how many chapter does have in research

Dissertations: Writing Chapters

• Choosing a topic
• Research Proposal
• Reviewing the literature
• Introductions & Conclusions

Writing Chapters

• Wrapping Up
• Abstracts & Summaries
• Managing Expectations

As part of your dissertation you will find that you need to write different types of chapters. In this guide we take you through those types, how to structure them. how to write them and some dos and dont's. Click on the links below to jump to the section you need.

• Writing a methodology chapter

Writing a results chapter

• Writing a discussion chapter

Writing a Methodology Chapter

What is a dissertation methodology.

• Structuring your methodology
• Dos and don’ts

A well-written methodology chapter is essential in establishing the credibility and validity of your research, as it allows other researchers to reproduce your study and build upon your findings . In this guide, we will provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to write a comprehensive and well-organized methodology chapter that will effectively communicate the methodology you used in your research. 

• The methodology explains your methodological approach and explains what you did and how , and why .
• The methodology section allows the reader to critically evaluate a study's overall credibility . 
• The purpose is to give another researcher enough information to replicate the study and obtain similar results.
• Methods and methodology are not synonyms (overarching approach vs  specific tools and procedures used to collect and analyse data).

The methodology chapter, as any other chapters of your dissertation except the introduction and conclusion chapters, consists of 3 main sections: introduction, main body and conclusion/summary.

[Adapted from: Succeeding with your Master’s Dissertation: A step-by-step handbook ]

The sections included in the main body depend on the type of research and the type of dissertation. For example:

• In the traditional dissertation , it is commonly a separate chapter preceding the Results chapter.
• In topic-based dissertations , the Methodology chapter might have a different title such as ‘Conducting Research’.
• In experiment-based or dissertations by compilation , each study or experiment might contain its own methodology or methods section. 

Step 1: Explain your research design/approach

This commonly includes a restatement of the research aim(s) , a justification of choice of research methods , overview of specific method(s) used .

Step 2: Explain your methods of data collection

This involves explaining how the research was conducted and how the data were obtained . It requires a detailed description of processes and procedures and a justification of the reasons for doing so . This might include describing:

• How was the data collection tool designed
• How participants were obtained and how was the sample drawn
• The location in which the data collection took place
• The themes covered during the data collection or any variables and measures
• Any piloting, adjustments made and reasons behind those
• Ethical considerations and any obstacles faced and how those were addressed

Step 3: Explain your methods of data analysis

This involves explaining how you processed and analysed the data. However, do not start discussing the results unless you are combining results and discussion into one chapter (commonly seen in qualitative research). For example, you might want to include:

• How you prepared the data before analysis (e.g., checking for missing data, removing outliers)
• The software used to analyse the data (e.g., SPSS, Atlas.ti)
• The methods used to analyse the data (e.g., regression analysis, thematic analysis)

[Adapted from: https://www.scribbr.co.uk/thesis-dissertation/methodology/ AND Thesis and Dissertation Writing in a Second Language: A Handbook for Students and their Supervisors ] 

For more information on language used in methodology chapters have a look at our page  Language used in dissertations . 

Writing a Results Chapter

• What is a results chapter?
• Structuring your results
• Presenting your results
• Using tables & figures

The results chapter is a crucial section of any piece of research, as it presents and interprets the findings obtained from the study. This chapter allows you to communicate the outcomes of your investigation, analyse the data, and draw meaningful conclusions . Crafting an effective results chapter requires careful planning, organization, and attention to detail. This guide aims to provide you with a step-by-step approach to writing a results chapter that effectively communicates your research findings.

• The results section of your dissertation is where you report the findings of your study based upon the information gathered as a result of the methodology you applied.
• The results section should simply state the findings , without bias or interpretation, and arranged in a logical sequence . 
• The results section should always be written in the past tense . 
• The page length of this section is set by the amount and types of data to be reported. Try to be concise and use non-textual elements .
• Avoid providing data that is not critical to answering the research question(s). 

