Results and Discussion paper

What to Do

Write a 1-2 page results section where you formally present the findings of your study. You should include at least one figure (e.g., column chart or scatterplot) or table to convey your results. You will also need to write a 1-3 page discussion section where you interpret what these results mean and relate your findings back to previous research. Your discussion should indicate if your results confirm your hypotheses and if they are consistent with what other researchers have found. You should also discuss any limitations of your study in this section and make suggestions about future research. Note that while results will be similar for people working in groups – each group member must write their own Results and Discussion Sections.

Writing a Results Section

There are several sources of information on writing your results section. These include 1) the textbook, 2) the PowerPoints, and 3) your own reference articles. Here are a few important guidelines:

1. If you decide to exclude any data (e.g., because participants did not follow instructions), then you should report how much data was excluded and what criteria you used for making these decisions.
2. Describe any procedure you used to reduce your data. This includes how you scored questionnaires or otherwise aggregated multiple responses into a single dependent variable. For example, you might explain that you began by computing the mean for your 10-item self-esteem measure.
3. Report measures of central tendency and variability for your dependent variable, separately for each condition. This usually means reporting the mean and standard deviation for each condition.
4. Include at least one column chart, line graph, or scatterplot. If necessary, you can include the figure at the very end of the document (if you are having trouble getting it to stay within the text) but you must refer to it explicitly in the text (e.g., As Figure 1 shows, ….). Create the figure using Excel (or table using Word) according to the guidelines provided in class.
5. Report the relevant inferential statistics used. This means reporting the test statistic, the degrees of freedom, and whether or not the p value was less than .05. Be clear about whether or not you rejected the null hypothesis.
6. In general, you should address each of your hypotheses one at a time. Discuss your primary hypothesis first, and then discuss any of your secondary hypotheses in turn.

Writing a Discussion Section

Unfortunately, there is no one exact way to write a discussion section. These tend to vary depending on the argument the authors are attempting to make. For some examples, look at the articles cited in your paper and the student sample paper. Here are a few important guidelines:

1. Report what you found and if it conformed to your hypotheses. This could be a paragraph or two but remember not to report the actual statistics in detail. Just summarize the results in words and whether they support the hypotheses.
2. Identify and discuss some explanations as to why the results turned out the way they did. This will likely be around 1-1.5 pages long but depends on what you find. This explanation is considered one of the most important parts of the paper and needs to be thought about and addressed adequately. If the hypotheses were supported, why might that be? A great idea is to look to other research on the topic and address their theories in relation to yours. If your results go along with the findings of others, then their theories might be relevant to your findings. If your results do not go along with previous findings, what might that mean? It is okay to speculate a little here, just do not assume the statements reflect a certainty when there is not one. For example, The results of the current study conflict with the findings of Ma-Kellams and Blascovish (2013), and this could show that the explanations they offered on science and morality may not be accurate.
3. Keep in mind that science is iterative (i.e., constantly changing and updating) and therefore your study contributes to this process but does not render it definitive. Thus, avoid saying things like, The findings of the current study prove Ma-Kellams and Blascovish were wrong Or that The results prove that science does not influence moral judgment. Instead, your study is just one that may provide evidence for or against a position, but it is not the final say.
4. Report any limitations of your study. That is, what went wrong? How could these problems have influenced your results? Limitations can include confounding variables, small sample size, the possibility that the manipulation did not work, and many others. Keep in mind that no study is perfect and therefore every published study includes a limitations subsection. Note that it is common for new students to focus too much of the discussion section on the limitations, but it is just one part.
5. Future research and applied uses should be ideas that are relevant to the results and/or research question, not just random alternative variables that could be tested. For example, if I found a relationship between beliefs in science and moral judgments, I might suggest future research could further explore the extent of how this relationship might be influenced by the history of scientific training and coursework. I could also suggest that this could have bearings on situations that call on people to make moral judgments (future research studies could take this into account as could legal situations).