The rhetorical unit of Methods in empirical academic articles of Psychology area: a socio and rhetorical investigation

ABSTRACT This research aims at describing how the Psychology area produces and understands the Methods unit in empirical academic articles. As a theoretical basis, we relied on Swales (1990) for the concepts involving academic genres and its Create a Research Space methodology. Hyland’s (2000) research was used as basis for the study of disciplinary cultures. Thus, our study, classified as an exploratory and descriptive research, has a corpus consisting of 30 copies of academic articles from 10 journals in the Psychology area, indexed in the WEBQUALIS platform from the Capes database. In our study we verified that the Methods sections had a very detailed section, providing information related to the sample size and profile, descriptions of materials or instruments used, research procedures, data related to the approval by research ethics committees and description of data analysis.