What Goes In a Results Chapter

There are two main parts in a results chapter: the results section and the discussion section. Some advisors prefer that their students separate these two sections into two chapters. Occasionally students have extensive results from their study and write two results chapters. This is particularly appropriate if you have two research questions. However, most students write only one results chapter, regardless of how many research questions they have.

The Results

Results sections can vary greatly depending on the purpose and methods of the study. Nonetheless, most result sections consist of a set of claims that the author attempts to describe and support by appealing to their data. The claims that you include in this section should come directly from your analysis of the data (as opposed to claims derived from the literature or "common sense"). Your goal when writing the results section is to enable your reader to understand and develop confidence in your claims.

The easiest way to write a results section is to first identify the main claims you will be making, and then write a subsection in the results section for each claim or set of related claims. The purpose of each subsection should fit with the purpose of the overall results section--to describe and justify claims. So start each subsection with a description of the claim and what it means. Choose an example from the data that illustrates the claim. Such an example will help the reader both to understand the claim and to have more confidence that your claim is valid.

To illustrate how this is done, suppose one of the purposes of my study was to identify the types of mathematics questions a teacher asks during inquiry-based instruction (this would purpose would likely correspond to one of my research questions). Further, suppose my analysis revealed four different types of mathematical questions. I would probably want to make the claim in my results section that the teacher asked four different types of mathematics questions during inquiry-based instruction. So I would write a subsection in the results section in which I describe the claim and what it means by describing the characteristics of each question type, providing an example from the data that illustrates each question type, and explaining how I see the characteristics of that question type in the example. I may even decide to divide this subsection into four smaller sections with their own headings, one for each type of question, to make the organization of the subsection even clearer to the reader.

Sometimes you will need to give more than one example for the reader to gain a rich understanding of a claim. There are at two different situations in which more than one example may be needed:

1. Diversity. For some claims, there may be important differences in the ways the claim might be satisfied. Some claims have this diversity built into the claim itself, like the claim in the example above about the existence of four types of questions. Even when the claim explicitly acknowledges diversity, there may be a need for even more examples from the data in order to communicate the diversity of the claim. Returning to the example of the four types of question, suppose that I discovered that there are two main purposes for the first type of question, and questions in this category are different depending on which purpose they serve. Then I probably should identify these two purposes and share two examples (as opposed to just one) of questions from this category, one for each purpose. In general, if there are important differences within a category or how a claim might be satisfied, you should identify those differences and give examples that illustrate them.
2. Complexity. Sometimes there are degrees of complexity in the data, making some instances of the claim easy to recognize and others less so. If you feel that the complexity occurs regularly in the data, then you will probably want to share an instance of that complexity. However, for the sake of the reader, it may be helpful to first start with an example that is short, clearly illustrates the claim, and is easily understood by someone who is not familiar with your data. Let your reader first get a feel what the claim is like or means. Then provide a second example that reflects the type of complexity that is encountered in the data (i.e., an example where identification of the claim is much less straightforward).

Researchers are expected to "stick to the facts" in their results sections, and save interpretation of what their findings mean in terms of the research problem or in comparison with other studies for the discussion section (described below). Separating results from discussion is typically straightforward in a quantitative study; the results consist solely of statistical findings, and the interpretation of what those findings mean is placed in the discussion section. For a qualitative study, however, separating results from discussion is often difficult, because the analysis of qualitative data itself involves interpretation. Sometimes qualitative researchers don't even try to separate their results and discussions sections, because they see the separation as artificial and cumbersome. As a novice researcher, you should try to separate your results from interpretation so that it's clear what claims are based on analysis of the data (also referred to as the findings of the study) and what claims are based on your interpretation of those findings. Include in your results section only the descriptions of and justification for the specific claims you are making based on your data.

After reading your results section, your reader should...

• Know and understand the specific findings of your study.
• Be convinced that those findings are viable.

The Discussion

The goal of the discussion section is to explain how your findings answer your research question and shed light on your research problem. While the content of the previous section was derived from the activity of analysis (of your data), the content of this section comes from the activity of synthesis (of your results and relevant literature). You are taking the claims you made in the results section and relating them to each other and the literature. Consequently, when you reach this section, you should be finished presenting claims and sharing data. In fact, if you feel compelled to introduce new data as you're writing your discussion section, it is likely that you are actually presenting additional findings that should be in the results section.

