how to present interview findings in a dissertation

How To Write The Results/Findings Chapter

For qualitative studies (dissertations & theses).

By: Jenna Crossley (PhD). Expert Reviewed By: Dr. Eunice Rautenbach | August 2021

So, you’ve collected and analysed your qualitative data, and it’s time to write up your results chapter. But where do you start? In this post, we’ll guide you through the qualitative results chapter (also called the findings chapter), step by step. 

Overview: Qualitative Results Chapter

• What (exactly) the qualitative results chapter is
• What to include in your results chapter
• How to write up your results chapter
• A few tips and tricks to help you along the way
• Free results chapter template

What exactly is the results chapter?

The results chapter in a dissertation or thesis (or any formal academic research piece) is where you objectively and neutrally present the findings of your qualitative analysis (or analyses if you used multiple qualitative analysis methods ). This chapter can sometimes be combined with the discussion chapter (where you interpret the data and discuss its meaning), depending on your university’s preference.  We’ll treat the two chapters as separate, as that’s the most common approach.

In contrast to a quantitative results chapter that presents numbers and statistics, a qualitative results chapter presents data primarily in the form of words . But this doesn’t mean that a qualitative study can’t have quantitative elements – you could, for example, present the number of times a theme or topic pops up in your data, depending on the analysis method(s) you adopt.

Adding a quantitative element to your study can add some rigour, which strengthens your results by providing more evidence for your claims. This is particularly common when using qualitative content analysis. Keep in mind though that qualitative research aims to achieve depth, richness and identify nuances , so don’t get tunnel vision by focusing on the numbers. They’re just cream on top in a qualitative analysis.

So, to recap, the results chapter is where you objectively present the findings of your analysis, without interpreting them (you’ll save that for the discussion chapter). With that out the way, let’s take a look at what you should include in your results chapter.

What should you include in the results chapter?

As we’ve mentioned, your qualitative results chapter should purely present and describe your results , not interpret them in relation to the existing literature or your research questions . Any speculations or discussion about the implications of your findings should be reserved for your discussion chapter.

In your results chapter, you’ll want to talk about your analysis findings and whether or not they support your hypotheses (if you have any). Naturally, the exact contents of your results chapter will depend on which qualitative analysis method (or methods) you use. For example, if you were to use thematic analysis, you’d detail the themes identified in your analysis, using extracts from the transcripts or text to support your claims.

While you do need to present your analysis findings in some detail, you should avoid dumping large amounts of raw data in this chapter. Instead, focus on presenting the key findings and using a handful of select quotes or text extracts to support each finding . The reams of data and analysis can be relegated to your appendices.

While it’s tempting to include every last detail you found in your qualitative analysis, it is important to make sure that you report only that which is relevant to your research aims, objectives and research questions .  Always keep these three components, as well as your hypotheses (if you have any) front of mind when writing the chapter and use them as a filter to decide what’s relevant and what’s not.

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How do I write the results chapter?

Now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time to look at how to structure your chapter. Broadly speaking, the results chapter needs to contain three core components – the introduction, the body and the concluding summary. Let’s take a look at each of these.

Section 1: Introduction

The first step is to craft a brief introduction to the chapter. This intro is vital as it provides some context for your findings. In your introduction, you should begin by reiterating your problem statement and research questions and highlight the purpose of your research . Make sure that you spell this out for the reader so that the rest of your chapter is well contextualised.

The next step is to briefly outline the structure of your results chapter. In other words, explain what’s included in the chapter and what the reader can expect. In the results chapter, you want to tell a story that is coherent, flows logically, and is easy to follow , so make sure that you plan your structure out well and convey that structure (at a high level), so that your reader is well oriented.

The introduction section shouldn’t be lengthy. Two or three short paragraphs should be more than adequate. It is merely an introduction and overview, not a summary of the chapter.

Pro Tip – To help you structure your chapter, it can be useful to set up an initial draft with (sub)section headings so that you’re able to easily (re)arrange parts of your chapter. This will also help your reader to follow your results and give your chapter some coherence.  Be sure to use level-based heading styles (e.g. Heading 1, 2, 3 styles) to help the reader differentiate between levels visually. You can find these options in Word (example below).

Section 2: Body

Before we get started on what to include in the body of your chapter, it’s vital to remember that a results section should be completely objective and descriptive, not interpretive . So, be careful not to use words such as, “suggests” or “implies”, as these usually accompany some form of interpretation – that’s reserved for your discussion chapter.

The structure of your body section is very important , so make sure that you plan it out well. When planning out your qualitative results chapter, create sections and subsections so that you can maintain the flow of the story you’re trying to tell. Be sure to systematically and consistently describe each portion of results. Try to adopt a standardised structure for each portion so that you achieve a high level of consistency throughout the chapter.

For qualitative studies, results chapters tend to be structured according to themes , which makes it easier for readers to follow. However, keep in mind that not all results chapters have to be structured in this manner. For example, if you’re conducting a longitudinal study, you may want to structure your chapter chronologically. Similarly, you might structure this chapter based on your theoretical framework . The exact structure of your chapter will depend on the nature of your study , especially your research questions.

As you work through the body of your chapter, make sure that you use quotes to substantiate every one of your claims . You can present these quotes in italics to differentiate them from your own words. A general rule of thumb is to use at least two pieces of evidence per claim, and these should be linked directly to your data. Also, remember that you need to include all relevant results , not just the ones that support your assumptions or initial leanings.

In addition to including quotes, you can also link your claims to the data by using appendices , which you should reference throughout your text. When you reference, make sure that you include both the name/number of the appendix , as well as the line(s) from which you drew your data.

As referencing styles can vary greatly, be sure to look up the appendix referencing conventions of your university’s prescribed style (e.g. APA , Harvard, etc) and keep this consistent throughout your chapter.

Section 3: Concluding summary

The concluding summary is very important because it summarises your key findings and lays the foundation for the discussion chapter . Keep in mind that some readers may skip directly to this section (from the introduction section), so make sure that it can be read and understood well in isolation.

In this section, you need to remind the reader of the key findings. That is, the results that directly relate to your research questions and that you will build upon in your discussion chapter. Remember, your reader has digested a lot of information in this chapter, so you need to use this section to remind them of the most important takeaways.

Importantly, the concluding summary should not present any new information and should only describe what you’ve already presented in your chapter. Keep it concise – you’re not summarising the whole chapter, just the essentials.

Tips for writing an A-grade results chapter

Now that you’ve got a clear picture of what the qualitative results chapter is all about, here are some quick tips and reminders to help you craft a high-quality chapter:

• Your results chapter should be written in the past tense . You’ve done the work already, so you want to tell the reader what you found , not what you are currently finding .
• Make sure that you review your work multiple times and check that every claim is adequately backed up by evidence . Aim for at least two examples per claim, and make use of an appendix to reference these.
• When writing up your results, make sure that you stick to only what is relevant . Don’t waste time on data that are not relevant to your research objectives and research questions.
• Use headings and subheadings to create an intuitive, easy to follow piece of writing. Make use of Microsoft Word’s “heading styles” and be sure to use them consistently.
• When referring to numerical data, tables and figures can provide a useful visual aid. When using these, make sure that they can be read and understood independent of your body text (i.e. that they can stand-alone). To this end, use clear, concise labels for each of your tables or figures and make use of colours to code indicate differences or hierarchy.
• Similarly, when you’re writing up your chapter, it can be useful to highlight topics and themes in different colours . This can help you to differentiate between your data if you get a bit overwhelmed and will also help you to ensure that your results flow logically and coherently.

If you have any questions, leave a comment below and we’ll do our best to help. If you’d like 1-on-1 help with your results chapter (or any chapter of your dissertation or thesis), check out our private dissertation coaching service here or book a free initial consultation to discuss how we can help you.

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22 Comments

This was extremely helpful. Thanks a lot guys

Hi, thanks for the great research support platform created by the gradcoach team!

I wanted to ask- While “suggests” or “implies” are interpretive terms, what terms could we use for the results chapter? Could you share some examples of descriptive terms?

I think that instead of saying, ‘The data suggested, or The data implied,’ you can say, ‘The Data showed or revealed, or illustrated or outlined’…If interview data, you may say Jane Doe illuminated or elaborated, or Jane Doe described… or Jane Doe expressed or stated.

I found this article very useful. Thank you very much for the outstanding work you are doing.

What if i have 3 different interviewees answering the same interview questions? Should i then present the results in form of the table with the division on the 3 perspectives or rather give a results in form of the text and highlight who said what?

I think this tabular representation of results is a great idea. I am doing it too along with the text. Thanks

That was helpful was struggling to separate the discussion from the findings

this was very useful, Thank you.

Very helpful, I am confident to write my results chapter now.

It is so helpful! It is a good job. Thank you very much!

Very useful, well explained. Many thanks.

Hello, I appreciate the way you provided a supportive comments about qualitative results presenting tips

I loved this! It explains everything needed, and it has helped me better organize my thoughts. What words should I not use while writing my results section, other than subjective ones.

Thanks a lot, it is really helpful

Thank you so much dear, i really appropriate your nice explanations about this.

Thank you so much for this! I was wondering if anyone could help with how to prproperly integrate quotations (Excerpts) from interviews in the finding chapter in a qualitative research. Please GradCoach, address this issue and provide examples.

what if I’m not doing any interviews myself and all the information is coming from case studies that have already done the research.

Very helpful thank you.

This was very helpful as I was wondering how to structure this part of my dissertation, to include the quotes… Thanks for this explanation

This is very helpful, thanks! I am required to write up my results chapters with the discussion in each of them – any tips and tricks for this strategy?

For qualitative studies, can the findings be structured according to the Research questions? Thank you.

Do I need to include literature/references in my findings chapter?

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How to Write the Dissertation Findings or Results – Tips

Published by Grace Graffin at August 11th, 2021 , Revised On August 13, 2024

Each  part of the dissertation is unique, and some general and specific rules must be followed. The dissertation’s findings section presents the key results of your research without interpreting their meaning .

Theoretically, this is an exciting section of a dissertation because it involves writing what you have observed and found. However, it can be a little tricky if there is too much information to confuse the readers.

The goal is to include only the essential and relevant findings in this section. The results must be presented in an orderly sequence to provide clarity to the readers.

This section of the dissertation should be easy for the readers to follow, so you should avoid going into a lengthy debate over the interpretation of the results.

It is vitally important to focus only on clear and precise observations. The findings chapter of the  dissertation  is theoretically the easiest to write.

It includes  statistical analysis and a brief write-up about whether or not the results emerging from the analysis are significant. This segment should be written in the past sentence as you describe what you have done in the past.

This article will provide detailed information about  how to   write the findings of a dissertation .

When to Write Dissertation Findings Chapter

As soon as you have gathered and analysed your data, you can start to write up the findings chapter of your dissertation paper. Remember that it is your chance to report the most notable findings of your research work and relate them to the research hypothesis  or  research questions set out in  the introduction chapter of the dissertation .

You will be required to separately report your study’s findings before moving on to the discussion chapter  if your dissertation is based on the  collection of primary data  or experimental work.

However, you may not be required to have an independent findings chapter if your dissertation is purely descriptive and focuses on the analysis of case studies or interpretation of texts.

• Always report the findings of your research in the past tense.
• The dissertation findings chapter varies from one project to another, depending on the data collected and analyzed.
• Avoid reporting results that are not relevant to your research questions or research hypothesis.

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1. Reporting Quantitative Findings

The best way to present your quantitative findings is to structure them around the research  hypothesis or  questions you intend to address as part of your dissertation project.

Report the relevant findings for each research question or hypothesis, focusing on how you analyzed them.

Analysis of your findings will help you determine how they relate to the different research questions and whether they support the hypothesis you formulated.

While you must highlight meaningful relationships, variances, and tendencies, it is important not to guess their interpretations and implications because this is something to save for the discussion  and  conclusion  chapters.

Any findings not directly relevant to your research questions or explanations concerning the data collection process  should be added to the dissertation paper’s appendix section.

Use of Figures and Tables in Dissertation Findings

Suppose your dissertation is based on quantitative research. In that case, it is important to include charts, graphs, tables, and other visual elements to help your readers understand the emerging trends and relationships in your findings.

Repeating information will give the impression that you are short on ideas. Refer to all charts, illustrations, and tables in your writing but avoid recurrence.

The text should be used only to elaborate and summarize certain parts of your results. On the other hand, illustrations and tables are used to present multifaceted data.

It is recommended to give descriptive labels and captions to all illustrations used so the readers can figure out what each refers to.

How to Report Quantitative Findings

Here is an example of how to report quantitative results in your dissertation findings chapter;

Two hundred seventeen participants completed both the pretest and post-test and a Pairwise T-test was used for the analysis. The quantitative data analysis reveals a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the pretest and posttest scales from the Teachers Discovering Computers course. The pretest mean was 29.00 with a standard deviation of 7.65, while the posttest mean was 26.50 with a standard deviation of 9.74 (Table 1). These results yield a significance level of .000, indicating a strong treatment effect (see Table 3). With the correlation between the scores being .448, the little relationship is seen between the pretest and posttest scores (Table 2). This leads the researcher to conclude that the impact of the course on the educators’ perception and integration of technology into the curriculum is dramatic.

Paired Samples

Paired Samples Correlation

Paired Samples Test

Also Read: How to Write the Abstract for the Dissertation.

2. Reporting Qualitative Findings

A notable issue with reporting qualitative findings is that not all results directly relate to your research questions or hypothesis.

The best way to present the results of qualitative research is to frame your findings around the most critical areas or themes you obtained after you examined the data.

In-depth data analysis will help you observe what the data shows for each theme. Any developments, relationships, patterns, and independent responses directly relevant to your research question or hypothesis should be mentioned to the readers.

Additional information not directly relevant to your research can be included in the appendix .

How to Report Qualitative Findings

Here is an example of how to report qualitative results in your dissertation findings chapter;

The last question of the interview focused on the need for improvement in Thai ready-to-eat products and the industry at large, emphasizing the need for enhancement in the current products being offered in the market. When asked if there was any particular need for Thai ready-to-eat meals to be improved and how to improve them in case of ‘yes,’ the males replied mainly by saying that the current products need improvement in terms of the use of healthier raw materials and preservatives or additives. There was an agreement amongst all males concerning the need to improve the industry for ready-to-eat meals and the use of more healthy items to prepare such meals. The females were also of the opinion that the fast-food items needed to be improved in the sense that more healthy raw materials such as vegetable oil and unsaturated fats, including whole-wheat products, to overcome risks associated with trans fat leading to obesity and hypertension should be used for the production of RTE products. The frozen RTE meals and packaged snacks included many preservatives and chemical-based flavouring enhancers that harmed human health and needed to be reduced. The industry is said to be aware of this fact and should try to produce RTE products that benefit the community in terms of healthy consumption.

