Results & Discussion page 1
Results Section
General Advice
Be friendly to your audience. Dont throw numbers at your audience. Walk them through
your results, holding their hand and explaining everything clearly.
Dont hunt for a significant result. Keep in mind that the statistical power of your study is
likely to be relatively low. This means there is a very good chance that your hypothesis will not
be supported with a statistically significant p-value even if you do everything perfectly. When
your central idea is not supported by the data, there is a strong temptation to begin
analyzing everything in the hopes of finding at least one significant finding. Please resist this
temptation.
In the first place, your goal is not to support your hypothesis but to test your
hypothesis, and the answer to the test may be no. There is no shame in not supporting your
hypothesis. In fact, that is the most likely outcome when you have low statistical power.
Active voice. APA recommends writing in the active voice rather than the passive voice.
The passive voice occurs when the subjects of the sentence are having things done to them
rather than the subjects themselves doing something.
In the sentence, The questionnaires
were completed by participants, the subject of the sentence is the questionnaire and it is being
acted upon by participants. To rewrite this in the active voice, you might write, Participants
completed the questionnaires.
First-person. It is preferable to write We conducted a 2 x 2 ANOVA rather than The
researchers conducted a 2 x 2 ANOVA. However, this can become awkward when discussing
results, in which case you could make the results themselves the subject of the sentence: The
results from a 2 x 2 ANOVA indicated…
Setting the Stage
Before you get to your central results, there is often some statistical housekeeping you
have to take care of. This typically involves clearing up any doubts the reader may have about
your measures or manipulations and is often called setting the stage.
Manipulation checks. A manipulation check is a procedure sometimes used to test
whether the levels of your independent variable differ on the variable you intend. For example,
if you will be having participants interacting with two confederates, one of whom will be acting
high incompetence and the other of whom will be acting low incompetence, you might have
participants complete a first impressions questionnaire in which they rate their partners,
among other things, competence. If you can report that participants rate the high competence
confederate significantly higher incompetence than they rate the low competence confederate
according to a t-test, your readers will have more confidence that you have successfully
manipulated competence.
Reliability. You need to report the reliability of any dependent variables as well as any
changes you made to improve reliability. If you have several dependent variables, it may be
more effective to present their reliabilities immediately before you present the statistical tests
they were used for, but otherwise, you can present reliabilities in this section. If you used
reliability analysis to improve reliability by deleting items, you should report the number of items
in your original scale, the number of items in your final scale, and the Cronbach alpha of your
final scale.
Conversions of raw observations into data. If the responses you collected consist of
Likert scale scores, you dont need to worry about this because your raw observations are
already in the form they need to be in for analysis. But lets say that you had participants
Below are the 10 participants and their reported times they said they prayed monthly.
PRAYER FREQUENCY (X)
1
15
49
7
3
2
30
10
5
13
This project just needs ONLY a RESULTS and A DISCUSSION section per the Instructor. NO OTHER SECTION Calculations of (Y) from the Correlation calculator explaining the Hypothesis.
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