H Some issues to consider in the RESULTS sections of your later reports and projects

As you become more experienced, more will be expected of you in the RESULTS. Here is some advice on the kinds of things that you are likely to be expected to do and to talk about in the RESULTS as time goes by. These include: checking and screening your data (see Section 13.9.5 of the book), reporting on any ways in which this influenced or altered the inferential analyses you ran on the data, reporting the inferential analyses more comprehensively and perhaps also undertaking more extensive inferential analyses, such as analyses to test a specific prediction. You may also be expected to report relevant statistics of effect size and comment on these as a matter of routine. (For more on effect size see Chapter 12 of the book and Section B5 of this Web site.)

Here are some of the issues considered in this part of the website:

1. At this stage in your career as a student of psychology the opening section of the RESULTS may become quite lengthy as you describe such things as what you did to the data prior to analysing it inferentially, any problems with missing data and how you dealt with these, or any corrections you employed to control for increases in the type I error rate produced by running several inferential tests on the one set of data. (For more on this see Section B7.1 of this Web site.)
2. You may have more than one set of data and associated analyses to report. If so, you need to work through these in order, starting with the data and analyses that are most important.
3. You may be expected to report relevant statistics of effect size and associated confidence intervals.
4. If you ran an experiment and your IV has more than two levels you will need to undertake and report further analyses to locate any statistically significant differences. (For more on this, see Section B7.1 of this Web site.)
5. If the RESULTS section becomes quite lengthy it may become necessary to produce summaries at key points that emphasize the key findings from each set of analyses or the purpose of the next series of analyses. This will help your reader navigate their way through the material.

Each of these issues is discussed below. You can also find an advanced example RESULTS for the mnemonic experiment in Section H6 of this Web site.