of a Good Report
The following sections
should be included in most reports.
The sections should be in roughly this order, though you may
vary the order somewhat for stylistic reasons.
The report should be about 5-10 pages in length, plus
an appendix of statistical tables, figures, or other output.
- Introductory statement. The first paragraph should state the theme
of the report. Your 5 hypotheses
should be interconnected enough that you can say something general
about them. For instance,
you might give a general picture of what you expect to find about
different aspects of liberalism/conservatism, or opinions about race
- Statement of your 5 hypotheses.
- Description of the sample. You should state what the universe is
(East Baton Rouge parish residents age 18 and over), and how the data
were collected. You might
also describe briefly any problems of representativeness and what
measures were taken to address them (call-backs, weighting the sample,
etc.). You should state the sample size.
- Testing the hypotheses. (If you choose, you can include the 5
hypotheses in this section, rather than before the sample description.)
- In this section, you test the accuracy of your
hypotheses and evaluate the reasons you have given for them.
- You should have at least a paragraph for each
hypothesis, though your discussions should be concise.
- You should include your statistical tables in
an appendix, sequentially numbered, and refer to them this way in
- Describe percentage differences in the tables,
if you use tables. Discuss
any correlations and their significance.
If you compute chi-square, state its significance.
- You should summarize your findings and evaluate
their substantive significance, at a similar level of generality
as in the first section of the report.
- You should describe any puzzling findings or unanswered
questions that may be a basis for further research.