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What to Avoid in Dissertation Findings Chapter

• Avoid using interpretive and subjective phrases and terms such as “confirms,” “reveals,” “suggests,” or “validates.” These terms are more suitable for the discussion chapter , where you will be expected to interpret the results in detail.
• Only briefly explain findings in relation to the key themes, hypothesis, and research questions. You don’t want to write a detailed subjective explanation for any research questions at this stage.

The Do’s of Writing the Findings or Results Section

• Ensure you are not presenting results from other research studies in your findings.
• Observe whether or not your hypothesis is tested or research questions answered.
• Illustrations and tables present data and are labelled to help your readers understand what they relate to.
• Use software such as Excel, STATA, and SPSS to analyse results and important trends.

Essential Guidelines on How to Write Dissertation Findings

The dissertation findings chapter should provide the context for understanding the results. The research problem should be repeated, and the research goals should be stated briefly.

This approach helps to gain the reader’s attention toward the research problem. The first step towards writing the findings is identifying which results will be presented in this section.

The results relevant to the questions must be presented, considering whether the results support the hypothesis. You do not need to include every result in the findings section. The next step is ensuring the data can be appropriately organized and accurate.

You will need to have a basic idea about writing the findings of a dissertation because this will provide you with the knowledge to arrange the data chronologically.

Start each paragraph by writing about the most important results and concluding the section with the most negligible actual results.

A short paragraph can conclude the findings section, summarising the findings so readers will remember as they transition to the next chapter. This is essential if findings are unexpected or unfamiliar or impact the study.

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Be Impartial in your Writing

When crafting your findings, knowing how you will organize the work is important. The findings are the story that needs to be told in response to the research questions that have been answered.

Therefore, the story needs to be organized to make sense to you and the reader. The findings must be compelling and responsive to be linked to the research questions being answered.

Always ensure that the size and direction of any changes, including percentage change, can be mentioned in the section. The details of p values or confidence intervals and limits should be included.

The findings sections only have the relevant parts of the primary evidence mentioned. Still, it is a good practice to include all the primary evidence in an appendix that can be referred to later.

The results should always be written neutrally without speculation or implication. The statement of the results mustn’t have any form of evaluation or interpretation.

Negative results should be added in the findings section because they validate the results and provide high neutrality levels.

The length of the dissertation findings chapter is an important question that must be addressed. It should be noted that the length of the section is directly related to the total word count of your dissertation paper.

The writer should use their discretion in deciding the length of the findings section or refer to the dissertation handbook or structure guidelines.

It should neither belong nor be short nor concise and comprehensive to highlight the reader’s main findings.

Ethically, you should be confident in the findings and provide counter-evidence. Anything that does not have sufficient evidence should be discarded. The findings should respond to the problem presented and provide a solution to those questions.

Structure of the Findings Chapter

The chapter should use appropriate words and phrases to present the results to the readers. Logical sentences should be used, while paragraphs should be linked to produce cohesive work.

You must ensure all the significant results have been added in the section. Recheck after completing the section to ensure no mistakes have been made.

The structure of the findings section is something you may have to be sure of primarily because it will provide the basis for your research work and ensure that the discussions section can be written clearly and proficiently.

One way to arrange the results is to provide a brief synopsis and then explain the essential findings. However, there should be no speculation or explanation of the results, as this will be done in the discussion section.

Another way to arrange the section is to present and explain a result. This can be done for all the results while the section is concluded with an overall synopsis.

This is the preferred method when you are writing more extended dissertations. It can be helpful when multiple results are equally significant. A brief conclusion should be written to link all the results and transition to the discussion section.

Numerous data analysis dissertation examples are available on the Internet, which will help you improve your understanding of writing the dissertation’s findings.

Problems to Avoid When Writing Dissertation Findings

One of the problems to avoid while writing the dissertation findings is reporting background information or explaining the findings. This should be done in the introduction section .

You can always revise the introduction chapter based on the data you have collected if that seems an appropriate thing to do.

Raw data or intermediate calculations should not be added in the findings section. Always ask your professor if raw data needs to be included.

If the data is to be included, then use an appendix or a set of appendices referred to in the text of the findings chapter.

Do not use vague or non-specific phrases in the findings section. It is important to be factual and concise for the reader’s benefit.

The findings section presents the crucial data collected during the research process. It should be presented concisely and clearly to the reader. There should be no interpretation, speculation, or analysis of the data.

The significant results should be categorized systematically with the text used with charts, figures, and tables. Furthermore, avoiding using vague and non-specific words in this section is essential.

It is essential to label the tables and visual material properly. You should also check and proofread the section to avoid mistakes.

The dissertation findings chapter is a critical part of your overall dissertation paper. If you struggle with presenting your results and statistical analysis, our expert dissertation writers can help you get things right. Whether you need help with the entire dissertation paper or individual chapters, our dissertation experts can provide customized dissertation support .

FAQs About Findings of a Dissertation

How do i report quantitative findings.

The best way to present your quantitative findings is to structure them around the research hypothesis or research questions you intended to address as part of your dissertation project. Report the relevant findings for each of the research questions or hypotheses, focusing on how you analyzed them.

How do I report qualitative findings?

The best way to present the qualitative research results is to frame your findings around the most important areas or themes that you obtained after examining the data.

An in-depth analysis of the data will help you observe what the data is showing for each theme. Any developments, relationships, patterns, and independent responses that are directly relevant to your research question or hypothesis should be clearly mentioned for the readers.

Can I use interpretive phrases like ‘it confirms’ in the finding chapter?

No, It is highly advisable to avoid using interpretive and subjective phrases in the finding chapter. These terms are more suitable for the discussion chapter , where you will be expected to provide your interpretation of the results in detail.

Can I report the results from other research papers in my findings chapter?

NO, you must not be presenting results from other research studies in your findings.

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How To Write the Findings Chapter for Qualitative Studies

Writing the findings chapter for qualitative studies is a critical step in the research process. This chapter allows researchers to present their findings, analyze the data collected, and draw conclusions based on the study’s objectives. In this blog post, I’lll explore the purpose, key elements, preparation, writing, and presentation of the findings chapter in qualitative studies.

Introduction: Contextualizing Your Findings

The introductory section serves as the gateway to your qualitative findings chapter. Begin by reiterating your problem statement and research questions, setting the stage for the data that will be presented. Highlighting the purpose of your research is crucial at this point to give context to the reader.

Example: The primary aim of this case study is to explore how educators perceive the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in K-12 education settings. This research seeks to understand the perceptions and experiences of educators who have implemented AI technologies in their classrooms, framed within the context of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK). In this chapter, data are systematically organized into three overarching themes, each comprising sub-themes that provide a nuanced understanding of the participants’ perspectives. The research questions guiding this investigation were: (1) What are educators’ perceptions of the role of AI tools in K-12 classrooms? (2) How do educators navigate the challenges of integrating AI tools into their teaching practices? The answers to these questions are integral to understanding the complex dynamics of AI implementation in educational contexts.  

Overview of Findings

Following this, offer a brief overview of your main findings. While you should not delve into the details here, giving the reader an idea of what to expect can be helpful. Explain the overall structure of your results chapter and how you’ve organized it to maintain coherence and logical flow.

The Heart of the Matter: The Body of Your Chapter

Presentation.

The body of the chapter is where you lay out your data for the reader. In qualitative research, this usually means dividing your data into themes or categories, which should be clearly described and substantiated with quotes and examples from your dataset. These themes provide the skeletal framework upon which your narrative is built.

Structure and Flow

When planning your qualitative findings chapter, carefully outline the sections and subsections to maintain the flow of the writing and improve readability. You can structure your chapter based on themes, which is often the case in qualitative research, but other formats like chronological or framework-based structures may be more appropriate depending on your specific research design.

✅ Consistency is Key: Make sure each portion of findings adheres to a standardized structure. This enhances consistency and enables the reader to follow your line of reasoning.

Objective and Descriptive Language

While your narrative might touch upon individual experiences and perspectives, remember to maintain an objective tone. Your task is to describe, not interpret—that comes later, in the Discussion chapter. Thus, avoid phrases that suggest interpretation, such as “suggests” or “implies.”

Visual Aids

Tables, figures, and other visual aids can add another layer of comprehension and break up the text, but make sure they can be understood independently of your body text. Label them clearly and use color coding judiciously to indicate differences or hierarchy.

Data Analysis and Interpretation

As you delve into the data, aim to narrate a coherent story. Interpret your findings in light of the literature in the field and your theoretical framework, but remember to clearly differentiate between your descriptions and your interpretations.

✅ References and Appendices: When using quotes or data excerpts, reference them appropriately. Use appendices to present additional data and ensure that you cite them according to the referencing style prescribed by your institution (e.g., APA, Harvard).

Bringing It All Together: The Concluding Summary

This is the section where you summarize your key findings in a concise manner, reiterating points that directly relate to your research questions. It serves as a stepping stone to the Discussion chapter, providing the reader with the essential takeaways. As a rule of thumb, this section should contain no new information.

Additional Tips and Tricks

– Write in the past tense, as you present findings that have already been gathered.

– Review your work multiple times, ensuring each theme or finding is backed by sufficient data.

– Use Microsoft Word’s “heading styles” for consistency.

Final Thoughts

With the right approach, writing the Findings chapter can be an enriching experience that showcases your research and prepares you for discussions and conclusions that follow. The tips and guidelines presented here are meant to make this crucial chapter as clear and impactful as possible, helping you make a valuable contribution to your field of study.

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Author:  Jessica Parker, EdD

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• How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples

How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples

Published on 27 October 2016 by Bas Swaen . Revised on 25 October 2022 by Tegan George.

A results section is where you report the main findings of the data collection and analysis you conducted for your thesis or dissertation . You should report all relevant results concisely and objectively, in a logical order. Don’t include subjective interpretations of why you found these results or what they mean – any evaluation should be saved for the discussion section .

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Table of contents

How to write a results section, reporting quantitative research results, reporting qualitative research results, results vs discussion vs conclusion, checklist: research results, frequently asked questions about results sections.

When conducting research, it’s important to report the results of your study prior to discussing your interpretations of it. This gives your reader a clear idea of exactly what you found and keeps the data itself separate from your subjective analysis.

Here are a few best practices:

• Your results should always be written in the past tense.
• While the length of this section depends on how much data you collected and analysed, it should be written as concisely as possible.
• Only include results that are directly relevant to answering your research questions . Avoid speculative or interpretative words like ‘appears’ or ‘implies’.
• If you have other results you’d like to include, consider adding them to an appendix or footnotes.
• Always start out with your broadest results first, and then flow into your more granular (but still relevant) ones. Think of it like a shoe shop: first discuss the shoes as a whole, then the trainers, boots, sandals, etc.

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If you conducted quantitative research , you’ll likely be working with the results of some sort of statistical analysis .

Your results section should report the results of any statistical tests you used to compare groups or assess relationships between variables . It should also state whether or not each hypothesis was supported.

The most logical way to structure quantitative results is to frame them around your research questions or hypotheses. For each question or hypothesis, share:

• A reminder of the type of analysis you used (e.g., a two-sample t test or simple linear regression ). A more detailed description of your analysis should go in your methodology section.
• A concise summary of each relevant result, both positive and negative. This can include any relevant descriptive statistics (e.g., means and standard deviations ) as well as inferential statistics (e.g., t scores, degrees of freedom , and p values ). Remember, these numbers are often placed in parentheses.
• A brief statement of how each result relates to the question, or whether the hypothesis was supported. You can briefly mention any results that didn’t fit with your expectations and assumptions, but save any speculation on their meaning or consequences for your discussion  and conclusion.

A note on tables and figures

In quantitative research, it’s often helpful to include visual elements such as graphs, charts, and tables , but only if they are directly relevant to your results. Give these elements clear, descriptive titles and labels so that your reader can easily understand what is being shown. If you want to include any other visual elements that are more tangential in nature, consider adding a figure and table list .

As a rule of thumb:

• Tables are used to communicate exact values, giving a concise overview of various results
• Graphs and charts are used to visualise trends and relationships, giving an at-a-glance illustration of key findings

Don’t forget to also mention any tables and figures you used within the text of your results section. Summarise or elaborate on specific aspects you think your reader should know about rather than merely restating the same numbers already shown.

Figure 1: Intention to donate to environmental organisations based on social distance from impact of environmental damage.

In qualitative research , your results might not all be directly related to specific hypotheses. In this case, you can structure your results section around key themes or topics that emerged from your analysis of the data.

For each theme, start with general observations about what the data showed. You can mention:

• Recurring points of agreement or disagreement
• Patterns and trends
• Particularly significant snippets from individual responses

Next, clarify and support these points with direct quotations. Be sure to report any relevant demographic information about participants. Further information (such as full transcripts , if appropriate) can be included in an appendix .

‘I think that in role-playing games, there’s more attention to character design, to world design, because the whole story is important and more attention is paid to certain game elements […] so that perhaps you do need bigger teams of creative experts than in an average shooter or something.’

Responses suggest that video game consumers consider some types of games to have more artistic potential than others.

Your results section should objectively report your findings, presenting only brief observations in relation to each question, hypothesis, or theme.

It should not  speculate about the meaning of the results or attempt to answer your main research question . Detailed interpretation of your results is more suitable for your discussion section , while synthesis of your results into an overall answer to your main research question is best left for your conclusion .

I have completed my data collection and analyzed the results.

I have included all results that are relevant to my research questions.

I have concisely and objectively reported each result, including relevant descriptive statistics and inferential statistics .

I have stated whether each hypothesis was supported or refuted.

I have used tables and figures to illustrate my results where appropriate.

All tables and figures are correctly labelled and referred to in the text.

There is no subjective interpretation or speculation on the meaning of the results.

You've finished writing up your results! Use the other checklists to further improve your thesis.

The results chapter of a thesis or dissertation presents your research results concisely and objectively.

