Chapter 6: Discussion/Conclusion Section(s)

Discussion/Conclusion Goal 2: Framing Principal Findings

The next goal in the Discussion and Conclusion section is Framing Principal Findings. The function of this goal is to discuss and establish the meaning of your research results. The name Framing Principal Findings comes from the aim of positioning the outcomes of your study in a way that the reader can understand — typically, within the already existing literature on the topic.

There are four strategies that can be used to achieve the communicative aims of Goal 2. Note that these are primarily associated with discussion of results rather than drawing conclusions about the entirety of the research.

Strategies for Discussion/Conclusion Communicative Goal 2: Framing Principal Findings

  • Accounting for results
  • Explicating results
  • Relating to expectations
  • Addressing limitations
Now we’ll delve deeper into each of the strategies you can use to achieve this goal in your own writing.

Discussion/Conclusion Goal 2 Strategy: Accounting for Results

Accounting for results is a way for you to reflect on or further consider the findings of your study. This could be accomplished with or without referencing previous works. You can use this strategy to clarify what may have contributed to, caused, or otherwise affected the results or outcomes. You may also want to suggest reasons or hypotheses that could account for certain findings, and justify the nature of results.

Here are two examples of how you can accomplish this strategy, with strategy-specific language in bold:

Examples

  • These changes are most probably related to modifications in N uptake into aap2 mesophyll cells, as suggested by upregulation of amino acid importer LHT1 (Figure 7A) and increased uptake of 14C-label.[1]
  • That multiple genes in this pathway are underexpressed in hybrids of both species pairs perhaps is a cause or consequence of their sterility.[2]

 

The Academic Phrasebank website offers a wealth of sentence starters useful to writers in this stage of reporting their research:

General comments and explanations:

  • A possible explanation for this might be that …
  • Another possible explanation for this is that …
  • This result may be explained by the fact that …
  • There are, however, other possible explanations.
  • These relationships may partly be explained by …
  • There are several possible explanations for this result.
  • These results are likely to be related to …
  • It seems possible that these results are due to …

Reporting inconsistent, counterintuitive, or contradictory findings:

  • These differences can be explained in part by …
  • This inconsistency may be due to …
  • This discrepancy could be attributed to …
  • This rather contradictory result may be due to …
  • The observed increase in X could be attributed to …
  • It is difficult to explain this result, but it might be related to …
  • The possible interference of X cannot be ruled out.
  • Differences between X and Y may have influenced …
  • These possible sources of error could have affected …
  • There are two likely causes for the differences between …
  • The reason for this is not clear but it may have something to do with …
  • Since this difference has not been found elsewhere it is probably not due to …

Discussion/Conclusion Goal 2 Strategy: Explicating Results

The explicating results strategy explains the reported results in the context of the study and/or in a broader context of the discipline. Here is where you consider your results and their implications. Your readers, of course, will develop their own interpretations or explanations for why the findings turned out as they did; however, you will want to guide their views as you make an argument explaining your own reasoning.

Here are a couple of examples from published articles in high-impact journals:

Examples

  • We must therefore conclude, to use the terminology of Goodlad et al. (1979), that the content standards, as formulated by the relevant official bodies, have not been properly incorporated into the formal curriculum, despite their authoritative national status.[3]
  • This research also showed that the effectiveness of rotations at reducing the weed seedbank was dependent on the specific crop that initiated the rotations (Fig. 1-3).[4]

The Academic Phrasebank website provides this list of suggested ways to report findings that are related to previous research:

Reporting findings in line with previous research:

  • Several reports have shown that …
  • As mentioned in the literature review, …
  • Prior studies that have noted the importance of …
  • Very little was found in the literature on the question of …
  • Previous studies evaluating X observed inconsistent results on whether …
  • A strong relationship between X and Y has been reported in the literature.
  • In reviewing the literature, no data was found on the association between X and Y.
  • These factors may explain the relatively good correlation between X and Y.
  • It may be that these participants benefitted from …
  • The observed correlation between X and Y might be explained in this way: …

Discussion/Conclusion Goal 2 Strategy: Relating to Expectations

Relating to expectations reasons about the researchers’ anticipated or unanticipated findings and/or observations. You can use this strategy to point out expected or unexpected results, express your attitudes about the results, often concerning surprise or unsatisfactory findings, and connect findings to initial hypotheses (i.e., to describe how findings were or were not confirmed, as seen in the following examples):

Examples

  • Hypothesis 1 is verified by unchanged oil content values in rain-fed plot. [5]
  • Interestingly, relative to inulin the dimer exhibited higher activity than the tetramer [35]. [6]

The Academic Phrasebank website recommends these phrases that are in line with using this strategy:

  • Surprisingly, X was found to …
  • What is surprising is that …
  • One unanticipated finding was that …
  • Surprisingly, no differences were found in …
  • This finding was unexpected and suggests that …
  • It is somewhat surprising that no X was noted in this condition …
  • Contrary to expectations, this study did not find a significant difference between …
  • However, the observed difference between X and Y in this study was not significant.
  • However, the ANOVA (one way) showed that these results were not statistically significant.

