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The opening paragraph of the RESULTS sets the scene for the reader and also describes any complications that arose in data collection and analysis. So, open by telling your reader anything general they need to know in order to understand the analyses. Remind them what data you gathered. Tell them about anything you did to modify or transform the data. If you handed out questionnaires, provide information about response rates. (See Section E of this Web site for more on how to write up studies that involve questionnaires.) If there are problems with lots of missing data on some of the key variables, inform the reader about the extent of the problem and which variables are most affected. (See Section E7.2 of this Web site for more on missing data.) If you had to exclude the data from any participants explain why here, unless it makes more sense to do so later on. If you are going to report a whole series of analyses using the same analysis, then describe accurately the inferential test used, state the significance level you used if you employed significance testing and whether this was one- or two-tailed here; this will avoid you having to repeat the same thing tediously later. Mention here also any corrections that you employed to control for increases in your type I error rate produced by running several inferential tests. (For more on type I error, see Section 11.3 of the book.) Describe and discuss any complications that arose, what you did in response, and any ways in which these complications influenced or altered the inferential analyses you ran on the data.
In your early experiments, this opening was probably little more than a sentence or two. As you progress and your experiments become more complex, it may run to several paragraphs.
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