Discussion

This is where you discuss your findings and have an opportunity to explain what it all means, interpret your results, and explain how they contribute to the research topic. This section is headed by ‘Discussion’ as a Level 1 heading. Your report follows an hourglass shape where you start broad (introduction) narrow in the middle (describe your study in specific detail) and then broaden towards the end where you discuss the implications of your findings.

In this section, you would use the following structure:

  • Start by reiterating the aims of the study and summarising your main findings. This would include reviewing the results but not restating statistics only the conclusions from them. Include all findings even those that were not significant. This portion should be just a short paragraph.

  • Next, relate these findings back to your original predictions (did they support them or not?) and the question you were originally trying to answer. What are the theoretical implications of your findings? Things to include are: i) Do your results support, contradict, extend or qualify previous findings? ii) Here you relate your results to the literature reviewed in the Introduction.

  • Compare and contrast your findings with previous research. Consider things like if they compare what this may signify for the generalisability of the findings. Alternatively, if they differ, what changes to the present study design may account for these differences or what may be any alternative interpretations of your results. It is also important to discuss the practical and theoretical implications of your results, explain what your findings mean in a practical sense and also link to the theoretical arguments in a broader sense. Speculation can be offered to explain the data if it is not consistent with other research.

  • Following this, critique your study through addressing any weaknesses or limitations. That is, what could be improved? Could you have done something better? Or is there an area that would benefit from further research?

  • When critiquing your study relate what you say back to the conclusions you drew. How could a particular weakness undermine your conclusions? If it does not, then it is not a useful criticism of your study. However, be mindful of over-criticising your research and giving an impression to your reader that what was done should be considered a meaningless effort. You should be open about the issues when interpreting the findings, yet appreciate the value of the results to adding to the overall understanding of the topic area.

  • Based on your findings, make specific recommendations for future research. These future directions could also stem from any limitations, and become suggestions for useful future studies.

  • Finally, conclude by summarising your main findings again and their implications. What is the take-home message for your reader?

You can think of the Discussion section as a triangle (the opposite shape to the Introduction section).

That is, it starts off focused on the present study, then broadens to consider how the results apply to previous studies and theories, then present some methodological and/or conceptual limitations of the study.

It then broadens even more to include implications of the results for further research, theory and/ or practice, and relate the overall findings to the broad research question that was asked at the start of the report.

Limitations of the study

The limitations and implications paragraphs in a Discussion section of a Research Report are very important as they convey to your readers that you have thought critically about the methodological, conceptual and/or theoretical limitations of the study and the implications of the study’s findings for future research, theory development, and practice in psychology and related fields.

When students are learning to write research reports they are often very cautious about stating the broader implications of a study and they tend to be overly negative about the limitations of the study.

It’s important to remember that all studies have limitations. When writing about the limitations of your study avoid just listing the weaknesses. To do so, diminishes the validity of your research because it leaves the reader wondering whether, or in what ways, the limitations in your study may have impacted the results and conclusions.

Limitations require a critical, overall appraisal and interpretation of their impact. You should answer the question: Do these problems eventually matter and, if so, to what extent? Note that descriptions of limitations should be stated in the past tense because they were discovered after the research was conducted.

Conclusion

The conclusion is very important! The concluding paragraph should remind the reader of the main results and their implications for current research and theory – think of it as a summary of the Discussion where all the points are synthesised and an overall argument is presented.

The concluding statement should be regarded as the conclusion to an argument that started in the Introduction section:

  • The introduction justified the justification of hypotheses and research aims,

  • the Method and Results sections presented evidence to substantiate the argument

  • The discussion and conclusion have provided a critical fulfilment of the argument

  • Leave enough time to write a high-quality discussion!

  • Remember to use present tense to describe results and their implications in the Discussion section.

  • After discussing the results for each hypothesis, consider carefully specific implications of results and avoid overgeneralisation.

  • Make sure the phrasing that you use matches with the design and method of the study. That is, if the study is a correlational survey make sure your phrasing does not imply causation.

  • Any results that are discussed in the Discussion section must have been reported in the Result section first. Never introduce new results in the Discussion.

  • The results should not be repeated in the Discussion. You should state whether the hypotheses were supported or not early in the Discussion section, but never repeat any statistical results in the Discussion section.

  • Do not use the words ‘proved’ or ‘prove’ when discussing the results and hypotheses.

  • Do not say ‘The results proved the hypothesis’

  • Instead say ‘The results supported the hypothesis’.

  • ‘Proof’ is something that detectives find, while researchers find ‘support’ for a theory or hypothesis.