The purpose of the thesis is to give the students some experience in working on a research problem.
The topic of the thesis can come from any area of psychology. A literature review has to be approved before you can submit your thesis.
In 2006-2007, the deadline for submitting the literature review is 1 December and the deadline for submitting the master thesis is 3 May. Click here for more information about deadlines.
Two students who work on a project of sufficiently large scope may work together on the same thesis.The students will receive the same mark, and it is not possible for only one of the students to submit a complaint.
The thesis should be typed with a margin of 2.5 cm, line spacing of 1.5 and a 12-point font. The thesis must have a title, a table of contents, a list of references and page numbers. It should also contain an abstract of around 250 words.
The front page should give the title of the thesis, the student’s name as well as the degree, the ISBN number, the department and the university, and the year and the month of submission.
The preface following after the front page, should give the names of the supervisor(s) and any other acknowledgements. If the thesis has been supported by paid employment or is a part of a larger project, the institutional affiliation and financial sources should be mentioned.
The page numbering should start at the first text page. Accordingly, the front page, the preface and the table of contents will not have page numbers. Any appendices should be placed after the list of references.
Tables and figures should be numbered. Tables should have headings to explain the contents, and the same rule holds for figures.
All references in the text must be included in the list of references, following APA guidelines.
The work effort of thesis should be comparable to two semester's full-time study/60 ECTS.
Students will have written a separate literature review in order to be allowed to submit the thesis.Therefore it is not necessary to include an extremely comprehensive review in the introduction of the thesis. Theses may be in the form of an article suitable for submission to an international journal; thus they may be concise and “to the point”. Alternatively, and according to the norms of the particular field of psychology the work is carried out in, a thesis may be longer. It would nevertheless be unusual for the body of the text of a thesis to be longer than 50 pages.
The thesis should be written in English or Norwegian.
The thesis should address a clearly stated problem. The topic of the thesis can be chosen among all psychological fields.
The thesis should contain and be based on psychological theory, which means that the student have to know about, refer to and describe important contributions to psychological theory relevant to the problem. The thesis should constitute an independent contribution to the relevant literature.
If the thesis comprises empirical work, the independent element could be the presenting of new data or the adaption of earlier data. Another possibility is to use an existing data set in a new problem.
In a purely theoretical thesis, it is not required that the students develop a wholly original model. It is sufficient to show how already known models can be adapted to the problem at hand.
The thesis should not contain obvious mistakes or defects. That means for instance: