Homework

GUIDELINES FOR FINAL RESEARCH REPORTS

· A research report is essentially similar in structure to what you might see in a journal research article. This study will be quantitative

The final report should be approximately 3-5 pages (not counting title page, abstract, data tables/charts, references, nor appendix), consisting of the following components:

· Title page title should say something more about your research topic

· Abstract. This should be no more than 300 words. We recommend you write your report first, and then summarize your research study (topic, rationale, research questions/ hypotheses, participants, procedures, analysis, results, implications) for the abstract.

· Methods Update. This is your chance to update the Methods section from your approved/revised proposal to accurately reflect what you actually did.

Please include in this section any changes you made to:

· (1) Participants (including how many and how you recruited them),

· (2) Procedures (including your survey or interview questions)

· (3) Analyses. Altered surveys/interview questions/consent forms should be noted here and included in the Appendix.

· You do not need to duplicate any information that has remained unchanged from the approved version of your proposal.

· If absolutely nothing changed from how you described it in your approved proposal, this section can be a single sentence: “No changes were made to the research methods from the approved proposal.”

· Results. This should be a detailed report of the results of your analysis of the data. The style of presentation will be very different depending whether your research is quantitative or qualitative.

· Quantitative: A good rule of thumb is to present as much of the statistics as possible through tables and charts, while providing a bare-bones narrative of what analyses you performed (and making reference in the text to the relevant tables/charts).

· You will want to include:

· descriptive statistics for your sample on both demographic and research variables (if you have 2 or more groups, also report descriptives separately for each group)

· scale calculation procedure and descriptives (if you created scales)

· hypothesis testing procedure and outcome (if you used a test), and any correlations you calculated.

· The writing ‘tone’ of the quantitative results section should be as neutral and factual as possible. Save your interpretations for the discussion section.

· NOTE: You can create tables in both MS Word and Excel; one advantage of using Excel is that once you have created a table, you can create a chart right from your table!

· Discussion. This section should be more speculative than the results section. This is your chance to identify the possible theoretical and practical implications of your research results.

Discussion sections often follow a general sequence of:

1. Brief summary of results (in a more conversational and less technical language than in your results), including your overall interpretation of what they mean

2. Consideration of alternate interpretations of the data

3. Discussion of theoretical and practical implications—including situating your results within the body of literature on your topic

4. Consideration of potential weaknesses of your study. This could include any aspect of your research that might limit its reliability, validity, or generalizability. For qualitative research, you will want to mention your own preconceptions about the topic prior to beginning the research.

5. Suggestions for future research (your own and/or others)

· Reference List. (standard APA format) This can be a repeat of the one from the proposal, but please add any additional references you use in the discussion.

· Appendix. (optional) If your survey/interview questions/consent form changed between your approved proposal addenda and the time that you used it, please include a copy of the final version(s) here.