PSY771 Research Project Assignment Brief 2026 | Wrexham University

Module title

Research Project

Module code

PSY771

Module leader

Dr Gwennan H Barton

Assessment title

Dissertation thesis

Launch date

29/9/2025

Submission deadline

10/7/2026 12 noon (mid-day)

Expected date for return of marks and feedback

Marks and feedback will be returned via Moodle 3 working weeks from the hand-in date. Individual feedback can be arranged by MS Teams

Assessment weighting

80%

Word count (if relevant)

6,000 – 8,000 words

Assessment task details

The dissertation will form a significant piece of written work (6,000 – 8,000). The dissertation should be based on the research carried out for this specific project by the student and be based upon the student’s own findings.

the report should comprise the following sections:

Abstract

Introduction

Literature review

Methodology

Method

Results

Discussion OR Discussion of findings (instead of sections on results and discussion – for qualitative research)

Conclusion

References

Appendices (if appropriate)

The exact nature of sub-sections may vary, depending on the form of the study. Please speak to your supervisor for further guidance on which sub-sections to include for your specific project.

Submission instructions - What should be the format of the submission? / Where should it be submitted?

Please use APA formatting for structuring your dissertation thesis.

Submission

Dissertations must be submitted with assignment submission sheet and declaration of academic honesty.

There is a 10% +/- leeway for all written work. Please also note the penalty for exceeding the word count by more than 10% will be 5 marks per 1000 words excess.

Writing Your Dissertation

Format and Presentation - Dissertation

The final dissertation should be in the region of 6,000 – 8,000 (+/- 10%) words in length (excluding appendices and references), although this will depend on the nature of the topic undertaken. If you anticipate that you will exceed the given word limit by more than 10%, this must be discussed with your supervisor.

Title page: See back of the handbook for the required format

Margins: All margins (left, top, right, and bottom) must be set to 2.5 cm. Except for the page number at the bottom of the page. Do not use any headers or footers.

Vertical and horizontal spacing: The line spacing should be set at 1.5. The font used throughout should be Times New Roman size 12. The alignment of the text must be fully justified.

Page numbering: The Title page, Abstract page etc. should not be numbered. Lower case Roman Numerals (i, ii… etc) should begin at the Contents page. Starting with the first page of Chapter 1, the main body of the dissertation should use ‘Arabic’ numbers, beginning at 1 and continuing consecutively. Numbers should appear in the centre bottom of each page.

Tables and figures: Each table and/or figure should be numbered consecutively and consistently within each chapter (e.g., in Chapter 4: Table 4.1, Table 4.2 etc., or in Chapter 3: Figure 3.1, Figure 3.2, etc.) and each should have a title that reflects the content clearly and accurately. Labels are placed above tables and figures with additional Notes placed below them.

References

The Reference Section must be started on a new page with the heading centred at the top of the page. The references are listed in alphabetical order according to the surname of the first author. All sources cited in the text should be written in full in this section following APA 7 guidelines.

You may also have an acknowledgement page before the abstract to recognise any persons or institution who were of key importance in realising the finished work. It is customary to include your supervisor.

Contents of Sections

Title

The title should give a brief (maximum 15 words), but clear indication of the content of the dissertation. Remember that this is the reader’s first point of contact with your work. Good titles make the relationship between IV and DV clear e.g., ‘the effects of A on B…’ or ‘the relation between…

Acknowledgements (optional)

This is used to recognise any persons or institutions/organisations who were of key importance in realising the dissertation.

Abstract

A brief statement which should summarise the dissertation in around 150 words. Whilst it appears at the beginning, it should be written after the rest of the dissertation. It ought to contain the main points of the dissertation and should, in theory, enable the reader to decide whether or not to read the full dissertation.

Contents

The contents section is simply to tell the reader what to expect on what page. For example:

Page

Introduction1

Review of Literature8

Methods20

Results 28

Discussion35

Conclusion 40

References 45

Appropriate subheadings (e.g. 2.1, 2.1.1 etc) should be used to structure your work.

Abbreviations (if applicable)

All abbreviations used in the text should be listed here (after contents pages) with the full names. The first time they are referred to in the text, they should also have the full name plus the

abbreviation in brackets. After this ‘definition’ you can use the abbreviation throughout the text. List of abbreviations must be in alphabetical order.

Introduction

Informing people about your research involves providing them with background information. You need to tell the reader how your research fits into the overall context and why your research was carried out. The introduction should lead the reader towards the specific issue with which your research is concerned. So throughout the introduction you should move from the general to the specific. You will have conducted a literature search and this review would have been an important factor in the conceptualisation and design of your project. Presenting this information to the reader is important but you should not bombard the reader with everything you found out. So this section should not be a review of literature – you should not be going into details about specific research here.

