Research Studies Questionnaire
University of Phoenix
PSYCH/610
Brandy Darling
4/20/2015

Part I
What is the purpose of each of the sections in a typical research article?
There are several parts to a research article including an abstract, which is used to briefly convey the information used throughout the article before reading through the whole thing. It gives a clear idea of what the article is about and what to look forward to before going any further into the research process. Next is the introduction, and that is used to point out what the focus is on and the main points of the article/paper. The introduction in “OCD and Cognitive Illusions” describes cognitive illusions thinking and how that may be contribute to understanding the origin of maintenance of obsessional thoughts. It covers the meaning of cognitive illusions and what they include, current studies pointing to cognitive biases/deficits in OCD, the nature of cognitive illusions and the relations to OCD thinking, and clinical implications/suggestions for further research. Other parts of a research article may include methods/methodology, results, discussion, conclusion and summary, and references/sources. Not all articles are the same, but generally this is how one would be set up.
What are the steps to critically evaluate research articles and how does the scientific method help you do this? The first step to critically evaluating a research article is the research question. The research must be clear when informing the desired audience of its aim, and terms must be clearly defined. It is important that the reader pays close attention to errors in logic. The second step is sample, and the sample needs to be adequate and representative in order to provide trustworthy conclusions. Third is control of confounding variables. Research findings tend to be influenced by extraneous variation,