ABSTRACT
When you write your methods section, you are creating your experiment. There are three main components to a methods section: participants, materials, and procedures. The participants section is a thorough description of the people or animals that participated in your study. The materials section describes all of the equipment and measurement tools that you used (such as surveys, personality inventories, or biofeedback equipment). The procedures section describes how you conducted your study from start to finish. The goal of the methods section is replication. When you have completed your methods section, any researcher should be able to read it and run their experiment exactly as you ran yours. Replication is the best way to see if an original research study has internal and external validity.
