Abstract
This chapter is intended to be a practical guide to help with the construction of tables and figures and with the general presentation of results of statistical analysis in a research paper. Constructing tables and figures well and writing a results section so that it appears to make a coherent point—and does not wander—is as important as constructing a solid research question and conducting analyses correctly to answer it. That is, if the reporting of the results does a poor job of telling a story that can answer the research question, it is ultimately pointless to have developed a good literature review and research question. For that matter, the statistical analyses may have been performed extremely well, but if the results are not displayed in a way that is easy to see and understand, the analyses have been a waste of time.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Agin, D. (2006). Junk science: An overdue indictment of government, industry, and faith groups that twist science for their own gain. New York: Thomas Dunne Books.
Babbie, E. (2004). The practice of social research (10th ed.). Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth.
Bonevac, D. (2003). Deduction: Introductory symbolic logic (2nd ed.). Malden: Blackwell.
Bunch, B. (1997). Mathematical fallacies and paradoxes. Mineola: Dover.
Campbell, S. K. (2004). Flaws and fallacies in statistical thinking. Mineoloa: Dover.
Campbell, D. T., & Stanley, J. C. (1963). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for research. Chicago: Rand-McNally.
Cleveland, W. S. (1993). Visualizing data. Summit: Hobart Press.
Coyne, J. A. (2009). Why evolution is true. New York: Viking.
Davis, J. A. (1985). The logic of causal order (Sage University paper series on quantitative applications in the social sciences, series no. 07–55). Beverly Hills: Sage.
DeGroot, M. H., & Schervish, M. J. (2012). Probability and statistics (4th ed.). Boston: Addison-Wesley.
Dickens, W. T., & Flynn, J. R. (2006). Black Americans reduce the racial IQ gap: Evidence from standardization samples. Psychological Science, 16(10), 913–920.
Dillman, D. A., Smyth, J. D., & Christian, L. M. (2009). Internet, mail, and mixed-mode surveys: The tailored design method (3rd ed.). Hoboken: Wiley.
Duneier, M. (2012). Qualitative methods. In G. Ritzer (Ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell companion to sociology (1st ed., pp. 73–81). West Sussex: Blackwell.
Durkheim, E. (1997). The division of labor in society (L. A. Coser, Trans.). New York: Free Press.
Firebaugh, G. (2008). Seven rules for social research. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fox, J. (2008). Applied regression analysis and generlized linear models (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Gujarati, D. N., & Porter, D. C. (2009). Basic econometrics (5th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Hawking, S. (1988). A brief history of time. New York: Bantam.
Hooke, R. (1983). How to tell the liars from the statisticians. New York: Marcel Dekker.
Huff, D. (1993). How to lie with statistics. New York: W.W. Norton.
Idler, E. L., & Benyamini, Y. (1997). Self-rated health and mortality: A review of twenty-seven community studies. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 38(1), 21–37.
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lieberson, S. (1987). Making it count: The improvement of social research and theory. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lohr, S. L. (1999). Sampling: Design and analysis. Pacific Grove: Duxbury Press.
Lynch, S. M. (2007). Introduction to applied Bayesian statistics and estimation for social scientists. New York: Springer.
Marx, K. (1988). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 (M. Milligan, Trans.). Amherst: Prometheus Books.
Merton, R. K. (1968). Social theory and social structure. New York: Free Press.
Mlodinow, L. (2008). The Drunkard’s walk: How randomness rules our lives. New York: Pantheon Books.
Morgan, S. L., & Winship, C. (2007). Counterfactuals and causal inference: Methods and principles for social research. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Paulos, J. A. (2001). Innumeracy: Mathematical illiteracy and its consequences. New York: Hill & Wang.
Pigliucci, M. (2010). Nonsense on stilts: How to tell science from bunk. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Popper, K. S. (1992). The logic of scientific discovery. New York: Routledge.
Preston, S. H., Heuveline, P., & Guillot, M. (2001). Demography: Meauring and modeling population processes. Oxford: Blackwell.
Scheaffer, R. L., Mendenhall, W., III, Ott, R. L., & Gerow, K. (2012). Elementary survey sampling (7th ed.). Boston: Brooks/Cole.
Smith, T. W., Marsden, P., Hout, M., & Kim, J. (2011). General social surveys 1972–2010 [machine-readable data file]/Principal Investigator, T.W. Smith; Co-Principal Investigator, P.V. Marsden; Co-Principal Investigator, M. Hout; Sponsored by National Science Foundation.–NORC ed.–Chicago: National Opinion Research Center [producer]; Storrs, CT: The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut [distributer].
von Hippel, P. T. (2005). Mean, median, and skew: Correcting a textbook rule. Journal of Statistics Education, 13(2).
Western, B. (2009). Punishment and inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Wimmer, A. (2013). Waves of war: Nationalism, state formation, and ethnic exclusion in the modern world. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ziliak, S. T., & McCloskey, D. N. (2008). The cult of statistical significance: How the standard error costs us jobs, justice, and lives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lynch, S.M. (2013). Presenting Results of Statistical Analysis. In: Using Statistics in Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8573-5_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8573-5_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-8572-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-8573-5
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)