Discussion/Conclusion Goal 2 Strategy: Addressing Limitations

Addressing limitations is used to evaluate the study by pointing out shortcomings and/or minimizing deficiencies in the research.

The following are examples of how you can realize this strategy, with specific language for expressing these limitations in bold.

Examples

  • However, the study area spans an overly large region encompassing several climatic zones, which calls into question whether chronologies can simply be averaged.[7]
  • Our study was not free of problems, however. For instance, the overall rate of participation in sending feedback by e-mail was just over 50% of all participants (23 corrective feedback e-mails to 44 transcripts in English sessions and 23 corrective feedback e-mails to 43 transcripts in Japanese sessions).[8]

It’s important to note that research reports do not provide information without taking a stance toward that information. Researchers may indicate more or less certainty about their interpretations, and this is especially true of Addressing Limitations. While it’s important, of course, to point to the shortcomings of your study (as no study is perfect), it’s important not to over-emphasize the deficiencies in your research. So, you may want to highlight a contribution that your study makes while simultaneously acknowledging some aspect that was less than ideal. In that case, you would want to hedge or boost accordingly, as showing in these sentence starters from the Academic Phrasebank website:

Hedging Boosting
  • These findings may be somewhat limited by …
  • These findings cannot be extrapolated to all patients.
  • These data must be interpreted with caution because …
  • These results, therefore, need to be interpreted with caution.
  • In observational studies, there is a potential for bias from …
  • These results should be interpreted with caution.
  • In spite of its limitations, the study certainly adds to our understanding of the …
  • Notwithstanding the relatively limited sample, this work offers valuable insights into …
  • Obviously, caution must be advised, but we want to emphasize …
  • Regardless of the imperfect design, there are definite benefits to the study’s methodology, and those benefits contribute to the value of the results by …

Sometimes it isn’t necessary to hedge or boost, but rather to simply present the information as neutrally as possible.

  • It could be argued that the positive results were due to …
  • Although the current study is based on a small sample of participants, the findings suggest …
  • While this study did not confirm X, it did …
  • Notwithstanding these limitations, the study suggests that …
  • Despite its exploratory nature, this study offers some insight into …
  • A note of caution is due here since …
  • Another source of uncertainty is …
  • These results, therefore, need to be interpreted with caution.
  • In observational studies, there is a potential for bias from …
  • It is important to bear in mind the possible bias in these responses.

Key Takeaways

Goal 2 of writing the Discussion/Conclusion section is related to Frame Principal Findings. There are four possible strategies that you can use to accomplish this goal:

  1. Accounting for results, and/or
  2. Explicating results, and/or
  3. Relating to expectations, and/or
  4. Addressing limitations.

Remember: It isn’t necessary to include all of these strategies — they are simply possibilities for reaching the goal.

  1. Zhang, L., Tan, Q., Lee, R., Trethewy, A., Lee, Y. H., & Tegeder, M. (2010). Altered xylem-phloem transfer of amino acids affects metabolism and leads to increased seed yield and oil content in Arabidopsis. The Plant Cell, 22(11), 3603-3620. ↵
  2. Noor, M. A. (2005). Patterns of evolution of genes disrupted in expression in Drosophila species hybrids. Genetics Research, 85(2), 119-125. ↵
  3. Fukkink, R. G. (2010). Missing pages? A study of textbooks for Dutch early childhood teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26(3), 371-376. ↵
  4. Teasdale, J. R., Mangum, R. W., Radhakrishnan, J., & Cavigelli, M. A. (2004). Weed seedbank dynamics in three organic farming crop rotations. Agronomy Journal, 96(5), 1429-1435. ↵
  5. Bedbabis, S., Rouina, B. B., & Boukhris, M. (2010). The effect of waste water irrigation on the extra virgin olive oil quality from the Tunisian cultivar Chemlali. Scientia Horticulturae, 125(4), 556-561.. ↵
  6. Artyukhov, V. G., Kovaleva, T. A., Kholyavka, M. G., Bityutskaya, L. A., Grechkina, M. V., & Obraztsova, T. B. (2009). Study of the oligomeric structure and some physicochemical properties of inulinase from Kluyveromyces marxianus Y-303. Biophysics, 54(6), 675-680. ↵
  7. Black, B. A., Copenheaver, C. A., Frank, D. C., Stuckey, M. J., & Kormanyos, R. E. (2009). Multi-proxy reconstructions of northeastern Pacific sea surface temperature data from trees and Pacific geoduck. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 278(1-4), 40-47. ↵
  8. Bower, J., & Kawaguchi, S. (2011). Negotiation of meaning and corrective feedback in Japanese/English eTandem. Language Learning & Technology, 15(1), 41-71. ↵

License

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Preparing to Publish Copyright © 2023 by Sarah Huffman; Elena Cotos; and Kimberly Becker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.