(ltr) How Do You Interpret The Results.docx

HOW DO YOU INTERPRET THE RESULTS? After reporting and explaining the detailed results, researchers conclude a study by summarizing key findings, developing explanations for results, suggesting limitations in the research, and making recommendations for future inquiries. Summarize the Major Results In the process of interpreting results, researchers first summarize the major findings and present the broader implications of the research for distinct audiences. A summary is a statement that reviews the major conclusions to each of the research questions or hypotheses. This summary is different from the results: It represents general, rather than specific, conclusions. Specific conclusions in the results would include detail about statistical tests, significance levels, and effect sizes. General conclusions state overall whether the hypothesis was rejected or whether the research question was supported or not supported. The research ends with statements by researchers about positive implications of the study. Implications are those suggestions for the importance of the study for different audiences. They elaborate on the significance for audiences presented initially in the statement of the problem. In effect, now that the study has been completed, the researcher is in a position to reflect (and remark) on the importance of the study. Explain Why the Results Occurred After this summary, researchers explain why their results turned out the way they did. Often this explanation is based on returning to predictions made from a theory or conceptual framework that guided the development of research questions or hypotheses. In addition, these explanations may include discussing the existing literature and indicating how the results either confirmed or disconfirmed prior studies. Thus, you will frequently find past research studies being presented by authors in this passage. A concluding passage may contrast and compare results with theories or bodies of literature. Advance Limitations Researchers also advance limitations or weaknesses of their study that may have affected the results. Limitations are potential weaknesses or problems with the study identified by the researcher. These weaknesses are enumerated one by one, and they often relate to inadequate measures of variables, loss or lack of participants, small sample sizes, errors in measurement, and other factors typically related to data collection and analysis. These limitations are useful to other potential researchers who may choose to conduct a similar or replication study. Advancing these limitations provides a useful bridge for recommending future studies. Limitations also help readers judge to what extent the finding scan or cannot be generalized to other people and situations.

Suggest Future Research Researchers next advance future research directions based on the results of the present study. Future research directions are suggestions made by the researcher about additional studies that need to be conducted based on the results of the present research. These suggestions are a natural link to the limitations of a study, and they provide useful direction for new researchers and readers who are interested in exploring needed areas of inquiry or applying results to educational practice. These educators often need an “angle” to pursue to add to the existing knowledge, and future research suggestions, typically found at the conclusion of a research study, provide this direction. For those reading a study, future research directions highlight areas that are unknown and provide boundaries for using information from a specific study. Typically, good quantitative studies end with a positive note about the contributions of the research.

REEXAMINING DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION IN THE PARENT INVOLVEMENT STUDY To obtain an overview of the process of quantitative data analysis and interpretation, we can turn once again to the parent involvement study by Deslandes and Bertrand (2005). With some advanced statistics used by the authors, it is easy to focus on statistics and miss the overall picture of analysis and interpretation unfolding in this study. The authors surveyed 770 parents of secondary-level students attending five public schools in Quebec. These parents completed several instruments. To look closely at the data analysis used by the authors, it is helpful to reflect on the question the authors sought to answer and then examine the statistical analysis they used to obtain answers to the question. The key question can be found in Paragraph 13: “What are the relative contributions of parents’ role construction, self-efficacy, perceptions of teacher invitations, and perceptions of adolescent invitations to predict parent involvement at home and at school in Grades 7, 8, and 9?” (p. 166). In this question, “relative contribution” means what independent variables best explain the two outcomes, parent involvement at home and parent involvement at school. Next, let’s scan the tables of statistical information the authors presented. Table 1 shows demographic, descriptive statistics (percentages) about the parent participants in the study. Table 2 simply lists the major predictor (independent) variables, the variables controlled in the data analysis, and the two outcome (dependent) variables. This is a helpful table to use to think about the data analysis and the statistical procedures. Table 3 shows descriptive statistics (means, standard deviations) on the four independent variables and the two dependent variables. Tables 4 and 5 show inferential, multiple regression analyses for the independent variables and the demographic control variables for the parent involvement at home and the parent involvement at school dependent variables, respectively. So, from the research question, we know that this study will build toward an understanding of the importance of the four factors in explaining parent involvement. Looking back again at Table 6.5 in this chapter on data analysis, we know that when we have two or more independent variables (four constructs and several control variables in this study) measured with

continuous scales (1 = disagree very strongly to 6 = agree very strongly) and one dependent variable (either home or school) measured separately as continuous scales, we will use multiple regression as a statistical procedure. We can look at the two regression tables (Table 4 and Table 5) and see that some of the variables were statistically significant at the p 6 .05, p 6 .01, and p < .001 levels (as shown by * markings) as seen in the notes at the bottom of the two tables. Unfortunately, we did not learn about effect sizes in Table 4 or Table 5. But in terms of data analysis, in Table 4 we can see that “parents’ perceptions of student invitations in academic domain” strongly predicted parent involvement at home (beta = .44). Then we can read the “Results” section to see the more detailed findings. So our thinking about the major forms of analysis of data in this journal article went from thinking about the research question, exploring the tables, recognizing the major types of statistics and using Table 6.5 in this chapter to assessing why the statistic was chosen and then looking closely at the results presented in the tables as well as in the results discussion. The Discussion section (starting at Paragraph 32) provides the “interpretation” of the results starting with a general summary of them presented by grade level and for each of the dependent measures, parent involvement at home and parent involvement at school. Note that throughout this discussion, the authors are introducing references to other studies that highlight similar findings (see, e.g., Paragraph 36). Also, the article ends with a discussion of implications for school interventions and for increased parental involvement, and of the importance of teacher–parent contacts. The final section identifies some of the limitations of the study in terms of sampling (Paragraph 46), advances ideas for further research (Paragraph 47), and then ends on a positive note about the final importance of the results of the study (Paragraph 49).