In the previous section, you focused on describing and justifying your claims. In this section, you interpret what these claims mean in terms of the issues you were trying to address with your research study. Some of the ideas you might want to address in the discussion section are listed below.

• What your claims (i.e., findings) mean when considered as a whole.
• What each finding implies for your research questions and research problem.
• How your findings compare to other related studies and theories.

Your discussion section should help your reader see the bigger picture and how your research findings fit within that picture. As you do this, avoid the temptation to make recommendations for the field based on your findings. Such recommendations belong in the implications section of the next chapter.

After reading your results section, your reader should...

• Understand how your findings fit with the literature.
• Understand what your findings mean for your research problem.
• Understand why your research findings are important.

Writing Tips

Presenting data in qualitative research. Making decision about what data to include and what to say about it can be very difficult when writing the results section for a qualitative study. One of the main challenges you will face is bringing your reader up to speed on a segment of data that you've spent hours thinking about. What has become obvious to you in that data segment may not be initially visible to your reader. Choose from the following strategies to make the data more accessible to your reader.

• Explain what you see in the data and why. Don't expect readers to be able to see what you see without some help from you.
• Tell readers what to look for in the data segment before they read it. If you wait until afterwards, they will likely have to reread the segment.
• Keep data segments short. Break long segments into a series of short ones, and place explanations of what you see and/or descriptions of what comes next between these short segments.
• Consider summarizing or paraphrasing parts of the data segment that aren't essential for your point. These summaries are typically much easier to read and digest than the raw data.
• Describe important aspects of the context. Sometimes your reader will need information about the context in which the data is situated before they will be able to make sense of the data. For example, they may need a description of the mathematical task the teacher gave to the students, the mathematical activity that preceded the data segment, the physical arrangement of people and objects in the room, and the resources that are available to the student (calculators, ruler, pencil and paper, etc.).

Inclusion of data without some of the above scaffolding can be extremely frustrating to readers. If you do it a lot, your readers will likely either start skipping over your data segments or become resentful and read your results section with an extremely critical eye. Either way, they will finish your results section feeling less than convinced, which is bad news for you. So be kind to your reader--only include data segments that, with a little help from you, will be accessible to your reader, and then make sure you scaffold their reading experience.

Common Graduate Student Mistakes

Forgetting to interpret and discuss the results. It is tempting for graduate students to merely report their results and move onto the final chapter of the thesis without interpreting and discussing the results. Some graduate students feel that the application of their findings to the research problem is obvious, and thus does not need to be discussed. Others struggle to identify what insights their findings can provide into better understanding the issue, problem, or phenomenon they were studying. Regardless of which situation you find yourself in, you still have to relate your research back to your original purpose and the literature you drew from. Look at the list of ideas for what to include in your discussion section to help you get started writing this section.

Providing only a cursory description of the results. Sometimes graduate students give descriptions of their claims without giving a rich sense of the different ways this claim occurred or was fulfilled in the data. Their examples from the data are short, their descriptions cryptic. This leaves the reader with the sense that the researcher has not thought deeply about his or her data. So try to think about the variation that occurs in regards to the claim you are making; identify the complexities and nuances in the data and share it with your reader. Choose examples that give you something to discuss.

Not anticipating and protecting against alternative interpretations of the data. One of the most dangerous mistakes graduate students make is writing about examples from their data in a way that doesn't rule out other possible interpretations. While this is typically an issue of not writing carefully, your readers could easily interpret it as a methodological issue and conclude that since there is a reasonable alternative interpretation of this data segment, there may be alternative interpretations for much of your data. This may cause them to disbelieve your results. To protect against alternative interpretations, (1) clearly identify why the example is an example of your claim, and (2) share your examples with your advisor and other graduate students to critique.

Use of present tense. Your results should be presented in past tense. This is particularly true about statements of what your participants did, knew, felt, or understood. For example, the sentence

As John completes the task, he sorts the marbles into 5 groups, with 2 marbles in each group.

should be

As John completed the task, he sorted the marbles into 5 groups, with 2 marbles in each group.