The next step is to construct the outline of your results section. And first of all, there are a few decisions
that you need to make.
So one thing you need to think about is whether you want to visualize key results in figures such as
for example a bar graph.
Another decision you need to make is whether you want to use tables, which can make sense if you have
extensive amounts of information.
And another thing to think about is how you want to structure your results section because results sections
are highly individual.
They really depend on your results.
And so there aren't many guidelines on how you should structure it.
So in this lecture I want to help you as best as I can by giving you some general guidelines for each
of these points.
So one thing that is worth thinking about is whether you want to depict your key results in a figure.
So for example for the fictional study that I discussed a couple of times about how to treat depression
we could include a bar graph that depicts the mean depression of the placebo group and the
mean depression of the treatment group.
However, in that case that wouldn't really be that necessary because if you mentioned in text that the
mean was lower for the treatment group.
And if you also mentioned the means that basically already gives all the information that the reader
needs.
However, suppose that we had four means or even more.
Well, then it can get a lot more difficult to imagine the pattern of the results.
And in that situation it can make sense to add a figure to make this more clear.
So this is something you need to think about. If something is already clear without figure then you don't
need to use a figure.
But if a figure helps to clarify your results it's definitely a great tool to use. And it doesn't have
to be a bar graph.
It can also be a scatter plot or a heat map or whatever makes sense in your case.
Another thing to think about is whether you want to add a table.
So this for example is a table from one of my studies and I had the problem that I had to report a lot
of parameter estimates and the lower bound and the upper bound of their confidence intervals, which
is a lot of numbers.
And so I decided to report these numbers in a table because if I put them all into text this would be
unreadable.
Right?
So if you have a lot of information and especially numerical information it can make sense to add this
information in a table and then you can just refer to this table in the text. And by the way the same
is true for figures.
If you use a figure, refer to it in the text.
Okay.
Next we need to think about the outline
and so the general structure of your text. And as I said, there aren't really any clear rules for that
because people have so different results.
And if your results section is very short then it can make sense to write it in just one text with paragraphs
but if it's quite extensive then it can make sense to have subheadings. Whatever you do, two parts you find
very often in the results section is one part where you describe what you did before the analysis.
So this could be the first paragraph or heading such as "pre processing". And then after that, people usually
describe what their main analysis are and I want to give you some pointers for each of these two
parts.
So what could you have done before the analysis?
Well, you could have, for example, excluded participants or observations. Maybe because they didn't complete
your whole study and so you just couldn't use their data.
Or maybe you transformed the data.
Maybe you combined two variables.
Maybe you recoded variables or maybe you applied some kind of smoothing. Another thing that may happen is
that you have missing data and you fill them in with some kind of statistical technique.
And if you have done so then it's definitely a good idea to describe that first and tell us how you
did it.
So start your results section with whatever you did before the main analyses.
Then next, you describe your main analysis and I wanna give you a general recipe that I always use
when I describe my main analyses.
So I always start by describing the research question that belongs to this analysis and this is particularly
important if you have several research questions because then it can get very confusing for the reader
what you are actually trying to do there.
So I always like to start with restating the research question that belongs to this analysis.
Then after that I describe the analysis that I used.
So for example, did you use a t test? Did you use an ANOVA?
Did you use regression? Or did you use something completely different.
What is it that you used? And then I describe the results and then after that I do nothing.
I'm done. So especially if you restate your research question, it can get very tempting to also try to
give an answer to that question but resist the temptation.
It's okay to re-state your research question but you shouldn't answer it in this section yet. Okay.
So these are some general pointers on how to structure your results section and how to create an outline
for that section.
Now let's turn to the writing in the next lecture.