The results chapter, as any other chapters of your dissertation except the introduction and conclusion chapters, consists of 3 main sections: introduction, main body and conclusion/summary.

Introduction

This might include:

• A brief reminder of the methodological approach or methods.
• A preview of the chapter: outline the organisation and state the scope (What is included? How is the chapter organised?)

The order of results can vary.  Some suggestions are:

• From most important to least important.
• As a logical response to the research questions or problems you are trying to answer or solve.  
• If you are using a range of methods or a number of experimental elements , group the method/procedure together with the relevant results. 
• In quantitative research , the descriptive statistics are generally presented first, then the results of each of the hypotheses or research questions that were tested.
• The information in the results section should be organised to show how the data tests the research questions or hypotheses , and should be presented sequentially to respond to each research question or hypothesis.

Conclusion or Chapter Summary

• A brief summary of the key results.
• Signpost how these will be discussed in the following chapter (leads to your discussion chapter).

Describe the findings of the study, but do not start to interpret the results . This will take place in the discussion section, which comes next, unless you decide to combine results and discussion, which is common in qualitative research.

Presenting Qualitative Results

• Structure your results around key themes .
• For each theme, make general observations about what the data showed.
• Support these points with direct quotations .
• If possible, include a brief conclusion (‘so what?’) to the observation and highlight any links with other findings.
• Repeat this process as many times as necessary.
• Further information can be included in an appendix .

Presenting Quantitative Results

• Structure your results around your research sub-questions .
• For each sub-question, present the relevant results , including any statistical analysis you conducted, and briefly evaluate their significance. 
• Highlight the most important trends , differences, and relationships among the data, but do not speculate on their meaning or consequences.
• If you have results that are not directly relevant to answering your questions, or any extra information that will help the reader understand how you gathered the data, you can include them in an appendix .

The description of tables and figures in academic written texts commonly includes two different elements:

• Location or summary statement: identifies the table or figure and indicates its content.
• Highlighting statement or statements: point out and describe the relevant or significant data.

Dos and don'ts of using tables and figures

For more information on the language used in results chapters see the Language section of this guide.

You can use the checklist below to ensure your results chapter includes all relevant information:

Writing a Discussion Chapter

What is a discussion chapter.

• Structuring your discussion
• Dos and don'ts

The discussion chapter of a dissertation is an essential component that showcases your ability to analyse and interpret your research findings, draw meaningful conclusions, and provide valuable insights into the broader academic and practical implications of your study. This guide aims to provide you with a comprehensive overview of how to write a compelling and well-structured discussion chapter that strengthens the overall impact of your dissertation.

• Explains what the results mean;
• Interprets and discusses the data;
• Compares it with other research (literature review);
• Evaluates its importance;
• Points out the limitations of your research;
• Raises questions for future directions .

Tip: When writing your discussion chapter, you might want to revisit your literature review chapter and ensure that the relevant literature included in this chapter has been already presented in the Literature Review.

The discussion chapter, as any other chapters of your dissertation except the introduction and conclusion chapters, consists of 3 main sections: introduction, main body and conclusion/summary.

[Adapted from: Succeeding with your Master’s Dissertation: A step-by-step handbook ]  

Your discussion should focus on explaining and evaluating your findings, displaying their connection to the previous literature (i.e., your literature review ) and research questions , as well as presenting a persuasive argument to support your overall conclusion.  While there are many different ways to write this section, you can focus your discussion around three key aspects:

• Interpretations: What is the meaning behind the results?
• Implications: Why do the results matter? Why are the results relevant?
• Limitations: What can’t the results tell us? What are the constraints or limitations of the results in terms of what they can reveal?

This can be done following the 5 steps below:  

Step 1: Summarise your findings

You can begin this section by reiterating your research problem and providing a succinct overview of your main findings. Do not just repeat all the data that you have already reported in the previous chapter, instead present a clear statement that directly addresses your research questions.

