Report what you found. Save what it means for the next chapter
The results chapter has one job and most drafts try to do two. Interpretation creeps in because stating a bare finding feels unsatisfying, and the result is a chapter that duplicates the discussion and satisfies neither examiner nor structure.
Get your free quote
We reply within 1 business hour, no delays.
No card details required · 100% confidential · On time, or it's free
Past tense, with the numbers, without the because
Everything in results should be something a reader could verify from your data. Participants reported higher satisfaction in condition A is a result. This suggests the intervention improved engagement is an interpretation, and it belongs one chapter later.
The second discipline is completeness. A finding reported without the statistics that support it leaves a reader unable to evaluate it, and APA 7 is specific about what accompanies each type of test. In qualitative chapters the equivalent is a theme presented without any sense of how widely it was held or how it varied.
The third is order. Results should follow your research questions, in the order you asked them. A chapter organized by the order you happened to run the analyses makes the reader do work that is yours to do.
- Findings organized by research question
- Complete reporting for every result
- Interpretation kept for chapter five
- Tables and figures in APA 7 rather than software output
What a review covers
Send the chapter and the underlying output together
- Whether every claim matches what your analysis actually produced
- Reporting completeness against APA 7
- Interpretation that has drifted into the wrong chapter
- Table and figure structure, numbering and in-text callouts
- Whether a reader could follow it without the output in front of them
Four recurring corrections
Discussion in disguise
Sentences containing because, suggests, indicates or likely. Each one is interpretation and belongs in chapter five. Moving them usually improves both chapters.
Incomplete reporting
A p value without the test statistic, degrees of freedom or an effect size. The most common single omission and the easiest to fix once you know the expected format.
Raw software output
SPSS tables pasted in unchanged. They are not APA 7 tables and never pass. They need rebuilding with correct titles, notes and numbering.
Themes without weight
In qualitative chapters, a theme with one supporting quote and nothing about prevalence, variation, or the cases that did not fit. All three get asked about.
What happens when you send chapter four
Send the chapter, the output and your handbook
The output matters. Without it we can check how you wrote, but not whether what you wrote matches what you found, which is the more valuable check.
Claim against evidence
Every finding traced back to the analysis behind it. Anything that overstates is graded with an explanation of exactly how far the data goes.
Completeness and format
What is missing from each reported result, how the tables should be structured, and where numbering or callouts are wrong.
Structure and order
Whether the chapter follows your research questions and whether anything belongs in chapter five. This is usually the largest single improvement available.
You revise, we reread
Comments explain the rule behind each correction, so the same mistakes do not reappear in the discussion chapter.
Your findings, reported by you
- We do not write your results chapter.
- We do not run or rerun your analysis.
- We do not alter, exclude or reinterpret your findings.
- We do not remove an inconvenient result from your reporting.
- We mark what does not hold up against your own output and explain why.
If a claim in the chapter is not supported by your analysis, we will say so. The fix is always the claim, never the data. Read the full policy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Results reports what you found, in past tense, with the numbers, without explanation. Discussion interprets it, connects it to the literature, acknowledges limitations and says what follows. The quickest test is to search your results chapter for the word because.
Every analysis relevant to your research questions, including the ones that returned nothing. Exploratory analyses can go in an appendix or be clearly labeled as exploratory. What you cannot do is run many and report only the ones that worked.
Usually theme by theme, each one stated as a claim rather than a topic, supported by quotes chosen to show range rather than only the clearest example, with some indication of how widely it was held and how it varied. Disconfirming cases belong here too.
As many as genuinely help and no more. A table that repeats what a sentence already said adds length without information. The test is whether a reader would find the data easier to take in as a table than as prose.
Usually yes, and it often improves the chapter considerably. It makes the structure explicit and it forces you to check that every question actually got answered, which is a surprisingly common omission.
Plainly, in results, exactly as you would a confirmed one. The engagement with why belongs in the discussion. A well-reported null finding is entirely respectable, and attempts to soften it in the results chapter are usually obvious.
Send chapter four and the output behind it
We will tell you which claims your analysis supports, what is missing from the reporting, and what has drifted in from chapter five.
Get Chapter Four Reviewed