Weblink: http://www.slideshare.net/aidenyeh/writing-the-discussion-and-analysis

In the discussion section you step back and take a broad look at your findings and your study as a whole. As in the introduction, researchers use the discussion section to examine their work in the larger context of their field.

This section moves the reader back from the specific information reported in the methods and the results sections to a more general view of how the findings should be interpreted.

WHAT HAVE YOU OBSERVED?

1.      What did the authors of this study find out about their original hypothesis?

2.      Why do you think the authors ordered the information in their discussion in the way shown here?

3.      What other kinds of information do you think the authors could have included in this section?

Ordering your Information

The information that you include in this section depends greatly on the findings of your study; however, the specific-to-general movement is a convention that most writers follow. The kinds of information that you can include in your discussion section are not fixed. However, the first elements are typically those that refer most directly to the study and its findings. They include:

As the discussion section continues, the writer moves the reader’s attention away from the specific results of the study and begins to focus more generally on the importance that the study may have for other workers in the field.

Researcher’s position towards the findings:

In the discussion section, researchers make explicit their own views on the study and its findings. The researcher may take a position with respect to the explanations, limitations, or applications of the findings.

Source: http://home.pchome.com.tw/showbiz/posenliao/doc/writing/Discussion.doc

http://www.rcjournal.com/contents/10.04/10.04.1238.pdf, How to Write an Effective Discussion

http://www2.winthrop.edu/wcenter/handoutsandlinks/sciwrit.html,

Discussion

The Discussion section is where you will analyze and interpret the results of your experiment. You should state your conclusions in this section. Do not use the word prove in your conclusions. Your results will support, verify, or confirm your hypothesis, or they will negate, refute, or contradict your hypothesis; but the word prove is not appropriate in scientific writing.

Complete your Introduction and Results sections before you begin writing the discussion. The figures and tables in the Results section will be particularly important as you begin to think about your discussion. The tables allow you to present your results clearly to the reader, and graphs allow you to visualize the effects that the independent variable has had on the dependent variables in your experiment. Studying these data will be one of the first steps in interpreting your results. As you study the information in the Introduction section and your data in the Results section, write down relationships and integrate these relationships into a rough draft of your discussion.

The following steps, modified from Gray, Dickey, and Kosinski (1988), may be helpful to you as you begin to organize your discussion:

1. Restate your question, hypothesis, and prediction.
2. Answer the question.
3. Write down the specific data, including results of statistical tests.
4. State whether your results did or did not confirm your prediction and support or negate your hypothesis.
5. Write down what you know about the TOPIC involved in your RESEARCH STUDY. How do your results fit in with what you know? What is the significance of your results?
6. List weaknesses you have identified in your RESEARCH design. You will need to tell the reader how these imperfections may have affected your results.
7. List any problems that arose during the STUDY itself. Unforeseen difficulties with the procedure may affect the data and should be described in the discussion.

Having completed this list, integrate all of this information into several simple, clear, concise paragraphs.