Step 2: Interpret your findings

While the significance of your results may appear apparent to you, it is crucial to explicitly articulate their importance for your reader by demonstrating how they directly address your research question. The manner in which you interpret the data will vary depending on the type of research conducted. However, some common approaches to interpreting the data include:

• Recognizing correlations, patterns, and relationships within the data
• Analysing whether the results align with your expectations or support your hypotheses
• Placing your findings within the context of prior research and established theories
• Elucidating unexpected results and assessing their significance
• Considering alternative explanations and presenting a compelling argument in favour of your position.

Step 3: Place your findings in context (literature review)

A helpful way to place your findings within context and identifying how your findings agree or disagree with the previous literature is to use a summary table such as the one below:

This can result in a paragraph like: The importance of timely feedback in block has also been stressed by students and faculty as one of the reasons as to why single assessments at the end of the module, and more specifically exams, are the least accurate method in block delivery. Although exams were considered by some participants as necessary in certain disciplines, participants agreed that this assessment type does not show knowledge depth as indicated by Dang et al. (2022) and students might receive limited or no feedback as highlighted by Race (2015). Therefore, incorporating frequent and a variety of assessments with timely feedback into block delivery could enhance student learning outcomes and improve the accuracy of assessments.

Step 4: Acknowledge the limitations

Every piece of research has limitations and acknowledging these is crucial for establishing the credibility of the study. The purpose of discussing these limitations is not to highlight errors, but rather to provide an accurate understanding of the conclusions that can and cannot be drawn from the study, as well as to highlight further areas for research on the topic. Limitations might relate to your research design, methodological choices, or unforeseen challenges encountered during the research process. Here are some examples:

• If the sample size was small or limited to a specific group of individuals, it is necessary to explain how the generalizability of the findings is constrained.
• If difficulties were encountered during data collection or analysis, it is important to elucidate how these challenges might have impacted the results.
• If there are potential confounding variables that could not be controlled, it is essential to acknowledge the potential effects they might have had.

[Adapted from: https://www.scribbr.co.uk/thesis-dissertation/discussion/ ]

For more information on the language used in discussions, have a look at our  Language used in dissertations guide

Further Reading

Journal of Suffolk Student Research

The Journal of Suffolk Student Research is an online academic journal, dedicated to the publication of high-quality undergraduate and postgraduate student research undertaken by University of Suffolk students. The journal will showcase the most outstanding student research undertaken at the University of Suffolk. It aims to promote and recognise this outstanding student research by offering valuable early experience of academic publishing and the peer review process. 

Find out more here

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Dissertation Chapters: A Guide to Writing Your Dissertation

Embarking on your dissertation is equal parts exhilaration and trepidation. It’s finally your turn to stake out your territory in the body of knowledge and hone your expertise. Naturally, it’s a lot of work, the evidence of which is reflected in your dissertation chapters. These chapters, which comprise the bulk of your dissertation, offer a clear snapshot of your topic, the work that has already been done by other scholars in your field, gaps in the literature, complications, your approach, and more. 

There are many moving parts to a dissertation, and the best way to simplify them is by chapter. Each chapter follows certain rules and serves a specific purpose. The most efficient way to break down the work ahead of you into pieces is to understand the role each chapter plays in the dissertation. 

These are frequently asked questions about dissertation chapters.  

• How many chapters are in a dissertation? 
• What is the content of each dissertation chapter?
• How long is each dissertation chapter? 
• How long does it take to write dissertation chapters?  

How Many Dissertation Chapters are in a Dissertation?

Usually five. While there are no short answers in academia, five dissertation chapters is the convention across many fields, if not most. Five dissertation chapters is a safe bet. As always, though, do your homework and find out exactly what the expectations are for dissertations in your department. 

Read (skim) dissertations written by recent graduates from your department to determine norms for chapter length and the extensiveness of the critical research they did and the studies they conducted. The average could be anything from 130 pages (math) to 500+ pages (history) –either way, you need to know. Also, visit office hours and talk to a few faculty members in your department. Whether they end up on your dissertation committee or not, their perspective will be helpful. 

