Writing a Results Section

Quantitative Results Section

Usually, if one is simply using an existing scale or the desire is to report the demographic characteristics of the sample, that information is often better served by appearing in the methods section. The methods section should be a place to provide information unrelated to the evaluation of hypotheses or the research questions but is vital or considered important. Demographic information about the profile of the participants may provide[Page 1892] important information that may affect the generalizability of the results but do not directly impact the findings. The results section should provide enough detail to permit someone provided with the data to be able to replicate the findings. The goal is conciseness and clarity for the report of the outcomes of the procedures undertaken.

The literature review provides a justification for the entire investigation and usually results in a cumulative statement about the purpose of the research and the expected outcomes. The forms usually involve two different focal points for the empirical examination: research questions and hypotheses. A research question is usually a nondirectional inquiry; for example, asking the question, “what is the relationship of communication apprehension to school grades?” is a nondirectional question. The question permits the relationship to be negative (as one variable increases the other variable decreases) or positive (as one variable increases the other variable increases). The results require a two-tailed test of significance, because the value could either be significantly positive or significantly negative.

A hypothesis is different because the direction of the outcome is specified. For example, a hypothesis would be something like, “men will report greater levels of communication apprehension than women.” The testable part of the statement provides a basis for the expectation of one group generating a score different from the other group in a particular direction (greater or lesser than). The appropriate statistical test will then be a one-tailed test. The statistical implications of this shift is an increase in the power of the statistical test to find significant differences between the two groups in this example. The gain in power is because, unlike the two-tailed, or nondirectional test, the levels of significance are not either a value that is higher or lower than the critical value but instead are all values greater than a critical value that is either positive or negative, depending on the direction of the hypothesis.

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