In quantitative research , for each question or hypothesis , state:

• The type of analysis used
• Relevant results in the form of descriptive and inferential statistics
• Whether or not the alternative hypothesis was supported

In qualitative research , for each question or theme, describe:

• Recurring patterns
• Significant or representative individual responses
• Relevant quotations from the data

Don’t interpret or speculate in the results chapter.

Results are usually written in the past tense , because they are describing the outcome of completed actions.

The results chapter or section simply and objectively reports what you found, without speculating on why you found these results. The discussion interprets the meaning of the results, puts them in context, and explains why they matter.

In qualitative research , results and discussion are sometimes combined. But in quantitative research , it’s considered important to separate the objective results from your interpretation of them.

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How to Write a Discussion Section | Tips & Examples

Published on August 21, 2022 by Shona McCombes . Revised on July 18, 2023.

The discussion section is where you delve into the meaning, importance, and relevance of your results .

It should focus on explaining and evaluating what you found, showing how it relates to your literature review and paper or dissertation topic , and making an argument in support of your overall conclusion. It should not be a second results section.

There are different ways to write this section, but you can focus your writing around these key elements:

• Summary : A brief recap of your key results
• Interpretations: What do your results mean?
• Implications: Why do your results matter?
• Limitations: What can’t your results tell us?
• Recommendations: Avenues for further studies or analyses

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Table of contents

What not to include in your discussion section, step 1: summarize your key findings, step 2: give your interpretations, step 3: discuss the implications, step 4: acknowledge the limitations, step 5: share your recommendations, discussion section example, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about discussion sections.

There are a few common mistakes to avoid when writing the discussion section of your paper.

• Don’t introduce new results: You should only discuss the data that you have already reported in your results section .
• Don’t make inflated claims: Avoid overinterpretation and speculation that isn’t directly supported by your data.
• Don’t undermine your research: The discussion of limitations should aim to strengthen your credibility, not emphasize weaknesses or failures.

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Start this section by reiterating your research problem and concisely summarizing your major findings. To speed up the process you can use a summarizer to quickly get an overview of all important findings. Don’t just repeat all the data you have already reported—aim for a clear statement of the overall result that directly answers your main research question . This should be no more than one paragraph.

Many students struggle with the differences between a discussion section and a results section . The crux of the matter is that your results sections should present your results, and your discussion section should subjectively evaluate them. Try not to blend elements of these two sections, in order to keep your paper sharp.

• The results indicate that…
• The study demonstrates a correlation between…
• This analysis supports the theory that…
• The data suggest that…

The meaning of your results may seem obvious to you, but it’s important to spell out their significance for your reader, showing exactly how they answer your research question.

The form of your interpretations will depend on the type of research, but some typical approaches to interpreting the data include:

• Identifying correlations , patterns, and relationships among the data
• Discussing whether the results met your expectations or supported your hypotheses
• Contextualizing your findings within previous research and theory
• Explaining unexpected results and evaluating their significance
• Considering possible alternative explanations and making an argument for your position

You can organize your discussion around key themes, hypotheses, or research questions, following the same structure as your results section. Alternatively, you can also begin by highlighting the most significant or unexpected results.

• In line with the hypothesis…
• Contrary to the hypothesized association…
• The results contradict the claims of Smith (2022) that…
• The results might suggest that x . However, based on the findings of similar studies, a more plausible explanation is y .

As well as giving your own interpretations, make sure to relate your results back to the scholarly work that you surveyed in the literature review . The discussion should show how your findings fit with existing knowledge, what new insights they contribute, and what consequences they have for theory or practice.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do your results support or challenge existing theories? If they support existing theories, what new information do they contribute? If they challenge existing theories, why do you think that is?
• Are there any practical implications?

Your overall aim is to show the reader exactly what your research has contributed, and why they should care.

• These results build on existing evidence of…
• The results do not fit with the theory that…
• The experiment provides a new insight into the relationship between…
• These results should be taken into account when considering how to…
• The data contribute a clearer understanding of…
• While previous research has focused on  x , these results demonstrate that y .

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Even the best research has its limitations. Acknowledging these is important to demonstrate your credibility. Limitations aren’t about listing your errors, but about providing an accurate picture of what can and cannot be concluded from your study.

Limitations might be due to your overall research design, specific methodological choices , or unanticipated obstacles that emerged during your research process.

Here are a few common possibilities:

• If your sample size was small or limited to a specific group of people, explain how generalizability is limited.
• If you encountered problems when gathering or analyzing data, explain how these influenced the results.
• If there are potential confounding variables that you were unable to control, acknowledge the effect these may have had.

After noting the limitations, you can reiterate why the results are nonetheless valid for the purpose of answering your research question.

• The generalizability of the results is limited by…
• The reliability of these data is impacted by…
• Due to the lack of data on x , the results cannot confirm…
• The methodological choices were constrained by…
• It is beyond the scope of this study to…

Based on the discussion of your results, you can make recommendations for practical implementation or further research. Sometimes, the recommendations are saved for the conclusion .

Suggestions for further research can lead directly from the limitations. Don’t just state that more studies should be done—give concrete ideas for how future work can build on areas that your own research was unable to address.

• Further research is needed to establish…
• Future studies should take into account…
• Avenues for future research include…

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In the discussion , you explore the meaning and relevance of your research results , explaining how they fit with existing research and theory. Discuss:

• Your  interpretations : what do the results tell us?
• The  implications : why do the results matter?
• The  limitation s : what can’t the results tell us?

The results chapter or section simply and objectively reports what you found, without speculating on why you found these results. The discussion interprets the meaning of the results, puts them in context, and explains why they matter.

In qualitative research , results and discussion are sometimes combined. But in quantitative research , it’s considered important to separate the objective results from your interpretation of them.

In a thesis or dissertation, the discussion is an in-depth exploration of the results, going into detail about the meaning of your findings and citing relevant sources to put them in context.

The conclusion is more shorter and more general: it concisely answers your main research question and makes recommendations based on your overall findings.

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Best Way To Include An Interview In A Dissertation​

In relation to interviews, using quotes from interviews, mentioning the interviewee’s name.

• Is it okay if you mention the name? Before including the interviewee’s name in a dissertation, you should ask yourself this question. Determine if the name may be mentioned in consultation with the interviewee. In some cases, the interviewee does not wish to be interviewed. This could be the case if you’ve had an interview with an employee and the employee doesn’t want his or her employer to be able to read the answers since it might jeopardize their working relationship. Another scenario in which this can happen is when the interviewer asks really intimate questions.
• Is it necessary to mention the name? The second consideration is whether or not it is necessary to mention the name. Is there anything it adds to your research? The name of the interviewee is less significant when the interviewee is an unknown individual you encountered on the street. However, if you’ve spoken with the CEO of a significant corporation, it’s important to include his or her name. In the second situation, include a brief introduction so that the dissertation reader understands who this individual is right away.

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Presenting your qualitative analysis findings: tables to include in chapter 4.

The earliest stages of developing a doctoral dissertation—most specifically the topic development  and literature review  stages—require that you immerse yourself in a ton of existing research related to your potential topic. If you have begun writing your dissertation proposal, you have undoubtedly reviewed countless results and findings sections of studies in order to help gain an understanding of what is currently known about your topic. 

In this process, we’re guessing that you observed a distinct pattern: Results sections are full of tables. Indeed, the results chapter for your own dissertation will need to be similarly packed with tables. So, if you’re preparing to write up the results of your statistical analysis or qualitative analysis, it will probably help to review your APA editing  manual to brush up on your table formatting skills. But, aside from formatting, how should you develop the tables in your results chapter?

In quantitative studies, tables are a handy way of presenting the variety of statistical analysis results in a form that readers can easily process. You’ve probably noticed that quantitative studies present descriptive results like mean, mode, range, standard deviation, etc., as well the inferential results that indicate whether significant relationships or differences were found through the statistical analysis . These are pretty standard tables that you probably learned about in your pre-dissertation statistics courses.

But, what if you are conducting qualitative analysis? What tables are appropriate for this type of study? This is a question we hear often from our dissertation assistance  clients, and with good reason. University guidelines for results chapters often contain vague instructions that guide you to include “appropriate tables” without specifying what exactly those are. To help clarify on this point, we asked our qualitative analysis experts to share their recommendations for tables to include in your Chapter 4.

Demographics Tables

As with studies using quantitative methods , presenting an overview of your sample demographics is useful in studies that use qualitative research methods. The standard demographics table in a quantitative study provides aggregate information for what are often large samples. In other words, such tables present totals and percentages for demographic categories within the sample that are relevant to the study (e.g., age, gender, job title). 

If conducting qualitative research  for your dissertation, however, you will use a smaller sample and obtain richer data from each participant than in quantitative studies. To enhance thick description—a dimension of trustworthiness—it will help to present sample demographics in a table that includes information on each participant. Remember that ethical standards of research require that all participant information be deidentified, so use participant identification numbers or pseudonyms for each participant, and do not present any personal information that would allow others to identify the participant (Blignault & Ritchie, 2009). Table 1 provides participant demographics for a hypothetical qualitative research study exploring the perspectives of persons who were formerly homeless regarding their experiences of transitioning into stable housing and obtaining employment.

Participant Demographics

Tables to Illustrate Initial Codes

Most of our dissertation consulting clients who are conducting qualitative research choose a form of thematic analysis . Qualitative analysis to identify themes in the data typically involves a progression from (a) identifying surface-level codes to (b) developing themes by combining codes based on shared similarities. As this process is inherently subjective, it is important that readers be able to evaluate the correspondence between the data and your findings (Anfara et al., 2002). This supports confirmability, another dimension of trustworthiness .

A great way to illustrate the trustworthiness of your qualitative analysis is to create a table that displays quotes from the data that exemplify each of your initial codes. Providing a sample quote for each of your codes can help the reader to assess whether your coding was faithful to the meanings in the data, and it can also help to create clarity about each code’s meaning and bring the voices of your participants into your work (Blignault & Ritchie, 2009).

Table 2 is an example of how you might present information regarding initial codes. Depending on your preference or your dissertation committee’s preference, you might also present percentages of the sample that expressed each code. Another common piece of information to include is which actual participants expressed each code. Note that if your qualitative analysis yields a high volume of codes, it may be appropriate to present the table as an appendix.

Initial Codes

Tables to Present the Groups of Codes That Form Each Theme

As noted previously, most of our dissertation assistance clients use a thematic analysis approach, which involves multiple phases of qualitative analysis  that eventually result in themes that answer the dissertation’s research questions. After initial coding is completed, the analysis process involves (a) examining what different codes have in common and then (b) grouping similar codes together in ways that are meaningful given your research questions. In other words, the common threads that you identify across multiple codes become the theme that holds them all together—and that theme answers one of your research questions.

As with initial coding, grouping codes together into themes involves your own subjective interpretations, even when aided by qualitative analysis software such as NVivo  or MAXQDA. In fact, our dissertation assistance clients are often surprised to learn that qualitative analysis software does not complete the analysis in the same ways that statistical analysis software such as SPSS does. While statistical analysis software completes the computations for you, qualitative analysis software does not have such analysis capabilities. Software such as NVivo provides a set of organizational tools that make the qualitative analysis far more convenient, but the analysis itself is still a very human process (Burnard et al., 2008).

Because of the subjective nature of qualitative analysis, it is important to show the underlying logic behind your thematic analysis in tables—such tables help readers to assess the trustworthiness of your analysis. Table 3 provides an example of how to present the codes that were grouped together to create themes, and you can modify the specifics of the table based on your preferences or your dissertation committee’s requirements. For example, this type of table might be presented to illustrate the codes associated with themes that answer each research question. 

Grouping of Initial Codes to Form Themes

Tables to Illustrate the Themes That Answer Each Research Question

Creating alignment throughout your dissertation is an important objective, and to maintain alignment in your results chapter, the themes you present must clearly answer your research questions. Conducting qualitative analysis is an in-depth process of immersion in the data, and many of our dissertation consulting  clients have shared that it’s easy to lose your direction during the process. So, it is important to stay focused on your research questions during the qualitative analysis and also to show the reader exactly which themes—and subthemes, as applicable—answered each of the research questions.

Below, Table 4 provides an example of how to display the thematic findings of your study in table form. Depending on your dissertation committee’s preference or your own, you might present all research questions and all themes and subthemes in a single table. Or, you might provide separate tables to introduce the themes for each research question as you progress through your presentation of the findings in the chapter.

Emergent Themes and Research Questions

Bonus Tip! Figures to Spice Up Your Results

Although dissertation committees most often wish to see tables such as the above in qualitative results chapters, some also like to see figures that illustrate the data. Qualitative software packages such as NVivo offer many options for visualizing your data, such as mind maps, concept maps, charts, and cluster diagrams. A common choice for this type of figure among our dissertation assistance clients is a tree diagram, which shows the connections between specified words and the words or phrases that participants shared most often in the same context. Another common choice of figure is the word cloud, as depicted in Figure 1. The word cloud simply reflects frequencies of words in the data, which may provide an indication of the importance of related concepts for the participants.

As you move forward with your qualitative analysis and development of your results chapter, we hope that this brief overview of useful tables and figures helps you to decide on an ideal presentation to showcase the trustworthiness your findings. Completing a rigorous qualitative analysis for your dissertation requires many hours of careful interpretation of your data, and your end product should be a rich and detailed results presentation that you can be proud of. Reach out if we can help  in any way, as our dissertation coaches would be thrilled to assist as you move through this exciting stage of your dissertation journey!

Anfara Jr., V. A., Brown, K. M., & Mangione, T. L. (2002). Qualitative analysis on stage: Making the research process more public.  Educational Researcher ,  31 (7), 28-38. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X031007028

Blignault, I., & Ritchie, J. (2009). Revealing the wood and the trees: Reporting qualitative research.  Health Promotion Journal of Australia ,  20 (2), 140-145. https://doi.org/10.1071/HE09140

Burnard, P., Gill, P., Stewart, K., Treasure, E., & Chadwick, B. (2008). Analysing and presenting qualitative data.  British Dental Journal ,  204 (8), 429-432. https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.bdj.2008.292

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Dissertation findings and discussion sections

(Last updated: 2 March 2020)

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Granted that at some point in the discussion you are going to have to link back to this previous research. But you still have the opportunity to demonstrate how you have met that coveted gap in the research and generally made a useful contribution to knowledge.

There are many ways to write up both your findings and discussion. In shorter dissertations, it might make sense to have both of these comprise one section. In longer pieces of work, these chapters are usually separate.