Literature review

The literature review should link to the concepts and issues introduced in the introduction (although the literature review is usually written prior to the completion of the introduction). In this section, the selected sources need to be expanded upon and critically reviewed. Hence, the literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by previous research. In writing the literature review, you are to present to your reader knowledge and ideas that have been established on a theme, and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

As a piece of writing, your literature review must be guided by your research question and/or hypotheses. It is not a simple summary of the existing literature, but a critical analysis of what is relevant to your work. This means that although you need to summarise certain research, it is also essential that you do it in an evaluative manner, showing the relationship between different works and how they relate to your own study. (In this section, you can review the methods that have been employed by the proponents of the specific field under scrutiny as using certain methods and adopting specific methodologies have a significant bearing on the data and the interpretation of that.)

A literature review must meet the following criteria:

• be organised and directly related to the research question and/or hypothesis you are developing

• synthesise result into a presentation of what is and is not known

• identify areas of controversy in the existing literature

• underpin the significance of your proposed research question/hypotheses

The purpose of the review of literature is to provide the necessary information to ensure that the reader understands why you have done what you have done. This normally involves giving the reader information about existing research and why it is incomplete or unsatisfactory. This enables you to show how your own study will contribute to the knowledge base of the area. Thus, the last paragraph or so of the introduction will serve as the transition to the specific details of your own study, and should contain your aim, specific hypotheses and/or research questions.

Methodology

The methodology section typically explains the how and why of a research study. Students should clearly outline the philosophical underpinnings of their research in this section, along with a rationale for why they have chosen certain research designs/approaches, recruitment choices, data collection methods, materials etc. There should also be a balanced overview of benefits and limitations of different approaches/methods explored, and why the final approach/method was selected over these.

Methods

It is here that you describe what you did in detail to enable the reader to understand how you collected your data and to replicate the research if they wished to. In line with learning outcome 2, this section should also include a justification for the methodology chosen. This section should be split into design, participants, material, procedures, and ethical considerations, you must append copies of any questionnaires, consent forms, information sheets and ethics approval.

Results

You should report the results of the data analyses that you completed. It is the crucial section around which the entire dissertation is centred, and you need to ensure that the reader understands them. The results section is written in continuous prose not just lists, tables, or quotes and provides summary, not raw data

Identify the form of any statistical analysis used and ensure that any effect is accompanied by its level of statistical significance. The use of figures and tables can help in the presentation of your results, but they must be elaborated on in the text. Do not just refer the reader to a table (or figure or graph) and leave it to him or her to discern the meaning. Clarify the meaning in the text.

If you are conducting a quantitative project the findings are usually described in the in the results section and then discussed in the discussion section. However, if you are doing a qualitative piece of work, you will probably have an integrated results/discussion section.

Never simply include SPSS printouts as your results as they often contain superfluous material and are rarely adequately formatted. In fact, these printouts can be easily improved after pasting them into a word document. Where statistical analyses have been undertaken the relevant SPSS outputs must be included in an appropriate appendix.

To get an idea of how results are presented in professional publications look at how this section is structured in current journal articles.

Discussion

The results should be discussed, and any conclusions that you develop from your results should be presented in this section. Here is where you begin to extend your study and lead the reader towards the more general points you wish to make. In many ways it is the reverse of the introduction. The conclusions/observations that you draw should emerge directly from your results - the discussion is a discussion of your results.

For many dissertations an appropriate starting point, or structure, is to take each hypothesis or research question and discuss the evidence you have collected. As part of this, explicitly state if each hypothesis is upheld or rejected or how the research question is answered.

For all types of project, it is normal to begin the discussion section with a restatement of the main research question and to provide a summary of the relevant results. It should not merely rehash what has already been said but should add something to the knowledge and understanding of the reader.

The section may also include an attempt to relate your findings to previous research in the area and place the results in a theoretical context. Attention should be drawn to differences between your results and those of other researchers. However, you should not get bogged down in minute detail. Focus on what you consider to be the important implications of your research. The discussion should lead the reader from the data obtained to their implications. You should consider questions raised by the results of your research or questions which have not been answered by your study. The more specific the hypotheses you used the more specific will be the recommendations you can make. End the discussion by bringing the reader back to the broader context.

One important point to note about the discussion is that it should not contain any surprises for the reader. It should not deviate from the path set out in the introduction unless the results question previous work on the topic or provide a radically different perspective on it.

Conclusions

The scope of the conclusion will vary considerably depending upon the type of dissertation completed, i.e. from basic conclusions from your work stated briefly for experimental projects, to comprehensive conclusions relating the work to theoretical models or applied situations for social science dissertations.