Content of Each Dissertation Chapter

There is a format for the structure of a dissertation that most fields adhere to, and it is very specific. The first three chapters constitute your dissertation proposal , which must be completed, defended, and approved by your dissertation committee. Once your proposal is successfully defended,  you can proceed with the research you will need to do to write the two final chapters. 

Dissertation Chapters

• Dissertation Chapter One: Introduction to the Study This chapter includes your problem and purpose statements, research questions, and definitions of key terms examined in your research. 
• Dissertation Chapter Two: Literature Review This section is a deep dive of the extant research on your topic, as well as your opportunity to identify and highlight gaps in the literature. 
• Dissertation Chapter Three: Research Methods This chapter offers a summary of how you propose to collect data and your methods of analysis. 
• Dissertation Chapter Four: Results In this section, you present your findings and share the results of your study. 
• Dissertation Chapter Five: Conclusion The final chapter is an opportunity to offer your analysis of your findings and discuss the implications. 

How Long is a Dissertation Chapter?

Dissertation chapter lengths vary, though the number of pages you can expect to write will likely correlate with standard dissertation lengths in your discipline. If you are doing research in a field like anthropology or theology, be prepared to conduct extensive literature reviews and write lengthy chapters. Topics that require a great deal of background information also make the pages add up. 

When thinking about the length of your dissertation chapters, also be aware that chapter lengths are not evenly divided. The bulk of your writing happens in the first three chapters, especially if the literature review covers a lot of ground. If you are writing a 130-page dissertation, the dissertation proposal will take up more than half of that space. Results sections can be comparatively short, and many scholars linger in the conclusion chapter because it’s their time to shine and it’s fun to write. 

How Long Does It Take to Write Dissertation Chapters? 

The amount of time it takes to write a dissertation depends on many factors and can vary greatly depending on the student, the program, and the discipline. This is a great conversation to have with your dissertation advisor, or even the chair of your department if you are still in the early stages of your graduate education. It never hurts to have a rough timeline in mind so you can get organized and plan for the journey ahead. 

These elements often determine the amount of time it takes to write dissertation chapters: 

Academic Discipline

Some graduate degrees take longer than others, and much of that disparity occurs after coursework is completed. In many arts programs, most of the dissertation is written while coursework is taking place. It’s a different story in the sciences and humanities. In fields like biology and chemistry, issues like lab space and institutional approval must be resolved before a study can even begin, much less be written about, and that can take months. In fields like history, the scholarly research phase is similarly extensive. 

University libraries are an academic wonderland, but that doesn’t mean they hold all the answers or everything that you’ll need to get to work on your literature review or background material. Like many burgeoning scholars, I was excited to discover that I would need to travel in order to undertake some archival research for the critical introduction to my dissertation. However, the time required to set this up and visit the sites extended the amount of time it took to write these dissertation chapters. 

Life has a sneaky way of persisting, even when you have a dissertation to write. Many scholars experience unavoidable stops and starts while writing their dissertations, and it’s important to make allowances for being human, even if it interferes with your writing schedule. In my experience, we do our best to write as quickly as possible, but there are inevitable hiccups along the way. No matter. Course correct and keep going. You can do this, and the rewards of having a completed, bound dissertation in your hands will make all the effort worthwhile. 

Related posts:

Courtney Watson, Ph.D.

Courtney Watson, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English at Radford University Carilion, in Roanoke, Virginia. Her areas of expertise include undergraduate and graduate curriculum development for writing courses in the health sciences and American literature with a focus on literary travel, tourism, and heritage economies. Her writing and academic scholarship has been widely published in places that include  Studies in American Culture ,  Dialogue , and  The Virginia Quarterly Review . Her research on the integration of humanities into STEM education will be published by Routledge in an upcoming collection. Dr. Watson has also been nominated by the State Council for Higher Education of Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Rising Star Award, and she is a past winner of the National Society of Arts & Letters Regional Short Story Prize, as well as institutional awards for scholarly research and excellence in teaching. Throughout her career in higher education, Dr. Watson has served in faculty governance and administration as a frequent committee chair and program chair. As a higher education consultant, she has served as a subject matter expert, an evaluator, and a contributor to white papers exploring program development, enrollment research, and educational mergers and acquisitions.

