Research Basics

The Research Steps

Contributions to the Field

So you collected and analyzed your data, now what? Remember, our goal as social scientists is to produce knowledge that will further our understanding of our social world. We do this in two ways.

Assessing your findings

After analyzing your data and determining your main findings, you should go back to the literature review and your argument/hypothesis and assess where your results fit in. By doing so, you are stating how your research contributes to our existing knowledge. Use these questions as a guide to evaluate your results.

• Do your findings suggest a new pattern that we did not about?
• Does it corroborate past research? How so?
• Does it contradict past research? How so?
• What are the implications of your results for our understanding of the social phenomena under study?
• Do your findings raise questions for future studies?

Writing a report (a paper, a journal article, a book) that summarizes your research process and findings.

Now that you have evaluated your research findings, you are now ready to write your research paper so that others can read your contributions to the field. After all, without disseminating your findings to a larger public (even if it is just for your professor), how will others learn about your great research? See the section on writing the research paper.

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