writing a psychology research report: the results

Previous posts:
> The abstract
> The introduction
> The method

In some ways this is the hardest out of the series to write about because it’s entirely dependent on your study and the kind of data you've collected. There are a couple of general rules of thumb, however:

• State what statistical tests you have used
• State the critical values of the test, the degrees of freedom, significance, and whether the results are one-tailed or two-tailed. How you set the results out depend on which test you’ve used, so if you’re not sure, look up a guide online.
• Make sure the results are logical, so mention any preliminary tests first, the main tests, and then any post-hoc tests that you may have ran.
• If you have completed a variety of tests and have lots of findings, summarise the main or “most significant” points (e.g. results with p < .01 should be valued more than p < .05 if you're limited by a word count, despite both being significant). You don’t need to list every single result that you found, so an unbiased overview is fine.
• You can use tables and figures (in fact, I’d advise that you do include them, especially if you have more results than you can mention) to visually show your data, but make sure they are labelled correctly with a figure/table number and title above, and a brief description below.
• This section is not descriptive. Try to keep your results concise and save any interpretation for the discussion.
• If it turns out that your results aren't significant, don’t describe them as “insignificant”. Data that is not significant can often tell you just as much as data that is, so it's still important - there’s a big difference between “insignificant” and “not significant” in statistics (might seem like a strange thing to mention, but lots of people lots marks for this early on in the course).

Next: the discussion