Many people confuse items that belong in the Results section with items that belong in the Discussion section.

Results are either data, summaries of data, or directly computed from data with no subjective input.  Here are examples of results:

• A listing of the data.

• A listing of a subset of the data.

• A figure generated from the data.

• Any summary statistics generated from the data.

• Other statistics generated from the data.

• Observations about the relationships in the data that are  qualitative or quantitative.

Here is one way to organize your Results section into sub-sections:

Data quality:  In this sub-section, you describe the steps that   were taken to ensure the integrity of the data that are about to be  analyzed to death.  Here, you describe the inclusion or exclusion  criteria for the data.

Sample characteristics:  Here you give a summary of the data.  How many complete records were obtained per group?  How many data are missing?   That sort of thing.

Little picture results:  Here you give results parameter by  parameter.  Typically these types of analyses are done in cookie-cutter fashion.

Big picture results:  Here you aggregate results from the individual parameter analyses or use  statistical methods that are designed to work on sets of  parameters.

A very typical organization of the thesis or dissertation manuscript is as follows:

Abstract:  The abstract dramatically summarizes the results and interpretation of the research.

Introduction: In addition to introducing the topics of the manuscript, the introduction is also typically used to lay out the research questions.

Background:  The Background section should represent a distillation of literature review into the existing state of
knowledge about the research questions.  This is very important because often there is a generally accepted “way of doing things” that you had better follow if you want your manuscript to be accepted.  From our point of view, the literature review will also most likely reveal a set of statistical methods that are likely to be of great interest.

Methods:  The Methods section should describe the actual materials and methods used to carry out the study.  Of particular interest to us will be the Statistical Methods section, which will describe the statistical techniques and methodology used to analyze the data.

Results:  The Results section contains presentations of the data, or direct summaries of the data in the form of statistics.  It can also contain text that integrates material in the Results section with itself.  For example, you may make global observations here.   Other words that go with Results are “Observations” and “Findings”.

Discussion:  The Discussion section generally speaking contains text that integrates the Results with information from the Introduction and Background sections.  Essentially, this is the   section that connects your study with the outside world.   Other words that go with Discussion include “Conclusions”,  “Interpretations”, “Recommendations”, and “Limitations”.

References: You will want to be extremely nit-picky in providing references to support all of your choices and conclusions.

You will want to use parallelism to an extreme degree in this type of writing.  Basically, first organize your Results in a way that makes sense, then write the other sections to match.