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How to Write a Research Paper: Parts of the Paper

• Choosing Your Topic
• Citation & Style Guides This link opens in a new window
• Critical Thinking
• Evaluating Information
• Parts of the Paper
• Writing Tips from UNC-Chapel Hill
• Librarian Contact

Parts of the Research Paper Papers should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Your introductory paragraph should grab the reader's attention, state your main idea, and indicate how you will support it. The body of the paper should expand on what you have stated in the introduction. Finally, the conclusion restates the paper's thesis and should explain what you have learned, giving a wrap up of your main ideas.

1. The Title The title should be specific and indicate the theme of the research and what ideas it addresses. Use keywords that help explain your paper's topic to the reader. Try to avoid abbreviations and jargon. Think about keywords that people would use to search for your paper and include them in your title.

2. The Abstract The abstract is used by readers to get a quick overview of your paper. Typically, they are about 200 words in length (120 words minimum to  250 words maximum). The abstract should introduce the topic and thesis, and should provide a general statement about what you have found in your research. The abstract allows you to mention each major aspect of your topic and helps readers decide whether they want to read the rest of the paper. Because it is a summary of the entire research paper, it is often written last. 

3. The Introduction The introduction should be designed to attract the reader's attention and explain the focus of the research. You will introduce your overview of the topic,  your main points of information, and why this subject is important. You can introduce the current understanding and background information about the topic. Toward the end of the introduction, you add your thesis statement, and explain how you will provide information to support your research questions. This provides the purpose and focus for the rest of the paper.

4. Thesis Statement Most papers will have a thesis statement or main idea and supporting facts/ideas/arguments. State your main idea (something of interest or something to be proven or argued for or against) as your thesis statement, and then provide your supporting facts and arguments. A thesis statement is a declarative sentence that asserts the position a paper will be taking. It also points toward the paper's development. This statement should be both specific and arguable. Generally, the thesis statement will be placed at the end of the first paragraph of your paper. The remainder of your paper will support this thesis.

Students often learn to write a thesis as a first step in the writing process, but often, after research, a writer's viewpoint may change. Therefore a thesis statement may be one of the final steps in writing. 

Examples of Thesis Statements from Purdue OWL

5. The Literature Review The purpose of the literature review is to describe past important research and how it specifically relates to the research thesis. It should be a synthesis of the previous literature and the new idea being researched. The review should examine the major theories related to the topic to date and their contributors. It should include all relevant findings from credible sources, such as academic books and peer-reviewed journal articles. You will want  to:

• Explain how the literature helps the researcher understand the topic.
• Try to show connections and any disparities between the literature.
• Identify new ways to interpret prior research.
• Reveal any gaps that exist in the literature.

More about writing a literature review. . .

6. The Discussion ​The purpose of the discussion is to interpret and describe what you have learned from your research. Make the reader understand why your topic is important. The discussion should always demonstrate what you have learned from your readings (and viewings) and how that learning has made the topic evolve, especially from the short description of main points in the introduction.Explain any new understanding or insights you have had after reading your articles and/or books. Paragraphs should use transitioning sentences to develop how one paragraph idea leads to the next. The discussion will always connect to the introduction, your thesis statement, and the literature you reviewed, but it does not simply repeat or rearrange the introduction. You want to: 

• Demonstrate critical thinking, not just reporting back facts that you gathered.
• If possible, tell how the topic has evolved over the past and give it's implications for the future.
• Fully explain your main ideas with supporting information.
• Explain why your thesis is correct giving arguments to counter points.

