Strategies for writing the findings section

A successful presentation of the main findings should set the stage for an engaging discussion section where readers become convinced of the main takeaways of the research. Where discussion sections are about persuasion, findings provide the necessary evidentiary warrants that ultimately make the arguments in the discussion persuasive.

With this in mind, there are a number of broad strategies to consider when presenting your findings.

Adopt the style of the field

Every research field has their own particular style for highlighting the salient points of a study. Research in economics will focus on statistics, relying on tables and figures to make important assertions about the meaning of the raw data. Cultural anthropology, on the other hand, seldom captures statistical data, opting instead for narratives and artifacts to get at the essence of a culture or community. Other fields have their own unique circumstances that dictate the accepted writing practices among researchers in each discipline.

As a result, you will benefit from reading research similar to the study you want to present, not merely for the findings they highlight but also the style in which they present those findings. Matching the tone and style of similar scholars in your field will resonate with your peer reviewers and eventually your research audience.

Provide the necessary context

Every scientific discipline requires the researcher to describe their research setting, the data or resources they are studying, and the means through which they study them. This task is especially challenging within the social sciences as researchers observe some social phenomenon in some social setting, neither of which is perfectly replicable.

As a result, reporting background information necessary to understanding a segment of data is important to persuading your research audience of the salience and relevance of your findings. Whether you’re presenting narratives or packaging qualitative data in excerpts or tables, you will still need to describe the context surrounding your data in prose to make the findings accessible to your research audience.

Establish research transparency

Beginning researchers may make the mistake of only presenting the good points of their findings, ignoring negative results from their own research while overemphasizing data that demonstrates promising trends but may not show the entire picture of the phenomenon being studied. Because of this, readers of research may be skeptical of unsupported claims. By extension, they may also look for all of the potential aspects that influence a concept or phenomenon which might confound or contextualize the claims made in the findings.

Transparency is thus an important part of the research writing process, demanding that researchers qualify their findings with important caveats worth considering. These caveats will often be found in the discussion section, where limitations of the study are outlined. However, describing contextual details in the findings can help your research audience assess the persuasive power of the evidentiary warrants you are using to support your claims.

Write clearly and consistently

Scientific theory, even in the social sciences, often employs specific jargon and technical terms. The background and discussion sections, where theory is the main focus, will often employ field-specific language that may not be accessible to researchers unfamiliar with the field. A compelling findings section, on the other hand, requires the researcher to make the findings easily understood by their research audience.

Oftentimes, this means using clear language that is accessible to readers of research who may not have a specific expertise but general interest in the topic you are studying. As a result, be sure to limit the technical or theoretical language you employ in the findings section to only what is necessary. Doing so can ground the readers in a clear understanding of the data, making for a more engaging discussion section that is more credible with its claims more readily acceptable as scientific knowledge.