Guidelines for writing and formatting your homework

  1. Always include the SPSS syntax commands you used to run your analyses. Place them right before the output.

  2. Annotations explain how and why you did what you did and what the output means; they should always succeed the output to which they refer.

  3. Make sure you have a one-page summary that is in journal-style. You can use Tabachnick & Fidell's writeups as a model or go to sample summaries at this site.

  4. To stay within the page limit for your homeworks, show only the output that is requested or that you deem essential for interpreting the data. For example, if you have multiple anlayses of the same kind (e.g., bivariate plots, histograms, factor analysis runs), you can normally show the appropriate output once and from then on only verbally describe the results of further runs.

  5. Focus equally on the process of data analysis and on interpreting your results. We really want you to understand how to interpret your data in light of your output.