The apa style manual cautions

Results/Findings Sections for Empirical Research Papers an overview

If you have not already, you may wish to review the befosing this resource. An annotated Results section and other empirical research paper resources are available .

Findings. To paraphrase the APA Publication Manual, researchers should organize findings in a way that reflects the study design. For example, it makes sense to present the results of an ethnographic study as a chronological narrative. Qualitative studies that use thematic coding might break down results by theme or category, whereas quantitative studies might break up findings by research question or statistical test. In most Results sections (whether the study is quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods), the findings are presented in order of importance, beginning with the answer to the primary research question(s). In his for writing journal articles, Daryl Bem writes, “The general rule in reporting your findings is to give the forest first and then the trees. This is true of the results section as a whole: Begin with the central findings, and then move to more peripheral ones” (p. 8).

Presentation and display of findings:

• Make good use of paragraph breaks and/or subheadings to help readers navigate between findings.

• Make sure to review examples of Results sections from sample papers or journal articles in your discipline, as conventions for structure, content, length, and data visualization differ by discipline and among journals.