26  Structure of the Discussion

Now we turn to the final major section of an empirical psychology report: the discussion.

The discussion summarises your findings and puts them in context compared to previous studies that influenced you. Relating back to the hypothetico-deductive model, the discussion focuses on the final part of the cycle: as you move from your conclusions to considering how they fit in with previous research.

Empirical report structure as an hourglass shape. In this part, the discussion is highlighted in red to show it is the focus of this chapter.

There are four key components to the discussion:

The discussion is the bottom of the hourglass shape of a report, starting narrow to summarise your findings and becoming broader as you get closer to the end. These components do not typically have headings to present as specific sub-sections, but you might see some articles include sub-headings for limitations, future research directions, and the conclusion. Providing your topic sentences are clear enough, they are not essential. You would not need sub-headings for the summary and previous research to compare though, these are just components to ensure you cover.

The introduction and discussion roughly mirror each other, so in your stage two report, the discussion should be longer than your results section.

26.1 Brief summary of main findings

The first paragraph or two of the discussion summarises your findings without all the statistics you presented in the results. You might mention the key effect size(s), but this is not a repetition of the results section. The idea is to summarise your findings in plain English and link back to your research question and hypothesis (if applicable) so it’s clear to the reader what you conclude.

26.2 Put your findings in context

The longest component in the discussion is putting your findings in context compared to previous research and theory. You will reuse many of the references from the introduction as these are the studies that influenced you, so they are going to be the most relevant. However, you can still bring in new references if there is a relevant study you found in the meantime, or you found something you did not expect, so you had to identify additional evidence.

The key consideration here is you are explaining to the reader how your work builds on what you already knew. Were your findings consistent with past studies or were they inconsistent? Did you find a smaller or larger effect size than previous studies? If you found different results than previous studies, are there key differences in your methods that might explain those differences?

Discussions are quite speculative as you are providing explanations for your findings, but knowledge/research and evaluation skills are still important. It is still crucial to cite evidence in support of your ideas and bring in relevant theory to provide a framework for your explanations wherever possible.

26.3 Consideration of any limitations, generalisability, and future directions

After putting your findings in context, you explain to the reader what your study could and could not tell you. Limitations are about highlighting weaknesses in your study and managing expectations, rather than overselling your results.

It takes time to develop a sense of what a valid limitation is as its easy to make it sound like your study was useless. No study is perfect but likewise no study can cover everything. You do not need to list everything that was missing or include what you consider personal limitations like data analysis is not your strength.

We will spend additional time on this in week 9 to develop a better sense of identifying and evaluating limitations, but for now, the key thing is identifying one or two features of your study’s method that you consider a weaknesses for what you can conclude. For example, you think your measure is useful but maybe you think it might not generalise to real-life behaviour. So, you would outline your limitation, support your reasoning with evidence on the validity of your measure, and link to future research on what you would do in future to address the limitation.

26.4 Conclusion

The final part of your discussion and report is a brief conclusion. This is typically a paragraph or two to remind the reader of your take home message. Consider it an executive summary of what your research question was and what you found in your study. It’s the final thing the reader will see, so recap all the key points you want them to remember.