Writing Up Your Partial Research Report In your professional lives, during the course of a research project you will often know the researchers, participants or confederates in your study. If such a situation arises, as a professional it is important that you proceed ethically. Some ways in which you can do this include: 1. De-identifying all data. Never refer to anyone by name - this includes the names of Institutions (e.g., Schools or Clinics). 2. Report group data, not individual scores. The group mean was.. The mean for males was.. etc. 3. Always write using formal academic language, mostly in the third person and past tense. For example, you may find yourself as part of a mental health team that decides to write a paper comparing the treatment regimes of a group of clients with phobias. At your clinic, Dr Smith is treating clients with phobias using a Cognitive Behavioural Intevention whilst Dr Brown is implementing a Meditation/Visualisation technique. Your clinic is located in Springmeadow, Sydney, and is called The Royal Phobia Treatment Centre. Over the course of the year, you as the Centre Director, get to know most of the clients by name. In this example, any information that could identify the clinic, the practitioners, or most importantly the clients, would be removed or generalised. Therefore, when situating the study, you would refer to the clinic in general terms, for example, a phobia treatment clinic in Sydney, Australia. Likewise, the clinicians themselves would not be named, instead the treatment groups would be referred to collectively as the CBT Group and the MV Group (if necessary the practitioners may also be referred to as Clinician A and Clinician B). You would talk about the study in the third person and not identify yourself as the Director of the clinic or by name. Instead, if required you would state, "The aim of the current research.." or "It is predicted that…" etc. Not "Director Jones predicts that…" In relation to the clients themselves, no names would be used and only general demographics provided (e.g., descriptive statistics on age and/or gender). A range of phobia test scores (including minimum and maximum scores) for each group may be necessary, but there should be no way of identifying which clients specifically obtained those minimum and maximum scores. In our research example, though Summertown High is clearly a fictitious school and it has been fun (and often amusing) learning about the different predicaments of the staff and students, when it comes to conducting our assessment research, we must be both professional and ethical. Therefore as practice for the real-world, you will follow the same standards for our fictitious scenario, as you would if you were the member of any research project. This means following the three steps indicated above and you may use the clinic example provided in this document for guidance. You may however take some artistic license and assume Summertown High is a Selective State High School located in Sydney, Australia.