Language: ASPPB offers a French form of the EPPP (the FEPPP) where a licensing authority legally requires one. ASPPB has not yet published the competency statements in French, so our questions and cards are in English until it does.

1.D.1

Reporting research accurately in professional settings

ASPPB's competency statement 1.D.1: Accurately report research findings and other knowledge within professional contexts (e.g., conferences, journals, policy statements)

This statement covers reporting findings faithfully in journals, at conferences and in policy statements: saying what was found, how certain it is and what it cannot show, without spin or selective emphasis. Ethics codes, reporting standards such as JARS and CONSORT, and evidence on how exaggeration spreads all point the same way. Accurate reporting protects the people who act on findings, from clinicians to legislators.

Key ideas

Honest reporting: Psychologists do not fabricate data, and when they find significant errors in their published data they take reasonable steps to correct them, such as a correction or retraction (APA Ethics Code 8.10). The CPA code's Principle III, Integrity in Relationships, likewise calls for accuracy and honesty.
Reporting standards: Checklists such as APA's Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) and the CONSORT 2025 statement for randomized trials set out what a report must include, such as a diagram of participant flow and, for each outcome, the effect estimate with its precision.
Spin: Reporting that makes a treatment look beneficial despite a nonsignificant primary outcome, or distracts from that result, for example by stressing secondary outcomes, subgroups or within-group change. Boutron and colleagues found spin common in titles, abstracts and conclusions of such trial reports.
Exaggeration downstream: Overstatement often starts close to the researchers. In UK university press releases, exaggerated advice, causal claims from correlational research and inferences from animal studies to humans were each strongly associated with the same exaggeration in the news stories that followed.
Conflicts of interest: Funding sources and financial or other interests that could affect, or seem to affect, a report are disclosed, as reporting standards such as CONSORT 2025 and JARS require, so that readers can weigh the findings.
Public and policy statements: In testimony, lectures and published materials, psychologists make no false or deceptive statements about their research or its results (APA Ethics Code 5.01), and they keep the evidence, its quality and their own value judgments clearly distinguished.

Worked example

A psychologist is drafting a conference abstract for a randomized trial of a mindfulness course for nurses. Burnout fell in both groups, and the difference between groups was not significant. A coauthor suggests the results line 'Nurses in the course showed significant reductions in burnout from baseline (p < .001),' with no mention of the control group.

Spot the problem: the line reports within-group change, which the control group also showed, and leaves out the between-group comparison the trial was designed to test.
Name it: stressing within-group improvement when the primary comparison is nonsignificant is a recognized form of spin.
Lead with the primary result: state that burnout fell in both groups and that the course did not reduce it more than the control condition, with the effect estimate and its confidence interval.
Place other findings honestly: label any other outcomes secondary or exploratory, and make the conclusion match the primary result.

An accurate report leads with the comparison the study was designed to test, whatever its result.

Check yourself

A psychologist will present an evaluation of a smartphone program for panic symptoms at a professional conference. She receives consulting fees from the company that sells the program, and the study design was rigorous. What should she do about the fees?

Practise 1.D.1

Sources

American Psychological Association (2017), Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, Standards 5.01, Avoidance of False or Deceptive Statements, and 8.10, Reporting Research Results
Canadian Psychological Association (2017), Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists, Fourth Edition, Principle III, Integrity in Relationships (accuracy and honesty)
Appelbaum, Cooper, Kline, Mayo-Wilson, Nezu and Rao (2018), Journal article reporting standards for quantitative research in psychology: the APA Publications and Communications Board task force report, American Psychologist (PMID 29345484), JARS-Quant Table 1: author note (funding and conflicts of interest), participant flow, results
Hopewell, Chan, Collins and colleagues (2025), CONSORT 2025 statement: updated guideline for reporting randomised trials, BMJ (PMID 40228833), Abstract (30-item checklist and flow diagram); open science section (funding and conflicts of interest); outcome results items
Boutron, Dutton, Ravaud and Altman (2010), Reporting and interpretation of randomized controlled trials with statistically nonsignificant results for primary outcomes, JAMA (PMID 20501928), Abstract (definition of spin and its frequency); spin strategies in the text
Sumner, Vivian-Griffiths, Boivin and colleagues (2014), The association between exaggeration in health related science news and academic press releases: retrospective observational study, BMJ (PMID 25498121), Abstract, Results and Conclusions