Discussion and Interpretation of Data
Discussion and Interpretation of Data
- Do not purposely start a new page for this section. Simply center the word Discussion and continue typing on the very next double-spaced line.
- The purpose of this section is to evaluate and interpret, summarize, explain, compare, and contrast the results, especially with respect to the original research questions.
- Start off with a brief, non-technical summary of the results. In other words, tell the reader of the main findings without using statistical terminology. In this stage, you should make reference to the research questions and give succinct answers to them. After brief summaries come detailed explanations of the results by going into the details.
- Then go on to discuss the implications of the results. In other words, whatever was found needs to be discussed. (Detailed Explanations of the summaries)
- Discuss how the results relate to the literature you cited in the introduction, i.e. emphasize any theoretical consequence of the results. In other words, compare the results of the present study with the results found in previous studies.
- Comment about the significance of the results or their implications for either pedagogy or theory.
- You need an ending paragraph in which you make a final summary statement of the conclusions you have drawn. Comment on the importance and relevance of your findings. How are your findings related to the big picture?
- Thus, this section should contain an absolute minimum of three paragraphs: the non-technical summary, discussion of the results and their implication, and the concluding paragraph.
- In qualitative research, ‘Results’ and ‘Discussion’ might be grouped together, as we have the unification of data collection and data analysis.
- Discussions in a qualitative research are narrative, richly or thickly descriptive, extensive and lengthy, interpretive, seldom generalizations are made perhaps due to its non-probabilistic sampling.
- In qualitative research: a full and thick description of observations, interviews and field notes.
