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Dissertations and research projects

Guidance for every stage of your research project, from planning to writing up.

Results

The purpose of your results section is to present your findings to your reader.  There are some key differences in how results may be presented for qualitative and quantitative data.  Select the headings below to find out more:

Presenting quantitative data

In quantitative research, the results section usually functions as a statement of your findings without discussion.

Results sections generally begin with descriptive statistics before moving on to further tests such as multiple linear regression, or inferential statistical tests such as ANOVA, and any associated Post-Hoc testing.

Here are some top tips for planning/writing your results section:

  • Explain any treatments you have applied to your data.
  • Present your findings in a logical order.
  • Describe trends in the data/anomalous findings but don’t start to interpret them. Save that for your discussion section.
  • Figures and tables are usually the clearest way to present information. It is important to remember to title and label any titles/diagrams to communicate their meaning to the reader and so that you can refer to them again later in the report (e.g. Table 1).
  • Remember to be consistent with the rounding of figures. If you start by rounding to 2 decimal places, ensure that you do this for all data you report.
  • Avoid repeating any information - if something appears in a table it does not need to appear again in the main body of the text.
For further information on statistics go to the Maths and Statistics support site where you can access resources.

Presenting qualitative data

In qualitative studies, your results are often presented alongside the discussion, as it is difficult to include this data in a meaningful way without explanation and interpretation. In the discussion section, aim to structure your work thematically, moving through the key concepts or ideas that have emerged from your qualitative data. Use extracts from your data collection - interviews, focus groups, observations - to illustrate where these themes are most prominent, and refer back to the sources from your literature review to help draw conclusions. 

Here's an example of how your data could be presented in paragraph format in this section:

Element Example

Introduction to the key themes identified from the interviews.

In analysing the interview data, two themes emerged which will be discussed in this section. These themes were: the complexity and challenges of working with families and the professional satisfaction and challenges of program planning for children in preschool or childcare.

Summary of theme A identified from the data.

For each of these graduates, their work with children was clearly the area of their professional lives that was bringing the most satisfaction, although there were some challenges identified. In the interviews, the data reveal that they were all seeking ways to improve their pedagogy and achieving success in different ways…

Specific example from your interviews to support this theme, embedded as a direct quotation.

Angela suggested that in her second year of teaching she had changed in that she was programming in a "more child oriented" way. She discussed this change:

"One of the things I've changed is this idea of herding children through the Kinder day: they go from indoor play to snack time to the mat and so on. How I do it now is that I have a lot of different things happening at once. I'll have a small group on the mat and there might be some children sitting down and having a snack and there's still some children in home corner playing."

Discussion/ interpretation of the findings, what they suggest, and what conclusions you can draw. Refer back to texts from the literature review that support your conclusions.

These comments seem to provide evidence that Angela is growing professionally for two reasons. First, the ability to identify changes in her program suggests to me that she has deeper pedagogical knowledge gained through critical reflection on her practice, and second, there is congruence between her expressed beliefs and the practice she describes… This is supported by…(Source A; Source B).

Example from 'Reporting and discussing your findings', Monash University.

 


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