Preparing to write

We also assume that you have used some sort of software program to help you with the organisation of your findings. If you have not completed this process, you must do so before beginning to write. If not, your findings chapter may end up a confusing and unorganised mess of random information. If you need help in this area, make sure to seek it out before beginning to put your findings down on paper.

One of the main issues that students tend to encounter when writing up their findings is the amount of data to include. By the end of the research process, you've probably collected very large amounts of data . Not all of this can possibly appear in your dissertation without completely overwhelming the reader. As a result, you need to be able to make smart decisions about what to include and what to leave out.

One of the easiest ways to approach this task is to create an outline. In approaching the outline, it is in your best interest to focus on two key points. Firstly, you need to focus on answering your research questions. Secondly, you must include any particularly interesting findings that have cropped up as you completed your research.

An outline will give you the structure you need, and should make the whole process of presenting your findings easier. We realise that it is going to be a difficult process to pick and choose pieces of data to include. But you must be diligent in the work that you cut out. A findings chapter that is long and confusing is going to put the reader off reading the rest of your work.

Introducing your findings

It can be up to 40% of the total word count within your dissertation writing . This is a huge chunk of information, so it's essential that it is clearly organised and that the reader knows what is supposed to be happening. One of the ways you can achieve this is through a logical and organised introduction.

There are four main components that your introduction should include:

Reminding the reader of what you set out to do

A brief description of how you intend approaching the write up of the results

Placing the research in context

Letting the reader know where they can find the research instruments (i.e. the Appendix)

With a findings chapter, there should be no suspense for the reader. You need to tell them what they need to know right from the beginning. This way, they'll have a clear idea about what is still to come. A good introduction will start by telling the reader where you have come from in the research process and what the outcome was (in a couple of paragraphs or less).

You need to highlight the structure of the chapter (as you generally will do with all chapters) and where the reader might find any further information (e.g. in the appendices).

Organisation of data

This is really going to depend on the type of project you have created .

For example, if you have completed a qualitative research project, you might have identified some key themes within the software program you used to organise your data. In this case, highlighting these themes in your findings chapter may be the most appropriate way to proceed. Not only are you using information that you have already documented, you are telling a story in each of your sections (which can be useful in qualitative research).

But what if you undertook a more quantitative type study? You might be better off structuring your findings chapter in relation to your research questions or your hypotheses. This assumes, of course, that you have more than one research question or hypothesis. Otherwise you would end up just having one really long section.

This brings us to our next student mistake – trying to do too much within one section.

Subheadings are ultimately going to be your friend throughout your dissertation writing . Not only do they organise your information into logical pieces, they give the reader guidelines for where your research might be going. This is also a break for the reader. Looking at pages and pages of text without any breaks can be daunting and overwhelming for a reader. You don't want to overwhelm someone who is going to mark your work and who is responsible for your success (or failure).

When writing your introduction, be clear, organised and methodical. Tell the reader what they need to know and try to organise the information in a way that makes the most sense to you and your project. If in doubt, discuss this with your supervisor before you start writing.

Presentation of qualitative data

If you have conducted things like interviews or observations, you are likely to have transcripts that encompass pages and pages of work.

Putting this all together cohesively within one chapter can be particularly challenging. This is true for two reasons. First, it is always difficult to determine what you are going to cut and/or include. Secondly, unlike quantitative data, it can often be difficult to represent qualitative data through figures and tables, so condensing the information into a visual representation is simply not possible. As a writer, it is important to address both these challenges.

When considering how to present your qualitative data, it may be helpful to begin with the initial outline you have created (and the one described above). Within each of your subsections, you are going to have themes or headings that represent impactful talking points that you want to focus on.

Once you have these headings, it might be helpful to go back to your data and highlight specific lines that can/might be used as examples in your writing. If you have used multiple different instruments to collect data (e.g. interviews and observations), you are going to want to ensure that you are using both examples within each section (if possible). This is so that you can demonstrate to more well-rounded perspective of the points you are trying to make. Once you have identified some key examples for each section, you might still have to do some further cutting/editing.

Once you have your examples firmly selected for each subsection, you want to ensure that you are including enough information. This way, the reader will understand the context and circumstances around what you are trying to ‘prove’. You must set up the examples you have chosen in a clear and coherent way.

Students often make the mistake of including quotations without any other information. It is important that you embed your quotes/examples within your own thoughts. Usually this means writing about the example both before and after. So you might say something like, “One of the main topics that my participants highlighted was the need for more teachers in elementary schools. This was a focal point for 7 of my 12 participants, and examples of their responses included: [insert example] by participant 3 and [insert example] by participant 9. The reoccurring focus by participants on the need for more teachers demonstrates [insert critical thought here]. By embedding your examples in the context, you are essentially highlighting to the reader what you want them to remember.

Aside from determining what to include, the presentation of such data is also essential. Participants, when speaking in an interview might not do so in a linear way. Instead they might jump from one thought to another and might go off topic here and there.

It is your job to present the reader with information on your theme/heading without including all the extra information. So the quotes need to be paired down to incorporate enough information for the reader to be able to understand, while removing the excess.

Finding this balance can be challenging. You have likely worked with the data for a long time and so it might make sense to you. Try to see your writing through the eyes of someone else, which should help you write more clearly.

Presentation of quantitative data

Something to consider first with numeric data is that presentation style depends what department you are submitting to. In the hard sciences, there is likely an expectation of heavy numeric input and corresponding statistics to accompany the findings. In the arts and humanities, however, such a detailed analysis might not be as common. Therefore as you write out your quantitative findings, take your audience into consideration.

Just like with the qualitative data, you must ensure that your data is appropriately organised. Again, you've likely used a software program to run your statistical analysis, and you have an outline and subheadings where you can focus your findings. There are many software programs available and it is important that you have used one that is most relevant to your field of study.

For some, Microsoft Excel may be sufficient for basic analysis. Others may rely on SPSS, Stata, R, or any of the other programs available through your institution or online. Whatever program you have used, make sure that you document what you have done and the variables that have affected your analysis.

One common mistake found in student writing is the presentation of the statistical analysis. During your analysis of the data, you are likely to have run multiple different analyses from regressions to correlations. Often, we see students presenting multiple different statistical analyses without any real understanding of what the tests mean.

Presentation of quantitative data is more than just about numbers and tables. You must explain your findings and justify why you have run/presented the tests that you have. You could also explain how they relate to the research question. However, depending on how you have organised your work, this might end up in the discussion section.

Students who are not confident with statistical analysis often have a tendency to revert back to their secondary school mathematics skills. They commonly document the mean, median, and mode for all of their results. Now, these three outcomes can be important. But having a good understanding of why you are proceeding with this strategy of analysis is going to be essential in a primarily quantitative study.

That noted, there are different expectations for an undergraduate dissertation and a PhD thesis, so knowing what these expectations are can be really helpful before you begin.

Presentation of graphs, tables, and figures

The first is the use of colour and/or variables. Depending on the presentation of your dissertation, you may be required to print out a final copy for the marker(s). In many cases, this final copy must be printed in black and white. This means that any figures or graphs that you create must be readable in a black and white (or greyscale) format.

This can be challenging because there are only so many distinct shades of grey. In a pie chart, you might show one section as purple and the other as green. Yet when printed, both the purple and the green translate to approximately the same shade of grey, making your graph suddenly unreadable.

Another common error is overwhelming the reader with graphs and tables. Let's think about your outline and subheadings. If you're including a table under each subheadings, it needs to be relevant to the information that is being discussed in that chapter. There is no correct or incorrect number of graphs that should exist within the section, but you should use your judgement about what looks appropriate.

The final mistake we see is the duplication of writing (or absence of writing) when presenting a graph. Some students will present their findings in a graph or table and then write out this information again below the graph. This defeats the entire purpose of using the graph in the first place. So avoid this at all times.

Conversely, other students sometimes include a graph or figure but nothing else. Doing this denies the reader of context or purpose of said graph or figure. At some point, a balance needs to be struck where the reader has the information they require to really understand the point being made within the section.

Analysis and synthesis in a discussion

The purpose of a discussion chapter.

The structure of your discussion chapter is really going to depend on what you are trying to do and how you have structured your findings. If you chose to structure your findings by theme, it might make sense to continue this into the analysis chapter.

Other people might structure it according to the research questions. This clearly indicates to the reader how you have addressed your study. Marking a dissertation usually requires the marker to comment on the extent to which the research questions have been addressed. So by structuring a dissertation that lays out each research question for the marker, you are making their job easier. Needless to say, this a great thing.

Like any other chapter in your thesis, an introduction is an essential component of your discussion. By this point, the reader has gone through your findings and is now looking for your interpretation. Therefore, at the end of your discussion introduction you should highlight the content that each of the subsections will cover.

A conclusion to your discussion section (or a chapter summary) is also going to be beneficial. The length of the analysis chapter is usually quite long, so a wrap up of the key points at the end can help the reader digest your work. It can also help ensure that the reader actually understands the points you are trying to highlight within your project.

Critical thinking

Without any critical thinking, you are really doing yourself a disservice. It will affect the mark that you obtain on your overall dissertation. This is why the analysis chapter is usually weighted quite heavily on the marking rubric.

We tell students about critical thinking and the importance of it on a daily basis. And yet, there does seem to be a general confusion about what critical thinking entails, i.e. what constitutes critical thinking versus what is a simple description.

Critical thinking asks you to provide your own opinion on your topic, which can be daunting at first. For much of your academic career, you've likely been asked to use research to justify a position that has already been set. Unlike critical thinking, this requires you to use other people’s ideas. But even if you're new to it, try and get to grips with what critical thinking entails and use it in your work.

Creating sub-sections

Subheadings need to be informative but not too long. It is possible to layer your subheadings, so you might have a Chapter 2, a Section 2.1 and then a 2.1.1 and 2.2.2. Usually anything after 3 numerical points does not get a number and would not appear in your table of contents.

When creating titles for your subheadings, consider how they are going to look in the table of contents. They need to fit on one line, ideally, so putting your research question as the subheading might end up being too long. Conversely, one- or two-word subheadings usually doesn't give enough information about the purpose of the section.

Finding this balance is important. But remember you can always edit your subheadings retrospectively.

Linking to previous chapters

Ideally, you will be able to concisely and effectively link your research to what has been researched previously. But this can be a challenge. You don't want to repeat what has been said in your literature review or the findings . But you need to pull examples from both of these sections in order to make the points that you need to.

So, how do you tackle this?

One way is by referring the reader back to previous chapters, sections, or subsections. This process can generally be done at the end. You can put in a place holder until you know how your sections will be numbered. For example you might write: “In Section XYZ, the theme of … was discussed. Findings from this study indicate…. (see Section XYZ for details)”. While ‘XYZ’ is obviously not going to be the same section, by using the same abbreviation, you can then search ‘XYZ’ after you have completed writing and replace each term with the appropriate number. This also makes the proofreading process easier.

If you are submitting an electronic version of this document, you may also consider hyperlinks to take the reader to the different sections. But be aware that this can be considerably more work, so you should allow for this in your timescale if it's something you wish to implement.

Let's outline the main takeaway points:

It is essential that you keep in mind the ‘describe, analyse, synthesise’ model.

The findings chapter is essentially the describe part. You need to ensure that you have clearly identified data that relates to your research questions, hypotheses, or themes of your study.

For the ‘describe’ component, you are not looking to support your work with other research, but rather to present your contribution. It is also important to consider your data in the ‘describe’ section. If you have qualitative data, ensure that you have edited the quotes and examples to a reasonable length. Pick quotes that accurately represent your theme. Try not to focus solely on one or two participants (if possible). Ensure that you are demonstrating links between multiple instruments, if you used them.

If you are using quantitative data, be careful about how many statistical tests you run. Make sure you can justify why you chose one particular test over another. When presenting graphs, use a colour scheme that's appropriate for the reader when printing in black and white. Ensure that graphs and tables are appropriately explained, but that the information provided is not duplicated.

From the ‘describe’ element, you move into the 'analysis' and 'synthesis'. These parts usually appear in the discussion and ask you to employ your critical thinking skills to demonstrate how your research fits into the bigger picture. It is often the case that your analysis holds the most weight in the marking scheme. So you should spend considerable time ensuring this section is appropriate. It needs to demonstrate how you have attempted to answer your research questions.

Finally, create an outline before you begin. While this might seem tedious at first, filling in the sections with the appropriate information will mean that you are not writing things over and over again. It'll also make sure you do not go wildly off topic. It is always beneficial to have a second set of eyes assess your work for any errors or omissions. Many students choose to contact professional editors to help with this as they hold the relevant expertise to guide you on the correct path to creating a perfect discussion section that is ready for submission.

In terms of presentation, both the findings and discussion chapters will benefit from a clear and logical introduction and chapter summary. Remember that both of these chapters are meant to inform. You are leading the reader on a journey, so make sure they stay on the path and arrive at the final destination with you!

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5 Writing Up the Research Findings

• Published: October 2022
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A common problem in qualitative interviewing concerns how to reduce or condense the often large amounts of data in interview studies. Chapter 5, on writing up the research findings, uses this problem as a springboard for describing more generally how to report research findings in ways that are both compelling and rigorous. The chapter refers to examples of findings that are based on theoretical readings of qualitative data and also discusses ways of presenting findings that are much freer from social science theory. There are numerous ways of writing up the findings, among them ways that make use of inductive, deductive, and abductive strategies, which are all discussed. The chapter also advocates the use of displays, which are graphic presentations of large amounts of data in ways that include what is central and makes transparent what has been left out.

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• LEARNING SKILLS
• Writing a Dissertation or Thesis
• Results and Discussion

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Writing your Dissertation:  Results and Discussion

When writing a dissertation or thesis, the results and discussion sections can be both the most interesting as well as the most challenging sections to write.

You may choose to write these sections separately, or combine them into a single chapter, depending on your university’s guidelines and your own preferences.

There are advantages to both approaches.

Writing the results and discussion as separate sections allows you to focus first on what results you obtained and set out clearly what happened in your experiments and/or investigations without worrying about their implications.This can focus your mind on what the results actually show and help you to sort them in your head.

However, many people find it easier to combine the results with their implications as the two are closely connected.

Check your university’s requirements carefully before combining the results and discussions sections as some specify that they must be kept separate.

Results Section

The Results section should set out your key experimental results, including any statistical analysis and whether or not the results of these are significant.

