A surprising amount of one' s time as a student and professional is spent reporting the
results of one' s research projects for presentation to teachers, managers, and clients.
Indeed, without basic research skills and the ability to present research results clearly
and completely, an individual will encounter many obstacles in school and on the
job. The need for some research- -writing ability is felt nearly equally by college
students in all fields, engineering and science as well as business and the humanities.
Graduate study often makes great demands on the student' S research- writing skills
, and most professions continue the demand; education, advertising and marketing
, economics and accounting,science and engineering,psychology, anthropology,
the arts, and agriculture may all require regular reporting of research data.
The standard research report,regardless of the field or the . intended reader,
contains four major sections. These sections may be broken down into a variety
of subsections, and they may be arranged in a variety of ways, but they regularly
significant relevance to the health of this segment of the population and might lead to
some sort of regulations on such foods. A frequent subsection of this problem section
is a review of past research on the topic being investigated. This would consist of
summaries of the contributions of previous researcher to the question under consideration
with some assessment of the value of these contributions. This subsection has rhetorical
usefulness in that it enhances the credibility of the researcher by indicating that the
data presented is based on a thorough knowledge of what has been done in the field
and, possibly, grows out of some| investigative tradition. Procedures Section. The second
major section of the research report details, with as much data as possible, exactly how
the study was carried out. This section . includes description of any necessary equi pment
,how the subjects were selected if subjects were used, what statistical technique was
used to evaluate the significance of the findings, how many observations were made and
when.