You should also include the limitations of your study and suggestions for further research, outlining those questions which were outside of the scope of your work, or which have been developed as part of your analysis.

Referencing

One of the marks of good scholarship in a piece of written work is that the writer pays full attention to the findings and opinions of other scholars who have written about the same subject matter. Mention of other people’s work should always be properly acknowledged and referenced. Failure to do so may be considered misleading or dishonest. Deliberately passing off another person’s work as your own is plagiarism and will result in strict penalties (see Student Handbook).

Another reason for referencing is so that the reader will be able to see where your ideas and statements come from and could check the original sources themselves to see if they agree with your interpretations. Hence, there is a need to distinguish primary from secondary sources, e.g., what Bloggs said, or what Brown said Bloggs observed. You should try and avoid employing secondary referencing at level 7.

Unless a particular reference is unobtainable within a reasonable time scale (for example, it is not translated into English/Welsh) you will be expected to gain access to primary references. If papers need to be purchased ordering these through the library is often the cheaper option, however in some cases papers can take a few weeks so plan ahead.

References

Start this on a new page, centre the heading at the top of the page. The references are listed in alphabetical order according to the surname of the first author. All sources cited in the text should be written in full in this section as per APA 7 guidelines.

Appendices

The appendices must contain evidence of ethical approval, examples of any instruments (questionnaires, scales, interview schedules etc.) used in the project, especially those you devised yourself. You need not show calculations or include pages and pages of SPSS printouts. However, you will be expected to provide examples of these to confirm to the reader that they have been completed appropriately and to include other information such as calibration results etc.

You must include

• depending on your study

o at least one sample interview transcript (anonymised)

o a sample of data collection tools employed (e.g., questionnaires)

o interview schedules

o copy of archival data

• any forms of supporting ethical documentation (e.g., subject consent forms, subject information sheets)

• evidence of ethical approval

• any relevant information or illustration that will aid the reader’s understanding of the subject matter

Evidence of data collection

At some point before the last supervision session, you are required to provide your supervisor with concrete evidence of data collection (hard copy or electronic format). This could be an example of the data (for example, several interview transcriptions) or all of them (for example, a data file or SPSS printout). Your supervisor has the right to question the authenticity of your raw data at any stage of the research.

N.B. You MUST keep ALL evidence of your work, in case it is questioned, until after the summer exam board (or any subsequent referral board).

Submitting your dissertation

• the dissertation is to be submitted electronically.

• work may be handed in before the due date, but once submitted, it may not be retrieved.

• dissertations must have your full name and the full dissertation title clearly shown on the front cover. An example of the completed cover is shown at the end of this module guide.

Requirements to pass the module

To pass this module, you are required to achieve 40% overall.

Late penalties

Up to one week late the work will be marked but will be capped passing grade if the work achieves this threshold of a passing mark.

If you are experiencing a situation(s) which may affect the quality of your work, you may submit a fully completed Extenuating Circumstances form. Extensions are seldom, if ever, issued for dissertation.

Theft, loss, failure to keep a back-up file, or computer and printer-related problems are not valid reasons for the submission of extenuating circumstances and / or extension form.

Coursework submission

You must attach submission sheet. The statement on academic honesty must also be signed. This is available at the end of the booklet and also on Moodle

Unfair Practice

Students are advised to consult the Academic Regulations in relation to ‘The Unfair Practice Procedure’. This is provided in detail on the student intranet. A key element of this relates to plagiarism, which essentially is the deliberate and substantial insertion in your own work of material from someone else, e.g., a published source such as a book or article, or simply another student’s piece of work, without acknowledging the extent or source of the quotation.

What happens after you submit your dissertation?

Getting feedback and a grade for your dissertation is different from a ‘standard’ piece of course work. Your supervisor will grade your dissertation and provide feedback in the first instance, then all dissertations are moderated as a team. The provisional mark that you are awarded is a result of this process. Your dissertation may also be subject to scrutiny by an internal moderator and external examiner.

We would like to use some dissertations for educational purposes. If you wish to do this please complete the appropriate part of the dissertation submission sheet to signify your consent

A Final Point

Hopefully, this module guide will help you to complete a successful and interesting dissertation. It will be hard work, but also enjoyable as it should be in a topic that you are particularly interested in. The key to success is to work steadily, with good time management and to make sure you engage with your supervisor regularly, whether via email or in person. Your dissertation is a major factor in deciding border line cases, please see the section on ‘What are the regulations for the determination of awards?’ in the Student Handbook. If you do have problems, ensure that you see your supervisor as soon as possible or contact the module leader.

Hints and tips

Ensure that you reference appropriately throughout using APA.

Marking and moderation

Marking will be in line with the Dissertation marking rubric/criteria.