You should cover any literature supporting your interpretation of significance. It does not have to include everything you did, particularly for a doctorate dissertation. However, for an undergraduate or master's thesis, you will probably find that you need to include most of your work.

You should write your results section in the past tense: you are describing what you have done in the past.

Every result included MUST have a method set out in the methods section. Check back to make sure that you have included all the relevant methods.

Conversely, every method should also have some results given so, if you choose to exclude certain experiments from the results, make sure that you remove mention of the method as well.

If you are unsure whether to include certain results, go back to your research questions and decide whether the results are relevant to them. It doesn’t matter whether they are supportive or not, it’s about relevance. If they are relevant, you should include them.

Having decided what to include, next decide what order to use. You could choose chronological, which should follow the methods, or in order from most to least important in the answering of your research questions, or by research question and/or hypothesis.

You also need to consider how best to present your results: tables, figures, graphs, or text. Try to use a variety of different methods of presentation, and consider your reader: 20 pages of dense tables are hard to understand, as are five pages of graphs, but a single table and well-chosen graph that illustrate your overall findings will make things much clearer.

Make sure that each table and figure has a number and a title. Number tables and figures in separate lists, but consecutively by the order in which you mention them in the text. If you have more than about two or three, it’s often helpful to provide lists of tables and figures alongside the table of contents at the start of your dissertation.

Summarise your results in the text, drawing on the figures and tables to illustrate your points.

The text and figures should be complementary, not repeat the same information. You should refer to every table or figure in the text. Any that you don’t feel the need to refer to can safely be moved to an appendix, or even removed.

Make sure that you including information about the size and direction of any changes, including percentage change if appropriate. Statistical tests should include details of p values or confidence intervals and limits.

While you don’t need to include all your primary evidence in this section, you should as a matter of good practice make it available in an appendix, to which you should refer at the relevant point.

For example:

Details of all the interview participants can be found in Appendix A, with transcripts of each interview in Appendix B.

You will, almost inevitably, find that you need to include some slight discussion of your results during this section. This discussion should evaluate the quality of the results and their reliability, but not stray too far into discussion of how far your results support your hypothesis and/or answer your research questions, as that is for the discussion section.

See our pages: Analysing Qualitative Data and Simple Statistical Analysis for more information on analysing your results.

Discussion Section

This section has four purposes, it should:

• Interpret and explain your results
• Answer your research question
• Justify your approach
• Critically evaluate your study

The discussion section therefore needs to review your findings in the context of the literature and the existing knowledge about the subject.

You also need to demonstrate that you understand the limitations of your research and the implications of your findings for policy and practice. This section should be written in the present tense.

The Discussion section needs to follow from your results and relate back to your literature review . Make sure that everything you discuss is covered in the results section.

Some universities require a separate section on recommendations for policy and practice and/or for future research, while others allow you to include this in your discussion, so check the guidelines carefully.

Starting the Task

Most people are likely to write this section best by preparing an outline, setting out the broad thrust of the argument, and how your results support it.

You may find techniques like mind mapping are helpful in making a first outline; check out our page: Creative Thinking for some ideas about how to think through your ideas. You should start by referring back to your research questions, discuss your results, then set them into the context of the literature, and then into broader theory.

This is likely to be one of the longest sections of your dissertation, and it’s a good idea to break it down into chunks with sub-headings to help your reader to navigate through the detail.

Fleshing Out the Detail

Once you have your outline in front of you, you can start to map out how your results fit into the outline.

This will help you to see whether your results are over-focused in one area, which is why writing up your research as you go along can be a helpful process. For each theme or area, you should discuss how the results help to answer your research question, and whether the results are consistent with your expectations and the literature.

The Importance of Understanding Differences

If your results are controversial and/or unexpected, you should set them fully in context and explain why you think that you obtained them.

Your explanations may include issues such as a non-representative sample for convenience purposes, a response rate skewed towards those with a particular experience, or your own involvement as a participant for sociological research.

You do not need to be apologetic about these, because you made a choice about them, which you should have justified in the methodology section. However, you do need to evaluate your own results against others’ findings, especially if they are different. A full understanding of the limitations of your research is part of a good discussion section.

At this stage, you may want to revisit your literature review, unless you submitted it as a separate submission earlier, and revise it to draw out those studies which have proven more relevant.

Conclude by summarising the implications of your findings in brief, and explain why they are important for researchers and in practice, and provide some suggestions for further work.

You may also wish to make some recommendations for practice. As before, this may be a separate section, or included in your discussion.

The results and discussion, including conclusion and recommendations, are probably the most substantial sections of your dissertation. Once completed, you can begin to relax slightly: you are on to the last stages of writing!

Continue to: Dissertation: Conclusion and Extras Writing your Methodology

See also: Writing a Literature Review Writing a Research Proposal Academic Referencing What Is the Importance of Using a Plagiarism Checker to Check Your Thesis?

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Presenting and Evaluating Qualitative Research

The purpose of this paper is to help authors to think about ways to present qualitative research papers in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education . It also discusses methods for reviewers to assess the rigour, quality, and usefulness of qualitative research. Examples of different ways to present data from interviews, observations, and focus groups are included. The paper concludes with guidance for publishing qualitative research and a checklist for authors and reviewers.

INTRODUCTION

Policy and practice decisions, including those in education, increasingly are informed by findings from qualitative as well as quantitative research. Qualitative research is useful to policymakers because it often describes the settings in which policies will be implemented. Qualitative research is also useful to both pharmacy practitioners and pharmacy academics who are involved in researching educational issues in both universities and practice and in developing teaching and learning.

Qualitative research involves the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data that are not easily reduced to numbers. These data relate to the social world and the concepts and behaviors of people within it. Qualitative research can be found in all social sciences and in the applied fields that derive from them, for example, research in health services, nursing, and pharmacy. 1 It looks at X in terms of how X varies in different circumstances rather than how big is X or how many Xs are there? 2 Textbooks often subdivide research into qualitative and quantitative approaches, furthering the common assumption that there are fundamental differences between the 2 approaches. With pharmacy educators who have been trained in the natural and clinical sciences, there is often a tendency to embrace quantitative research, perhaps due to familiarity. A growing consensus is emerging that sees both qualitative and quantitative approaches as useful to answering research questions and understanding the world. Increasingly mixed methods research is being carried out where the researcher explicitly combines the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the study. 3 , 4

Like healthcare, education involves complex human interactions that can rarely be studied or explained in simple terms. Complex educational situations demand complex understanding; thus, the scope of educational research can be extended by the use of qualitative methods. Qualitative research can sometimes provide a better understanding of the nature of educational problems and thus add to insights into teaching and learning in a number of contexts. For example, at the University of Nottingham, we conducted in-depth interviews with pharmacists to determine their perceptions of continuing professional development and who had influenced their learning. We also have used a case study approach using observation of practice and in-depth interviews to explore physiotherapists' views of influences on their leaning in practice. We have conducted in-depth interviews with a variety of stakeholders in Malawi, Africa, to explore the issues surrounding pharmacy academic capacity building. A colleague has interviewed and conducted focus groups with students to explore cultural issues as part of a joint Nottingham-Malaysia pharmacy degree program. Another colleague has interviewed pharmacists and patients regarding their expectations before and after clinic appointments and then observed pharmacist-patient communication in clinics and assessed it using the Calgary Cambridge model in order to develop recommendations for communication skills training. 5 We have also performed documentary analysis on curriculum data to compare pharmacist and nurse supplementary prescribing courses in the United Kingdom.

It is important to choose the most appropriate methods for what is being investigated. Qualitative research is not appropriate to answer every research question and researchers need to think carefully about their objectives. Do they wish to study a particular phenomenon in depth (eg, students' perceptions of studying in a different culture)? Or are they more interested in making standardized comparisons and accounting for variance (eg, examining differences in examination grades after changing the way the content of a module is taught). Clearly a quantitative approach would be more appropriate in the last example. As with any research project, a clear research objective has to be identified to know which methods should be applied.

Types of qualitative data include:

• Audio recordings and transcripts from in-depth or semi-structured interviews
• Structured interview questionnaires containing substantial open comments including a substantial number of responses to open comment items.
• Audio recordings and transcripts from focus group sessions.
• Field notes (notes taken by the researcher while in the field [setting] being studied)
• Video recordings (eg, lecture delivery, class assignments, laboratory performance)
• Case study notes
• Documents (reports, meeting minutes, e-mails)
• Diaries, video diaries
• Observation notes
• Press clippings
• Photographs

RIGOUR IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Qualitative research is often criticized as biased, small scale, anecdotal, and/or lacking rigor; however, when it is carried out properly it is unbiased, in depth, valid, reliable, credible and rigorous. In qualitative research, there needs to be a way of assessing the “extent to which claims are supported by convincing evidence.” 1 Although the terms reliability and validity traditionally have been associated with quantitative research, increasingly they are being seen as important concepts in qualitative research as well. Examining the data for reliability and validity assesses both the objectivity and credibility of the research. Validity relates to the honesty and genuineness of the research data, while reliability relates to the reproducibility and stability of the data.

The validity of research findings refers to the extent to which the findings are an accurate representation of the phenomena they are intended to represent. The reliability of a study refers to the reproducibility of the findings. Validity can be substantiated by a number of techniques including triangulation use of contradictory evidence, respondent validation, and constant comparison. Triangulation is using 2 or more methods to study the same phenomenon. Contradictory evidence, often known as deviant cases, must be sought out, examined, and accounted for in the analysis to ensure that researcher bias does not interfere with or alter their perception of the data and any insights offered. Respondent validation, which is allowing participants to read through the data and analyses and provide feedback on the researchers' interpretations of their responses, provides researchers with a method of checking for inconsistencies, challenges the researchers' assumptions, and provides them with an opportunity to re-analyze their data. The use of constant comparison means that one piece of data (for example, an interview) is compared with previous data and not considered on its own, enabling researchers to treat the data as a whole rather than fragmenting it. Constant comparison also enables the researcher to identify emerging/unanticipated themes within the research project.

STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Qualitative researchers have been criticized for overusing interviews and focus groups at the expense of other methods such as ethnography, observation, documentary analysis, case studies, and conversational analysis. Qualitative research has numerous strengths when properly conducted.

Strengths of Qualitative Research

• Issues can be examined in detail and in depth.
• Interviews are not restricted to specific questions and can be guided/redirected by the researcher in real time.
• The research framework and direction can be quickly revised as new information emerges.
• The data based on human experience that is obtained is powerful and sometimes more compelling than quantitative data.
• Subtleties and complexities about the research subjects and/or topic are discovered that are often missed by more positivistic enquiries.
• Data usually are collected from a few cases or individuals so findings cannot be generalized to a larger population. Findings can however be transferable to another setting.

Limitations of Qualitative Research

• Research quality is heavily dependent on the individual skills of the researcher and more easily influenced by the researcher's personal biases and idiosyncrasies.
• Rigor is more difficult to maintain, assess, and demonstrate.
• The volume of data makes analysis and interpretation time consuming.
• It is sometimes not as well understood and accepted as quantitative research within the scientific community
• The researcher's presence during data gathering, which is often unavoidable in qualitative research, can affect the subjects' responses.
• Issues of anonymity and confidentiality can present problems when presenting findings
• Findings can be more difficult and time consuming to characterize in a visual way.

PRESENTATION OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH FINDINGS

The following extracts are examples of how qualitative data might be presented:

Data From an Interview.

The following is an example of how to present and discuss a quote from an interview.

The researcher should select quotes that are poignant and/or most representative of the research findings. Including large portions of an interview in a research paper is not necessary and often tedious for the reader. The setting and speakers should be established in the text at the end of the quote.

The student describes how he had used deep learning in a dispensing module. He was able to draw on learning from a previous module, “I found that while using the e learning programme I was able to apply the knowledge and skills that I had gained in last year's diseases and goals of treatment module.” (interviewee 22, male)

This is an excerpt from an article on curriculum reform that used interviews 5 :

The first question was, “Without the accreditation mandate, how much of this curriculum reform would have been attempted?” According to respondents, accreditation played a significant role in prompting the broad-based curricular change, and their comments revealed a nuanced view. Most indicated that the change would likely have occurred even without the mandate from the accreditation process: “It reflects where the profession wants to be … training a professional who wants to take on more responsibility.” However, they also commented that “if it were not mandated, it could have been a very difficult road.” Or it “would have happened, but much later.” The change would more likely have been incremental, “evolutionary,” or far more limited in its scope. “Accreditation tipped the balance” was the way one person phrased it. “Nobody got serious until the accrediting body said it would no longer accredit programs that did not change.”

Data From Observations

The following example is some data taken from observation of pharmacist patient consultations using the Calgary Cambridge guide. 6 , 7 The data are first presented and a discussion follows:

Pharmacist: We will soon be starting a stop smoking clinic. Patient: Is the interview over now? Pharmacist: No this is part of it. (Laughs) You can't tell me to bog off (sic) yet. (pause) We will be starting a stop smoking service here, Patient: Yes. Pharmacist: with one-to-one and we will be able to help you or try to help you. If you want it. In this example, the pharmacist has picked up from the patient's reaction to the stop smoking clinic that she is not receptive to advice about giving up smoking at this time; in fact she would rather end the consultation. The pharmacist draws on his prior relationship with the patient and makes use of a joke to lighten the tone. He feels his message is important enough to persevere but he presents the information in a succinct and non-pressurised way. His final comment of “If you want it” is important as this makes it clear that he is not putting any pressure on the patient to take up this offer. This extract shows that some patient cues were picked up, and appropriately dealt with, but this was not the case in all examples.

Data From Focus Groups

This excerpt from a study involving 11 focus groups illustrates how findings are presented using representative quotes from focus group participants. 8

Those pharmacists who were initially familiar with CPD endorsed the model for their peers, and suggested it had made a meaningful difference in the way they viewed their own practice. In virtually all focus groups sessions, pharmacists familiar with and supportive of the CPD paradigm had worked in collaborative practice environments such as hospital pharmacy practice. For these pharmacists, the major advantage of CPD was the linking of workplace learning with continuous education. One pharmacist stated, “It's amazing how much I have to learn every day, when I work as a pharmacist. With [the learning portfolio] it helps to show how much learning we all do, every day. It's kind of satisfying to look it over and see how much you accomplish.” Within many of the learning portfolio-sharing sessions, debates emerged regarding the true value of traditional continuing education and its outcome in changing an individual's practice. While participants appreciated the opportunity for social and professional networking inherent in some forms of traditional CE, most eventually conceded that the academic value of most CE programming was limited by the lack of a systematic process for following-up and implementing new learning in the workplace. “Well it's nice to go to these [continuing education] events, but really, I don't know how useful they are. You go, you sit, you listen, but then, well I at least forget.”

