The structure and format of a Master's degree thesis in Psychology

Thesis is a key component of master degree; one can earn his degree by completing a thesis of dissertation. Thesis is document of your research on the chosen area of your field of study that includes analysis, results and conclusion on the basis of research method that you opt to conduct study. Every master’ student knows about that conducting research is not a piece of cake and also writing research. Conducting research and writing research are interlinked that seems same and different at the same time. Conducting research requires adopting a particular research method to find the expected outcomes and writing research is putting your research into a documented form by following specific structure of format of writing.

This article is about formatting and structuring of your thesis for specifically master’ students of psychology. A different structuring and formatting approach for study in psychology is being discussed because this field of study is different from arts and other social sciences subjects. Like all other master’ students, psychology students also face common challenges while writing their thesis to earn master degree as there are some common elements in all master’ thesis. Planning your research is the key element that every single research does and put his/her efforts in process of planning and organizing to get successful results of their efforts. One might have question that how is psychology thesis different from other social sciences research these are some basic differences;

· There are different types of psychology researches and each requires following different statistics tool and techniques to analyse data.

· There is myth that psychology results are people opinion that’s completely wrong, this research rely on data results so it’s an evidence based research somehow like natural sciences.

· Third most important factor is that most of the sources in psychology study are empirical researches.

· The most important factor of difference is that it is not different in academic writing but in terms of communicating factual knowledge by being precise and your every single word needs to be literal that is easy to understand for all readers.

These are the things that you need to avoid in structure and format of psychology thesis;

ü Avoid surprise statements: means isto be clear about your statement and ideas and how evidences relates to them.

ü Avoid direct quotations: psychologists rarely use direct quotes in research writing means they paraphrase other researchers’ statements and cite them as per required format of references.

ü Avoid Bias language:As previously discussed that psychology research writing is communicating factual knowledge that requires to use unbiased language for example using only male pronounce is a kind of bias language so use he/she or his/her.

On the other hand thesis of psychology consists of some common structure and format points as it includes;

ü An Abstract

ü Introduction of study

ü Methodology used to conduct research

ü Results or predicted results of study

ü Discussion on findings of current research in light of previous studies

ü Finally the list of references and appendixes.