want to improve lives or understand something that will benefit other people and so highlighting. The benefits of things is another way to have a potential pillar or part of different topics that you’re discussing and then also along with benefits of course risks and negative outcomes so if something is related to negative outcomes then that also indicates the importance of doing research psychological research papers, mental health journals in that area so it enhances support for the hypothesis and also gets it across about why. It’s important to study this topic. You’ll also address weaknesses and strengths of previous research psychological research papers, mental health journals. So if you’re looking to make an adjustment to somebody else’s method or a slightly different hypothesis than somebody else has made.
Then you want to address the justification for that and and where there were weaknesses or strengths in the previous research psychological research papers, mental health journals both in methods and hypothesis and findings so this example while previous studies have focused on the target persons that first generation college students disclose to none have looked at the proximity of those targets to the student so that then suggests okay looking at proximity of those targets is important and then narrowing topics is important and so there are many article psychological research papers, mental health journalss probably that have looked at first-generation college students and their social networks. But it’s your job to narrow that in terms of the hypothesis which is a different sort of a lecture but just a reminder that when you’ve got the hypothesis that comes at the end of your introduction so you are leading the reader through lots of justifications and arguments and at the end they should come to the same conclusion that you have. Oh yeah of course. This hypothesis makes great sense. So you’ve suggested the research psychological research papers, mental health journals question at the beginning more broadly and then you get very specific at the end and so make sure the hypothesis is stated in a way that it can be tested it stated specifically enough. It’s based on your research psychological research papers, mental health journals topic obviously and that the variables are clearly defined. So you can have your variable definitions right around where your hypothesis is so your reader knows what kind of conceptual and operational definitions that you are using for your hypothesis and it’s okay to have multiple hypotheses but you to make sure that you have support for all of them so the hypotheses shouldn’t come out of nowhere. The hypotheses should be the absolutely logical inevitable conclusion from the journey that the reader has gone through reading your arguments and your claims and your evidence and the way that you’ve organized and then there it is at the end the hypothesis. Which is the specific center of your paper so you can picture it like a funnel.
Oh actually to funnel stuck together hourglass broad in the introduction and it gets narrow to the hypothesis and the methods are very specific. And then in the discussion you get broad again. And that’s for a different section of the paper. But that’s where you’re headed with this a couple other pointers so use the results in discussion section from studies as evidence for your argument especially at the beginning of discussions discuss the main findings of papers and sometimes the discussion is separated into different aspects of it. But you can find the way authors have written about their results in sort of real-life language. Not just the statistical language of the results but it is worth I think mucking through the results section and I always picture this or the parts. You don’t understand yet or the parts that you may never understand. If that is a very specific statistical test that very few people do. It’s sort of like the Charlie Brown teacher voice of the parts. You don’t understand but muck through that to get to the parts that you can understand. So it’s like won’t won’t won’t won’t won’t won’t we found that. This group had a higher score than that group. Aha that’s something you can understand. And then some won’t won’t won’t won’t won’t woof stuff and hopefully by the end of the semester – you’ll understand more of the results section but again there are some that are beyond the statistics that you’ll learn in your undergraduate years and use the information from literature review sparingly. It’s tempting because somebody else has laid it all out on this big topic. Their best purpose is to lead you to studies that you can use as evidence and use their reference list to go find more evidence aka bricks for those good pillars of arguments and mainly another pointer. That’s not on this. Slide is to allow yourself small work periods as you go along. This is a hard kind of writing task.
Especially if you’re new to this style of writing an organization of a paper to allow yourself little bits at a time so say okay today. I’m gonna summarize three article psychological research papers, mental health journalss and then come back and summarize a few article psychological research papers, mental health journalss another time. And then you might start noticing your themes and then you can one day work on one theme and another day work on another theme so this is a very very difficult prospect. If you’re thinking about just sitting down in one day and writing the whole thing so it’s highly recommended to space it out. So that’s it so happy introduction writing and. I hope it all goes well for you.
Where to find great research papers?
Various great research journals such as Global Research Letters are a great option and way to help you look up impactful research papers with a great format. Here, you will find a number of various research papers that are provided and made available to you in the journal, which will help you write your own paper.
You can very easily find papers on a variety of topics at Global Research Letters, which will help you with your own research work and understanding of writing and publishing research papers properly. With access to so many amazing research papers, you can practice and learn the process of writing research papers and their importance.