The following is an extract from a focus group (conducted by the author) with first-year pharmacy students about community placements. It illustrates how focus groups provide a chance for participants to discuss issues on which they might disagree.

Interviewer: So you are saying that you would prefer health related placements? Student 1: Not exactly so long as I could be developing my communication skill. Student 2: Yes but I still think the more health related the placement is the more I'll gain from it. Student 3: I disagree because other people related skills are useful and you may learn those from taking part in a community project like building a garden. Interviewer: So would you prefer a mixture of health and non health related community placements?

GUIDANCE FOR PUBLISHING QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Qualitative research is becoming increasingly accepted and published in pharmacy and medical journals. Some journals and publishers have guidelines for presenting qualitative research, for example, the British Medical Journal 9 and Biomedcentral . 10 Medical Education published a useful series of articles on qualitative research. 11 Some of the important issues that should be considered by authors, reviewers and editors when publishing qualitative research are discussed below.

Introduction.

A good introduction provides a brief overview of the manuscript, including the research question and a statement justifying the research question and the reasons for using qualitative research methods. This section also should provide background information, including relevant literature from pharmacy, medicine, and other health professions, as well as literature from the field of education that addresses similar issues. Any specific educational or research terminology used in the manuscript should be defined in the introduction.

The methods section should clearly state and justify why the particular method, for example, face to face semistructured interviews, was chosen. The method should be outlined and illustrated with examples such as the interview questions, focusing exercises, observation criteria, etc. The criteria for selecting the study participants should then be explained and justified. The way in which the participants were recruited and by whom also must be stated. A brief explanation/description should be included of those who were invited to participate but chose not to. It is important to consider “fair dealing,” ie, whether the research design explicitly incorporates a wide range of different perspectives so that the viewpoint of 1 group is never presented as if it represents the sole truth about any situation. The process by which ethical and or research/institutional governance approval was obtained should be described and cited.

The study sample and the research setting should be described. Sampling differs between qualitative and quantitative studies. In quantitative survey studies, it is important to select probability samples so that statistics can be used to provide generalizations to the population from which the sample was drawn. Qualitative research necessitates having a small sample because of the detailed and intensive work required for the study. So sample sizes are not calculated using mathematical rules and probability statistics are not applied. Instead qualitative researchers should describe their sample in terms of characteristics and relevance to the wider population. Purposive sampling is common in qualitative research. Particular individuals are chosen with characteristics relevant to the study who are thought will be most informative. Purposive sampling also may be used to produce maximum variation within a sample. Participants being chosen based for example, on year of study, gender, place of work, etc. Representative samples also may be used, for example, 20 students from each of 6 schools of pharmacy. Convenience samples involve the researcher choosing those who are either most accessible or most willing to take part. This may be fine for exploratory studies; however, this form of sampling may be biased and unrepresentative of the population in question. Theoretical sampling uses insights gained from previous research to inform sample selection for a new study. The method for gaining informed consent from the participants should be described, as well as how anonymity and confidentiality of subjects were guaranteed. The method of recording, eg, audio or video recording, should be noted, along with procedures used for transcribing the data.

Data Analysis.

A description of how the data were analyzed also should be included. Was computer-aided qualitative data analysis software such as NVivo (QSR International, Cambridge, MA) used? Arrival at “data saturation” or the end of data collection should then be described and justified. A good rule when considering how much information to include is that readers should have been given enough information to be able to carry out similar research themselves.

One of the strengths of qualitative research is the recognition that data must always be understood in relation to the context of their production. 1 The analytical approach taken should be described in detail and theoretically justified in light of the research question. If the analysis was repeated by more than 1 researcher to ensure reliability or trustworthiness, this should be stated and methods of resolving any disagreements clearly described. Some researchers ask participants to check the data. If this was done, it should be fully discussed in the paper.

An adequate account of how the findings were produced should be included A description of how the themes and concepts were derived from the data also should be included. Was an inductive or deductive process used? The analysis should not be limited to just those issues that the researcher thinks are important, anticipated themes, but also consider issues that participants raised, ie, emergent themes. Qualitative researchers must be open regarding the data analysis and provide evidence of their thinking, for example, were alternative explanations for the data considered and dismissed, and if so, why were they dismissed? It also is important to present outlying or negative/deviant cases that did not fit with the central interpretation.

The interpretation should usually be grounded in interviewees or respondents' contributions and may be semi-quantified, if this is possible or appropriate, for example, “Half of the respondents said …” “The majority said …” “Three said…” Readers should be presented with data that enable them to “see what the researcher is talking about.” 1 Sufficient data should be presented to allow the reader to clearly see the relationship between the data and the interpretation of the data. Qualitative data conventionally are presented by using illustrative quotes. Quotes are “raw data” and should be compiled and analyzed, not just listed. There should be an explanation of how the quotes were chosen and how they are labeled. For example, have pseudonyms been given to each respondent or are the respondents identified using codes, and if so, how? It is important for the reader to be able to see that a range of participants have contributed to the data and that not all the quotes are drawn from 1 or 2 individuals. There is a tendency for authors to overuse quotes and for papers to be dominated by a series of long quotes with little analysis or discussion. This should be avoided.

Participants do not always state the truth and may say what they think the interviewer wishes to hear. A good qualitative researcher should not only examine what people say but also consider how they structured their responses and how they talked about the subject being discussed, for example, the person's emotions, tone, nonverbal communication, etc. If the research was triangulated with other qualitative or quantitative data, this should be discussed.

Discussion.

The findings should be presented in the context of any similar previous research and or theories. A discussion of the existing literature and how this present research contributes to the area should be included. A consideration must also be made about how transferrable the research would be to other settings. Any particular strengths and limitations of the research also should be discussed. It is common practice to include some discussion within the results section of qualitative research and follow with a concluding discussion.

The author also should reflect on their own influence on the data, including a consideration of how the researcher(s) may have introduced bias to the results. The researcher should critically examine their own influence on the design and development of the research, as well as on data collection and interpretation of the data, eg, were they an experienced teacher who researched teaching methods? If so, they should discuss how this might have influenced their interpretation of the results.

Conclusion.

The conclusion should summarize the main findings from the study and emphasize what the study adds to knowledge in the area being studied. Mays and Pope suggest the researcher ask the following 3 questions to determine whether the conclusions of a qualitative study are valid 12 : How well does this analysis explain why people behave in the way they do? How comprehensible would this explanation be to a thoughtful participant in the setting? How well does the explanation cohere with what we already know?

CHECKLIST FOR QUALITATIVE PAPERS

This paper establishes criteria for judging the quality of qualitative research. It provides guidance for authors and reviewers to prepare and review qualitative research papers for the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education . A checklist is provided in Appendix 1 to assist both authors and reviewers of qualitative data.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to the 3 reviewers whose ideas helped me to shape this paper.

Appendix 1. Checklist for authors and reviewers of qualitative research.

Introduction

• □ Research question is clearly stated.
• □ Research question is justified and related to the existing knowledge base (empirical research, theory, policy).
• □ Any specific research or educational terminology used later in manuscript is defined.
• □ The process by which ethical and or research/institutional governance approval was obtained is described and cited.
• □ Reason for choosing particular research method is stated.
• □ Criteria for selecting study participants are explained and justified.
• □ Recruitment methods are explicitly stated.
• □ Details of who chose not to participate and why are given.
• □ Study sample and research setting used are described.
• □ Method for gaining informed consent from the participants is described.
• □ Maintenance/Preservation of subject anonymity and confidentiality is described.
• □ Method of recording data (eg, audio or video recording) and procedures for transcribing data are described.
• □ Methods are outlined and examples given (eg, interview guide).
• □ Decision to stop data collection is described and justified.
• □ Data analysis and verification are described, including by whom they were performed.
• □ Methods for identifying/extrapolating themes and concepts from the data are discussed.
• □ Sufficient data are presented to allow a reader to assess whether or not the interpretation is supported by the data.
• □ Outlying or negative/deviant cases that do not fit with the central interpretation are presented.
• □ Transferability of research findings to other settings is discussed.
• □ Findings are presented in the context of any similar previous research and social theories.
• □ Discussion often is incorporated into the results in qualitative papers.
• □ A discussion of the existing literature and how this present research contributes to the area is included.
• □ Any particular strengths and limitations of the research are discussed.
• □ Reflection of the influence of the researcher(s) on the data, including a consideration of how the researcher(s) may have introduced bias to the results is included.

Conclusions

• □ The conclusion states the main finings of the study and emphasizes what the study adds to knowledge in the subject area.

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How to Present Dissertation Findings

The presentation of dissertation findings is a critical component in the successful completion of a master’s degree program. As the culmination of years of hard work, research, and dedication, your dissertation stands as a testament to your academic prowess and your ability to contribute meaningfully to your chosen field. Effectively presenting your findings not only demonstrates your mastery of the subject matter but also allows you to communicate your research’s significance to a broader audience. A well-crafted presentation of findings can facilitate a greater understanding and appreciation of your research, paving the way for future opportunities in academia or professional settings.

This article aims to provide a comprehensive guide for master’s degree candidates seeking to present their dissertation findings effectively. We will cover how to present dissertation findings, the essential aspects such as interpreting your findings, structuring your findings section, articulating results with clarity and precision, employing visual aids, contextualizing findings within the scholarly discourse, and preparing an engaging oral presentation. By following the guidelines and recommendations outlined in this article, you will be well-equipped to deliver a compelling, informative, and polished presentation of your dissertation findings.

Comprehending and Interpreting Your Findings

To effectively present your dissertation findings, you must first have a thorough understanding of the results obtained through your research. This begins with the application of suitable data analysis techniques, which may involve quantitative methods such as descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, and regression analysis, or qualitative approaches like thematic analysis, content analysis, or grounded theory. Selecting the appropriate method depends on your research questions, objectives, and the nature of the data collected. By employing suitable techniques, you can derive meaningful insights from your data and facilitate a more accurate interpretation of your findings.

Key Themes and Patterns

Once you have analyzed your data, it is crucial to identify the most significant themes and patterns that emerge from the results. This process requires a critical and analytical mindset, as well as a deep understanding of your research objectives and the theoretical underpinnings of your study. By focusing on the most salient findings, you can effectively communicate the essence of your research to your audience. Additionally, this will allow you to prioritize information and prevent information overload, making your presentation more accessible and engaging.

Ensuring Methodological Rigor and Credibility

To establish confidence in your findings, you must demonstrate that your research methods and data analysis techniques are rigorous and credible. This involves adhering to established methodological standards and practices within your field, as well as addressing potential threats to the validity and reliability of your results. For qualitative research, this may include addressing issues related to credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. For quantitative research, it is essential to consider aspects like internal and external validity, reliability, and generalizability. By ensuring methodological rigor, you enhance the credibility of your findings and foster trust in your research among your audience.

Constructing a Coherent Findings Section

An effective findings section is organized in a manner that clearly demonstrates the relationship between your results and your research questions or objectives. To achieve this, present your findings by addressing each research question or objective systematically, thereby providing a coherent and logical structure to your presentation. This approach not only enhances the readability and comprehensibility of your findings section but also allows your audience to quickly grasp the significance of your results in the context of your study’s overarching goals.

As you present each finding, it is essential to contextualize it within the broader research landscape, discussing how it relates to existing knowledge and scholarship in your field. This may involve comparing and contrasting your results with those of previous studies, highlighting any similarities or discrepancies, and explaining possible reasons for the observed patterns. By providing this context, you enable your audience to better appreciate the novelty, relevance, and implications of your findings.

Establish a Logical Progression

To enhance the readability and organization of your findings section, make use of headings and subheadings to delineate different aspects of your results. These textual markers can help guide your audience through the structure of your findings, enabling them to follow your argument more easily. Ensure that your headings and subheadings accurately reflect the content of each section and are formatted consistently throughout the document.

Striking a Balance Between Textual Exposition and Visual Representation

A well-crafted findings section strikes a balance between textual exposition and visual representation, ensuring that your results are presented in a manner that is both accessible and engaging. Textual descriptions should be clear, concise, and focused, providing sufficient detail without overwhelming the reader. Visual representations, such as tables, charts, and graphs, should be employed judiciously to complement and clarify your textual exposition, presenting complex data in a more easily digestible format. Carefully consider the most effective way to present each finding, and strive to create a harmonious interplay between text and visuals that enhances the overall impact and comprehensibility of your findings section.

Articulating Findings with Clarity and Precision

To ensure that your findings are accessible to a wide range of audiences, including those outside your immediate field of expertise, employ clear and lucid language throughout your presentation. This involves avoiding excessive jargon, convoluted sentence structures, and overly complex vocabulary. By using straightforward and comprehensible language, you increase the likelihood that your research will be understood and appreciated by a diverse audience, thereby amplifying its impact and relevance.

When discussing complex concepts, theories, or methodologies, strive to elucidate them using accessible terminology and simple explanations. This may involve breaking down complicated ideas into their constituent parts or providing analogies, examples, or illustrations to facilitate understanding. Ensuring that your audience grasps these intricate concepts is vital for them to fully appreciate the significance of your findings and their implications for your field.

Accentuating Salient Points While Avoiding Redundancy

To maintain the interest and engagement of your audience, focus on accentuating the most salient points of your findings while avoiding unnecessary repetition or extraneous details. This involves carefully selecting the information to be presented and highlighting its relevance to your research questions or objectives. By distilling your findings down to their essential elements, you provide your audience with a concise and coherent overview of your results, enabling them to more readily grasp the key takeaways from your research.

When presenting your findings, it is crucial to exercise meticulousness and accuracy in reporting your results. This involves ensuring that all data, statistics, and calculations are correct and that any claims made are substantiated by the evidence provided. Additionally, be transparent about any limitations or uncertainties associated with your findings, acknowledging potential sources of error or bias. By adhering to these standards, you enhance the credibility of your research and foster trust in your findings among your audience.

Employing Visual Aids to Reinforce Findings

Visual aids, such as tables, charts, and graphs, can significantly enhance the presentation of your dissertation findings by providing a succinct and visually appealing representation of complex data. When selecting visual aids, consider which format best conveys the information you wish to highlight and which is most appropriate for your research context. Ensure that the chosen visual aids align with your research objectives and contribute meaningfully to the overall narrative of your findings.

