Research report: Intro - Lit review - Methodology - Results - Conclusions

FY028 Inquiry Based Learning

Answered

Questions:

Contents Page:

I. Introduction

II. Literature Review

III. Methodology

IV. Results/ Discussion

V. Case study (optional)

VI. Conclusions

VII. Recommendations

VIII. References/bibliography

I. Introduction In this section you should:

• State what your research/project/enquiry is about?

• What are your objectives?

• What are you trying to show or prove (your hypothesis)?

• Why your topic is important? (Motivation)

• What is your contribution? What are your main findings (very brief)?

• What are your next steps of your report? For instance, you can say: “The rest of the report is organised as follows. Section 2 presents the related literature review. Section 3 shows….”

II. Literature Review In this section you should report the work that has already been done on your topic. Explain how other people’s research is relevant to yours. Write in an analytical style, compare and contrast. You can find the related literature on books, journals, official websites etc.

For each study, you can include what is the main idea, methodology, main results. In particular, give a summary of each study and how is relevant to your topic. The order of each study matter. You can group them according to the theme.

III. Methodology In this section you should clearly state how you carried out your investigation. You need to describe what you did to conduct your investigation and follow a step by step procedure of what you did. Explain:

• Your data (primary, secondary, qualitative, quantitative),

• The resources that you used in order to collect the data.

• How you analyse the data for your report.

IV. Results/Discussion This is the section you interpret and explain your results, offering possible reasons as to why you got the findings you did, providing evidence to back up your explanations.

You may find that you use phrases such as, “This seems to support…..”, “It appears that…….” “This may be due to…..” This is called academic hedging and as your findings may be generalised, it attempts to explain your findings within the limitations of your investigation.

• Present your finding of your research. You can use text, graphs or diagrams.

• Give each graph/table a title and provide a description of the information demonstrated.

• Discuss what your findings mean by supporting the explanation with previous research.

V. Case Study (optional) You can focus on a particular aspect of your topic. For example, if you are investigating the unemployment rate, you can focus of one country.

VI. Conclusions Summary of the main points of your research, the key points you have made, telling the reader why your findings are important, in one paragraph, ending with the message that you want to leave your readers with.

This is where you ask yourself “So what do my findings show, what does this mean and why should the reader care? Suggestions for future research.

VII. Recommendation What are the recommendation for action? Let reader know what they should do as a result of the investigation.

VIII. References/bibliography List all your sources in alphabetical order, using the Harvard Referencing style. Appendix (optional) In this section, you can provide additional information related to your topic. For example, you can include the Questioner if you are using primary data for your research, or provide an historical overview. 5

Get instant help from 5000+ experts for