Assignment Three: Results and Discussion Sections

This final assignment involves conducting both your qualitative and quantitative analyses, writing up your results section and also your discussion. Writing these will be covered extensively in Lectures 7,9 and 10. Briefly, you will need to:

1. Produce basic descriptive statistics for the sample (e.g. number of men and women, average age, etc.). Generating these statistics will be covered in Lectures 8 and 9.

2.Conduct simple inferential statistics on your chosen variables. This will involve selecting the

correct statistic for the data you use. This will be covered in Lectures 8 and 9.

3.Write numbers 1 and 2 above in the format outlined in Lecture 9.

4. Identify and then examine three key themes from the qualitative data. This will be outlined in

Lecture 7. It will involve providing examples of extracts from the focus groups of the themes on

which you have chosen to focus, and then making a comment on each of the themes you choose

to include. This comment should be analytic and not descriptive. In other words, you should not

simply repeat what is in the data, but rather should outline broad parameters of the theme and

how it fits with your overall research and the research question(s) you originally wanted to

answer.

5. Write a discussion of your findings/results. This will be covered in Lecture 10. This will provide a brief summary of your findings, a comment on their relationship to the previous literature, a comment on the limitations of the research, any recommendations for future research, and any concluding remarks about your research.

Whilst this all may sound daunting or very new to you, it will be clearly covered in the lectures. Also, you can look up many research reports via the library if you want to see examples of how research reports are written.

There are also some examples in this topic guide, including one that reports a mixed methods approach – ie. one that includes both quantitative and qualitative data– which is the approach we are taking. Overall, conducting and writing up this research should be both a challenging but satisfying experience, and one that equips you with considerable skills for future research that you may conduct, either as a student or in our workplace, i.e. in the form of a workplace evaluation or needs assessment or a particular project.

Weighting

: 60% of overall grade

Length: 2000 words