To maximize the effectiveness of your visual aids, ensure that they are both comprehensible and aesthetically appealing. This involves using clear, legible fonts and labels, employing appropriate color schemes, and maintaining a consistent visual style throughout your presentation. Additionally, consider the use of white space and other design elements to enhance the readability and visual appeal of your visual aids. By attending to these details, you create visual aids that effectively support your findings and engage your audience.

Consistent Labeling and Formatting Practices

Consistency is crucial when employing visual aids in your dissertation findings. This includes using consistent labeling conventions, such as capitalization, abbreviation, and numbering, as well as maintaining a uniform style in terms of fonts, colors, and formatting. By adhering to these practices, you create a cohesive and polished presentation that enhances the professionalism and credibility of your research.

Seamlessly Incorporating Visual Aids Within the Narrative

Finally, to ensure that your visual aids effectively support your findings, it is essential to seamlessly incorporate them within the narrative of your presentation. This involves referencing each visual aid in the accompanying text, explaining its relevance, and discussing any key insights or patterns it reveals. By integrating your visual aids into the narrative in this manner, you create a cohesive and engaging presentation that effectively conveys the significance of your findings to your audience.

Contextualizing Findings within the Scholarly Discourse

To contextualize your findings within the broader scholarly discourse, draw connections between your results and existing research in your field. This may involve discussing how your findings align with, challenge, or expand upon previous studies, highlighting any similarities or discrepancies, and providing possible explanations for these observations. By drawing these connections, you demonstrate your awareness of the current state of knowledge and establish your research’s relevance within the wider academic landscape.

Emphasize the novelty and relevance of your investigation by highlighting how your research contributes to the existing body of knowledge. This may involve underscoring the unique aspects of your study, such as the research questions, methodology, or context, and discussing how these elements distinguish your research from previous investigations. By showcasing the novelty and relevance of your work, you demonstrate its value and significance within your discipline.

Identifying Lacunae Your Research Addresses in the Literature

Another way to contextualize your findings within the scholarly discourse is by identifying gaps or lacunae in the existing literature that your research addresses. By pinpointing these gaps and discussing how your findings help fill them, you underscore the importance of your research and its potential to advance the understanding of your field.

Deliberating on the Implications and Limitations of Your Findings

To discuss the implications of your findings, relate them to the relevant theories and conceptual frameworks that underpin your study. This may involve examining how your results support, challenge, or extend these theoretical frameworks and discussing the potential ramifications of your findings for the development of new theories or the refinement of existing ones.

It is crucial to acknowledge and evaluate the limitations and boundaries of your findings. This may involve discussing any methodological limitations, the generalizability of your results, or the potential biases inherent in your study. By addressing these issues, you demonstrate your awareness of the complexities and nuances of your research, fostering trust and credibility among your audience.

Based on the implications and limitations of your findings, propose potential avenues for future research. This may involve suggesting new research questions, methodologies, or contexts for investigation that could help advance the understanding of your field. By identifying these future research directions, you demonstrate the ongoing relevance and importance of your work within the academic community.

Elucidating the Ramifications of Your Findings for the Discipline

Finally, consider the broader ramifications of your findings for your discipline. This may involve discussing how your results contribute to the development of new knowledge, inform practice or policy, or inspire further inquiry in your field. By elucidating these ramifications, you underscore the significance of your research and its potential to make a lasting impact on your discipline.

Preparing an Engaging Oral Presentation of Findings

To support your oral presentation of findings , create a visually appealing and informative slideshow. Ensure that your slides are well-designed, employing a clear and readable font, appropriate colors, and relevant visuals, such as charts, graphs, or images. Limit the amount of text on each slide, focusing on key points and findings, and use bullet points or concise phrases to convey information effectively.

Develop your public speaking skills by practicing techniques such as maintaining eye contact, speaking clearly and confidently, using effective body language, and varying your tone and pace to maintain audience interest. Engage your audience by incorporating storytelling elements, sharing anecdotes, or posing thought-provoking questions throughout your presentation.

Anticipating and Addressing Potential inquiries and Critiques

Prepare for potential questions or critiques by anticipating the inquiries your audience may have and addressing them proactively in your presentation. Familiarize yourself with common concerns or objections within your field and be ready to respond to them with evidence-based arguments and counterpoints.

Organize your presentation in a logical and coherent manner, starting with an introduction that sets the stage for your findings, followed by a clear and succinct presentation of your results, and concluding with a summary of the main points and implications of your research. Avoid tangents or unnecessary digressions, and maintain a steady pace throughout your presentation.

Fostering Audience Participation

Encourage audience participation by incorporating interactive elements into your presentation, such as live polls, group discussions, or question-and-answer sessions. By fostering audience engagement, you create a dynamic and stimulating environment that enhances the overall impact and effectiveness of your presentation .

Soliciting Feedback and Refining Your Presentation

Solicit feedback on your presentation from peers, mentors, or advisors to gain valuable insights and suggestions for improvement. Encourage them to provide honest and constructive criticism, and be open to their perspectives and ideas.

Revise your presentation based on the feedback you receive, focusing on areas where improvements can be made or where further clarification is needed. This may involve refining your slide design, adjusting the organization of your presentation, or enhancing your public speaking skills.

Rehearse to Hone Your Delivery Skills

Practice your presentation multiple times, either alone or in front of a supportive audience, to build confidence and fine-tune your delivery. Use these rehearsal sessions to work on pacing, tone, and body language, as well as to familiarize yourself with your content and anticipate potential questions or critiques.

In Conclusion

Effectively presenting dissertation findings is crucial for demonstrating the significance and implications of your research within the academic community. By comprehending and interpreting your findings, constructing a coherent findings section, articulating results with clarity and precision, employing visual aids, contextualizing findings within the scholarly discourse, deliberating on implications and limitations, preparing an engaging oral presentation, and refining your presentation through feedback and rehearsal, you can master the art of presenting your dissertation findings.

Embracing these strategies and principles will enable you to communicate your research in a compelling, informative, and engaging manner, contributing to the advancement of your field and bolstering your academic and professional prospects.

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Incorporating Interview Data

Introduction

When you incorporate original interview data into your writing, you are developing new ideas by using quotations and often sources that no one else has accessed. Drawing from interviews can liven up your writing, ground your big concepts within the specific circumstances of particular individuals, and introduce you to insights you might never have considered on your own. Additionally, interviews are an exciting way for you to provide a larger audience for people who might not otherwise have opportunities to share their stories, perceptions, and experiences.

There are lots of good reasons to incorporate original interview data into your writing. But doing so also involves making many, specific writing decisions. On this page we explore some of those decisions by considering: 1) the process by which interview data is gathered; 2) models for interview incorporation; and 3) identification of ways that writing with interview data can be like writing with information from any other source (as well as some of the unique writerly considerations that interviews raise).

Contents       Before You Write       Different Models of Incorporating Interview Data       Summarizing, Paraphrasing, or Quoting       Referring to your Interviewees       Using Verbatim or Non-Verbatim

Before You Write

Of course, before you can incorporate interview data into your writing, you need to plan and conduct your interviews and begin to analyze your findings.

Interviewing is a common form of research and information gathering in many different fields and across many different genres. In order to develop and actualize a plan for why interviews will help you answer the questions you’re asking, whom you’ll interview, and what you’ll ask these subjects, you’ll want to consult a range of resources. Talk with your instructor, mentor, or advisor about common ways of approaching interviews for this assignment or in this discipline. Additionally, many undergraduate textbooks about research in the social sciences and humanities offer introductions to interviewing. We’ve listed a few great resources to help you learn more.

For comprehensive introductions to research methods used in the writing research that include some information about interviews, consider:

• Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s book Strategies for Writing Center Research —especially pages 55-69. While Grutsch McKinney’s is focused on writing center research, her close consideration of the different ways to structure interviews as well as how to plan and conduct them can be applied to all interview contexts. Additionally, her treatment of data analysis in chapter 8 provides a step-by-step guide for coding qualitative data—one of the approaches you might use to make sense of what your interview data means.
• Joyce Kinkead’s Researching Writing: An Introduction to Research Methods —especially pages 37-39. This is a potential textbook for that could be used for a class specifically about the formal study of writing. However, its direct and specific information about interviewing is applicable for any social science researcher preparing to use interviews for research.

These resources focus more specifically on qualitative research methods in particular and interviewing in particular:

• Robert Bogdan and Sari Knopp Biklen’s Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to Theories and Methods —especially pages 103-109. Bogdan and Knopp Biklen’s treatment of interview practices provides a brief overview of how to approach and implement this research methodology.
• Irving Seidman’s Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences —especially pages 78-94. This entire book explores interview practices, logistics, and applications, but chapter six in particular usefully details particular interviewing techniques and provides transcripted examples of some of these strategic techniques in action.

The rest of the information on this page assumes that you have learned to develop and implement your interview plan, that you’ve analyzed the information you’ve gathered, and that you’re now ready to start weaving that information into your writing.

Different Models for Incorporating Interview Data

You can use interview data in many different ways. Most often, you will probably be making an argumentative or analytical point and illustrating and supporting it with evidence from your interviews. For example, in the following passage from the book Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines , Paul D. Hutchcroft, a political science professor at Australian National University, begins with an original claim, follows that with a quotation from an interview subject that exemplifies that claim, and then offers additional commentary on that issue. Note how the quotation from the interview both connects the concepts of banking and politics and introduces the prism metaphor that Hutchcroft continues into the next sentence.

The major focus of this [book] is two arenas that offer particular insights into the nature of relations between state and oligarchy in the banking system: bank supervision and selective credit allocation. “Banking,” observes one former bank president, “is a prism through which to understand power politics in the Philippines.” A study of the banking system highlights larger patterns at work within the political economy: how a predatory oligarchy extracts privilege from a patrimonial state, and how developmental policy objectives are continually choked out by a clamor of particularistic demands made by those who currently enjoy proximity to the political machinery. (7)

Generalizing about a Trend or Theme

Using information from an interview to support your claim is the primary purpose for incorporating interview data into your writing, but how you do this may change according to your specific intent. In what follows, we explore different models for weaving interview data into your writing and provide examples of what this looks like.

It is important to consider the politicization of the nationality responses in context. On the whole, the vast majority of republican executives did not try to influence the process, and the nationality question was a non-issue in the predominantly ethnically Russian regions. In my regional interviews I found that in the oblasts and krays, there were almost no reports of difficulty with the nationality question. Officials in those areas reported that respondents who were not ethnically Russian had no difficulty citing a different nationality. This finding corresponded with my observations of the enumeration process in Moscow. There were sporadic cases of respondents in ethnically mixed marriages registering one child as of one parent’s ethnic group and the other child as of the other parent’s ethnic group. However, this is a conceptual issue rather than a problem of politicization. ( 367-8 )

Quoting to Illustrate a Trend or Theme

Sometimes interviewees say things that are so strikingly similar that it is useful to draw attention to these complementary concepts and word choices by putting them together. In the following passage, Jane Calvert, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Joan Fujimura, a sociology professor at UW-Madison, use this strategy while writing about scientists’ responses to the new and developing field of systems biology. Note that these authors carefully tie quotations to specific anonymized interviewees through parenthetical citations.

In another US university, the decision to build an interdisciplinary research centre was top-down, initiated by university and funding administrators and initially opposed by most campus laboratory scientists. The building of new interdisciplinary structures is challenging for the existing disciplinary “fiefdoms” (Biologist19) and “silos” (Biologist9 and Biologist12) “where people feel protected and safe” (Biologist19) because they are not required to step outside of their “comfort zones” (Biologist7).

Putting Two Sources in Conversation with Each Other

Sometimes writers can use one interviewee to contribute to or complicate what another interviewee says. The following paragraph from Hutchcroft’s Booty Capitalism shows this practice at work. In addition to bringing two sources together, in this passage Hutchcroft also strategically incorporates paratextual insight gained from the interview process into his analysis. He uses the former governor’s laughter to showcase an attitude that directly contrasts with what the former bank supervisor says.

Even when the Central Bank has acted against those who milked their banks, former bank owners have been known to use personal connections, even up to the Supreme Court, to confound Central Bank discipline. Former Governor Jaime Laya noted that even martial law “didn’t seem to stop the lawsuits against Central Bank personnel.” He actually laughed as he told me how the Central Bank legal office has “never won a case.” But the former head of the bank supervision sector, who has herself been sued, doesn’t find it a laughing matter: “Why only in this country,” she exclaimed, “do the regulators go to the jail, and the bankers go scot-free?” (9)

Providing a Profile/Telling a Story

Sometimes your writing needs to focus on your interview subject as a full and complex individual. In order to analyze an issue, you need to write about this individual’s background, family, and previous experiences. In this situation, you’ll weave together information you gained from your interviews with quotations from this person. This kind of writing is common when you are using interviews to develop ethnographis case studies. In the following example of this technique, Kate Vieira, a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at UW-Madison, tells the story of Jocélia, an undocumented Brazilian immigrant living in Massachusetts:

Jocélia, a 22 year-old Brazilian woman who grew up in a favela (shanty town) in Brazil, came to the United States to study and to earn money. When her visa expired and the small sum she had borrowed from cousins ran out, she quit her ESL classes and began to work illegally. When I met her in 2008, she had been in the United States for 4 years, had managed to buy a house for her mother in Brazil, and had plans to buy another one for herself and a car. To earn money as an undocumented worker, she held down two jobs: one from 3 p.m. to midnight and another from 5 a.m. to afternoon. One evening, exhausted from having not slept in days, she nodded off as she drove home from work, resulting in a serious accident that led her to a friend’s house in South Mills and to a Catholic retreat. When I came here, I was not a youth who had fun. I only worked, and this made me a little frustrated, you know? Sad, lonely, understand? And nobody could change my mind. I had to work . . . But the Lord showed me something different, that I can’t live only for work . . . So I went there [to the retreat] and I really felt that the Lord touched us. It was a very good experience . . . (444)

Attending to Language

As explored in greater depth in the discussion about verbatim transcription , sometimes you want to analyze or consider the language an individual uses or the implications of certain kinds of words or even pauses. For example, in the following passage, Beth Godbee, a writing and rhetoric professor at Marquette University, meticulously considers the implications of her subjects’ specific words and phrasing. Although this example is taken from Godbee’s analysis of a conversation she recorded between a writer Susan and a writing center tutor Kim as opposed to a direct interview she conducted, the attention she pays to language could just as well be applied to information from an interview.

