Overview
Your results section is perhaps the most important part of your research, aside from your research question. It functions as a bookend on the other side of your RQ or hypothesis. Your results section MUST consist of the following elements:
1. Your descriptive statistics. This is the full breakdown of how many participants were in your study and how they break down, demographically. So you need both to describe these things briefly in text, but also provide a table for these things.
2. After your descriptives, you will then address your RQ or H and tell us how you used statistics to address this: This is done via a number of tests that you might perform, e.g. a t-test, correlation, regression, or ANOVA. These are all statistical tests that show the impact of your independent variable on your dependent variable, or to show a relationship between two variables (such as student political participation (dependent variable) and student TikTok use (independent variable). Once again, in text, you discuss the test and then provide us with the table. It is VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU NOT PRESENT A TABLE WITHOUT IT FIRST BEING DISCUSSED IN TEXT. For example, you could say, "as Table 2 shows, there was a moderate correlation between political participation and TikTok use" Then you give the numbers for that in your table. We obviously have to discuss running SPSS and tests more thoroughly before we can do this, so we will begin SPSS discussion on Thursday, March 20th.Your results section will be due on April 10th, 2025. It is imperative that each of you meet with me so we can discuss your specific project in detail. I will be setting up appointments for these on March 20th, 2025.
3. Your SPSS output and your data set, from whatever source. Please provide me with your actual data so that I can make sure you have inputted it in SPSS correctly. If you are doing qualitative data, provide me with the anonymized interview quotes, etc.
The following will be for your Discussion section, but is good to run with your other data.
4. Consider running post hoc tests to both identify possible spurious correlations and also to test related hypotheses, if you have data for these. These post hoc results would actually go in your Discussion section, but you should run them now. For example, you may not have hypothesized that one age group (or gender, etc.) does better with Facebook on some metric than another, but if you have the data and it's relevant, you may want to put that in the Discussion/Conclusion section.
Research question - How has social media as a mass communication medium influenced the communication patterns of college students compared to traditional mass communication mediums such as television, newspapers, or radio?
Hypothesis-College students are more likely to rely on social media as their primary mass communication medium than on traditional mediums like television, newspapers, or radio for staying informed and connected.
These are the correct questions and hypotheses you need