Kim reinforces Susan’s qualifications: “You’re gonna—you’re the specialist in this area. You know these kids; you see what know the effects are, and maybe where some change could be made” (lines 558-561). Here Kim revises her projection of Susan as a “specialist” in the future tense (“gonna,” as in “you’re going to be”) to a statement of her current position (“you’re,” or “you are now”). By repairing her speech mid-utterance, Kim emphasizes Susan’s current status and qualifications to write, thereby reframing her institutional power to assert her right to speak. (185)

Summarizing, Paraphrasing, or Quoting

As the above examples show, interview data is incorporated into writing through summaries, paraphrases, or quotations. In some ways this makes working with interviews just like working from any other kind of outside. As you choose between summarizing, paraphrasing, or quoting, a guiding question for you to consider is: What is most important about this information?

• Is it the overall story it tells or the general perspective it provides? Then summarizing might be the best option.
• Is it the particular take on a complex issue? Then paraphrasing that idea in your own words to make it as understandable as possible might be best.
• Is it the memorability, specificity, or authenticity of the language the source used? Then probably go with a quote, but be sure to contextualize this quotation by providing necessary background and commentary.

Of course, in working with interview data, you might go with all three incorporation strategies by, for example, summarizing early in a paragraph to provide an overall sense of what this source is saying, paraphrasing a key idea or two, and then including a poignant quotation that exemplifies the argument you are making. For more information about quoting and paraphrasing outside sources in your writing, check out our resources on this issue .

Referring to your Interviewees

In certain writing situations, you are expected to identify the people you interviewed by using their real names. This is often the case in journalistic writing as well as when you have consulted with an expert on an issue. But, even in these writing contexts, you must receive permission from them to associate their words and insights with their names by clearly establishing whether or not they are talking with you “on the record.”

However, when you are conducting interviews for academic research, you are frequently expected to use pseudonyms so that your subjects’ responses are confidential. Protecting your subjects’ privacy should be your primary priority. They are giving you access to personal experiences and trusting you with their individual insights and observations; you must honor that trust by anonymizing their identities so that readers can’t figure out who your subjects were. Developing a research methodology that keeps all of your data confidential is an important part of the IRB (Internal Review Board) process, and in order to receive permission to do research at your institution you’ll need a plan that outlines how you’ll achieve confidentiality. Part of that plan will involve using different names for your subjects. But selecting pseudonyms is a bigger issue than just choosing different names at random.

Ruth Allen and Janine L. Wiles, Social and Community Health scholars at the University of Auckland, have closely considered the many issues surrounding pseudonym selection in connection to their original psychological and health-related research. They advocate that researchers think critically about this process and even bring their subjects into these discussions of identity and confidentiality. You need to be thoughtful about what aspects of your subjects’ true identities you are communicating or obscuring through the pseudonyms you use. The following questions are adapted from ones Allen and Wiles recommend researchers ask themselves when preparing to use pseudonyms for participants:

• Does the researcher or the participant choose the pseudonym? How does this issue get talked about with the participants?
• Is it important, valuable, or expected to use first name or also include last names and/or titles (i.e., Cara, Mr. Terrance, Dr. Jean Nichols)?
• Within the context of this writing, should the names to be associated with a specific gender, ethnicity, and/or culture? Should those nominal identity markers align with the participants’ actual identities?
• Do pseudonyms need to be selected for other people, places, activities, and organizations mentioned in the interview? And if so, who makes those choices?

How you answer these questions should be informed by your specific context. For example, in relation to that fourth question, if a participant is talking supportively about a small on-campus organization that you want to bring attention to through your writing, it might make sense to refer to this organization by name even though its size might make it harder to disguise your participant’s identity. However, if your interviewee is speaking critically about a large, multi-national corporation where she works, you might want to develop a pseudonym for that company in order to protect this individual as much as possible.

Using Verbatim or Non-Verbatim

When you are conducting interviews, you are engaging people in very focused conversation. But when we converse, we say “like” a lot and “um” and “ah.” We start sentences and then interrupt ourselves and never return to complete those earlier thoughts. Conversation is never as direct and naturally coherent as writing can be. As a result, when you’re representing other people’s speech, you need to decide if you’ll be employing what is called “verbatim transcription” or “non-verbatim transcription.”

In “verbatim transcriptions,” you write out what people say exactly as they say it. You include all the filler words, false starts, and grammatical inconsistencies. You may even choose to include coughs and laughs. Scholars have traditionally upheld verbatim accounts as being accurate depictions of the interview process, but as Blake Poland pointed out, “much of the emotional context of the interview as well as nonverbal communication are not captured at all well in audiotape records, so that the audiotape itself is not strictly a verbatim record of the interview” (291). “Non-verbatim transcriptions,” (sometimes called “intelligent transcription”) respond to this acknowledged gap between the complexities of real conversation and the limitations of writing by encouraging writers to focus on the primary substance of participants’ quotes. In “non-verbatim transcriptions, you eliminate the unnecessary utterances like “er,” “well,” and “you know” and just include the foundational meaning of the interviewees’ words.” For example:

Verbatim Transcription : Well, you see, I was [pause] the problem, as I saw it, was more of a, a matter of representation, you know? How can I, like, be the one that’s just out there just declaring the way things are when I’ve not even, like, you know, experiencing the whole process for myself? Non-verbatim Transcription : The problem, as I saw it, was more a matter of representation. How can I be the one that’s out there declaring the way things are when I’ve not even experienced the whole process for myself?

The choice to use verbatim or non-verbatim transcription in quoting your participants should be informed by intentional considerations you are making as a writer. There are good reasons to use either forms. As Mahesh Kumar has identified in a blog post for the Transcription Certification Institute, verbatim transcription is useful for showcasing the thought process by which interview participants develop their ideas. False starts and self-corrections track down how someone is thinking about an issue in real time, and some fillers can be useful expressions of personality. Additionally, some linguistics research and conversation analysis methodologies expect highly structured, verbatim transcriptions that even account for pauses and simultaneous dialogue. However, quotations presented through non-verbatim transcriptions are clearer and easier to read and enable you to present your interview subjects as articulate (Poland 292). Whether you go with verbatim or non-verbatim transcription, make sure that you are being consistent with this choice across your article, paper, report, or essay. Also, if it’s common in the genre you are writing to discuss your methodology choices, it may be useful to clarify which transcription form you have chosen to use and why this was an appropriate choice.

Works Cited

Allen, Ruth E.S., and Janine L. Wiles. “A Rose by Any Other Name: Participants Choosing Research Pseudonyms.” Qualitative Research in Psychology , Dec. 2015. Research Gate , doi: 10.1080/14780887.2015.1133746.

Bogdan, Robert C., and Sari Knopp Biklen. Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to Theories and Methods . 5 th ed., Pearson, 2007.

Calvert, Jane, and Joan H. Fujimura. “Calculating Life? Duelling Discourses in Interdisciplinary Systems Biology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences , vol. 42, no. 2l, 2011. Science Direct , https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2010.11.022 .

Godbee, Beth. “Toward Explaining the Transformative Power of Talk About, Around, and for Writing.” Research in the Teaching of English , vol. 47, no. 2, 2012, pp. 171-97.

Grutsch McKinney, Jackie. Strategies for Writing Center Research . Parlor Press, 2016.

Herrera, Yoshiko M. “The 2002 Russian Census: Institutional Reform at Goskomstar.”  Post-Soviet Affairs , vol, 20, no. 4, 2004, pp. 350-86.

Hutchcroft, Paul D. Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines , Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998.

Kinkead, Joyce. Researching Writing: An Introduction to Research Methods . University Press of Colorado, 2015.

Kumar, Mahesh. “Verbatim Vs Non-Verbatim Transcription: Differences, Requirements, & Jobs.” Transcription Certification Institute , 5 December 2017. Accessed online 19 June 2017. https://blog.transcriptioncertificationinstitute.org/verbatim-vs-non-verbatim-transcription-differences-requirements-jobs/.

Poland, Blake D. “Transcription Quality as an Aspect of Rigor in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry , no. 1, vol. 3, 1995, pp. 290-310.

Seidman, Irving. Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences . 3 rd ed., Teachers College Press, 2006.

Vieira, Kate. “Undocumented in a Documentary Society: Textual Borders and Transnational Religious Literacies.”  Written Communication , vol 28, no. 4, 2011, pp. 436-61.

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Academic Phrases for Writing Results & Discussion Sections of a Research Paper

Overview |   Abstract   | Introduction | Literature Review | Materials & Methods | Results & Discussion | Conclusion & Future Work | Acknowledgements & Appendix

The results and discussion sections are one of the challenging sections to write. It is important to plan this section carefully as it may contain a large amount of scientific data that needs to be presented in a clear and concise fashion. The purpose of a Results section is to present the key results of your research. Results and discussions can either be combined into one section or organized as separate sections depending on the requirements of the journal to which you are submitting your research paper. Use subsections and subheadings to improve readability and clarity. Number all tables and figures with descriptive titles. Present your results as figures and tables and point the reader to relevant items while discussing the results. This section should highlight significant or interesting findings along with P values for statistical tests. Be sure to include negative results and highlight potential limitations of the paper. You will be criticised by the reviewers if you don’t discuss the shortcomings of your research. This often makes up for a great discussion section, so do not be afraid to highlight them.

The results and discussion section of your research paper should include the following:

• Comparison with prior studies
• Limitations of your work
• Casual arguments
• Speculations
• Deductive arguments

1. Findings

From the short review above, key findings emerge: __ We describe the results of __, which show __ This suggests that __ We showed that __ Our findings on __ at least hint that __ This is an important finding in the understanding of the __ The present study confirmed the findings about __ Another promising finding was that __ Our results demonstrated that __ This result highlights that little is known about the __ A further novel finding is that __ Together, the present findings confirm __ The implications of these findings are discussed in __ The results demonstrate two things.  First, __. Second,  __ The results of the experiment found clear support for the __ This analysis found evidence for __ Planned comparisons revealed that __ Our results casts a new light on __ This section summarises the findings and contributions made. It performs well, giving good results. This gives clearly better results than __ The results confirm that this a good choice for __ From the results, it is clear that __ In this section, we will illustrate some experimental results. This delivers significantly better results due to __ The result now provides evidence to __ It leads to good results, even if the improvement is negligible. This yields increasingly good results on data. The result of this analysis is then compared with the  __ The applicability of these new results are then tested on __ This is important to correctly interpret the results. The results are substantially better than __ The results lead to similar conclusion where __ Superior results are seen for __ From these results it is clear that __ Extensive results carried out show that this method improves __ We obtain good results with this simple method. However, even better results are achieved when using our algorithm. It is worth discussing these interesting facts revealed by the results of  __ Overall, our method was the one that obtained the most robust results. Slightly superior results are achieved with our algorithm. The result is equal to or better than a result that is currently accepted.

2. Comparison with prior studies

The results demonstrated in this chapter match state of the art methods. Here we compare the results of the proposed method with those of the traditional methods. These results go beyond previous reports, showing that __ In line with previous studies __ This result ties well with previous studies wherein __ Contrary to the findings of __ we did not find __ They have demonstrated that __ Others have shown that __ improves __ By comparing the results from __, we hope to determine __ However, in line with the ideas of __, it can be concluded that __ When comparing our results to those of older studies, it must be pointed out that __ We have verified that using __ produces similar results Overall these findings are in accordance with findings reported by __ Even though we did not replicate the previously reported __, our results suggest that __ A similar conclusion was reached by __ However, when comparing our results to those of older studies, it must be pointed out __ This is consistent with what has been found in previous __ A similar pattern of results was obtained in __ The findings are directly in line with previous findings These basic findings are consistent with research showing that __ Other results were broadly in line with __

3. Limitations of your work

Because of the lack of __ we decided to not investigate __ One concern about the findings of __ was that __ Because of this potential limitation, we treat __ The limitations of the present studies naturally include __ Regarding the limitations of __, it could be argued that __ Another limitation of this __ This limitation is apparent in many __ Another limitation in __ involves the issue of __ The main limitation is the lack of __ One limitation is found in this case. One limitation of these methods however is that they __ It presents some limitations such as __ Although widely accepted, it suffers from some limitations due to __ An apparent limitation of the method is __ There are several limitations to this approach. One limitation of our implementation is that it is __ A major source of limitation is due to  __ The approach utilised suffers from the limitation that __ The limitations are becoming clear __ It suffers from the same limitations associated with a __

4. Casual arguments

A popular explanation of __ is that __ It is by now generally accepted that __ A popular explanation is that __ As it is not generally agreed that __ These are very small and difficult to observe. It is important to highlight the fact that __ It is notable that __ An important question associated with __ is __ This did not impair the __ This is important because there is __ This implies that __ is associated with __ This is indicative for lack of __ This will not be biased by __ There were also some important differences in __ It is interesting to note that, __ It is unlikely that __ This may alter or improve aspects of __ In contrast, this makes it possible to __ This is particularly important when investigating __ This has been used to successfully account for __ This introduces a possible confound in __ This was included to verify that __

5. Speculations

However, we acknowledge that there are considerable discussions among researchers as to __ We speculate that this might be due to __ There are reasons to doubt this explanation of __ It remains unclear to which degree __ are attributed to __ However, __ does seem to improve __ This does seem to depend on __ It is important to note, that the present evidence relies on __ The results show that __ does not seem to impact the __ However, the extent to which it is possible to __ is unknown Alternatively, it could simply mean that __ It is difficult to explain such results within the context of __ It is unclear whether this is a suitable for __ This appears to be a case of __ From this standpoint, __ can be considered as __ To date, __remain unknown Under certain assumptions, this can be construed as __ Because of this potential limitation, we treat __ In addition, several questions remain unanswered. At this stage of understanding, we believe__ Therefore, it remains unclear whether __ This may explain why __

6. Deductive arguments

A difference between these __ can only be attributable to __ Nonetheless, we believe that it is well justified to __ This may raise concerns about __ which can be addressed by __ As discussed, this is due to the fact that __ Results demonstrate that this is not necessarily true. These findings support the notion that __ is not influenced by __ This may be the reason why we did not find __ In order to test whether this is equivalent across __, we __ Therefore, __ can be considered to be equivalent for __

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32 Comments

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