7. The Conclusion A concluding paragraph is a brief summary of your main ideas and restates the paper's main thesis, giving the reader the sense that the stated goal of the paper has been accomplished. What have you learned by doing this research that you didn't know before? What conclusions have you drawn? You may also want to suggest further areas of study, improvement of research possibilities, etc. to demonstrate your critical thinking regarding your research.

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13.1 Formatting a Research Paper

Learning objectives.

• Identify the major components of a research paper written using American Psychological Association (APA) style.
• Apply general APA style and formatting conventions in a research paper.

In this chapter, you will learn how to use APA style , the documentation and formatting style followed by the American Psychological Association, as well as MLA style , from the Modern Language Association. There are a few major formatting styles used in academic texts, including AMA, Chicago, and Turabian:

• AMA (American Medical Association) for medicine, health, and biological sciences
• APA (American Psychological Association) for education, psychology, and the social sciences
• Chicago—a common style used in everyday publications like magazines, newspapers, and books
• MLA (Modern Language Association) for English, literature, arts, and humanities
• Turabian—another common style designed for its universal application across all subjects and disciplines

While all the formatting and citation styles have their own use and applications, in this chapter we focus our attention on the two styles you are most likely to use in your academic studies: APA and MLA.

If you find that the rules of proper source documentation are difficult to keep straight, you are not alone. Writing a good research paper is, in and of itself, a major intellectual challenge. Having to follow detailed citation and formatting guidelines as well may seem like just one more task to add to an already-too-long list of requirements.

Following these guidelines, however, serves several important purposes. First, it signals to your readers that your paper should be taken seriously as a student’s contribution to a given academic or professional field; it is the literary equivalent of wearing a tailored suit to a job interview. Second, it shows that you respect other people’s work enough to give them proper credit for it. Finally, it helps your reader find additional materials if he or she wishes to learn more about your topic.

Furthermore, producing a letter-perfect APA-style paper need not be burdensome. Yes, it requires careful attention to detail. However, you can simplify the process if you keep these broad guidelines in mind:

• Work ahead whenever you can. Chapter 11 “Writing from Research: What Will I Learn?” includes tips for keeping track of your sources early in the research process, which will save time later on.
• Get it right the first time. Apply APA guidelines as you write, so you will not have much to correct during the editing stage. Again, putting in a little extra time early on can save time later.
• Use the resources available to you. In addition to the guidelines provided in this chapter, you may wish to consult the APA website at http://www.apa.org or the Purdue University Online Writing lab at http://owl.english.purdue.edu , which regularly updates its online style guidelines.

General Formatting Guidelines

This chapter provides detailed guidelines for using the citation and formatting conventions developed by the American Psychological Association, or APA. Writers in disciplines as diverse as astrophysics, biology, psychology, and education follow APA style. The major components of a paper written in APA style are listed in the following box.

These are the major components of an APA-style paper:

Body, which includes the following:

• Headings and, if necessary, subheadings to organize the content
• In-text citations of research sources
• References page

All these components must be saved in one document, not as separate documents.

The title page of your paper includes the following information:

• Title of the paper
• Author’s name
• Name of the institution with which the author is affiliated
• Header at the top of the page with the paper title (in capital letters) and the page number (If the title is lengthy, you may use a shortened form of it in the header.)

List the first three elements in the order given in the previous list, centered about one third of the way down from the top of the page. Use the headers and footers tool of your word-processing program to add the header, with the title text at the left and the page number in the upper-right corner. Your title page should look like the following example.

The next page of your paper provides an abstract , or brief summary of your findings. An abstract does not need to be provided in every paper, but an abstract should be used in papers that include a hypothesis. A good abstract is concise—about one hundred fifty to two hundred fifty words—and is written in an objective, impersonal style. Your writing voice will not be as apparent here as in the body of your paper. When writing the abstract, take a just-the-facts approach, and summarize your research question and your findings in a few sentences.

In Chapter 12 “Writing a Research Paper” , you read a paper written by a student named Jorge, who researched the effectiveness of low-carbohydrate diets. Read Jorge’s abstract. Note how it sums up the major ideas in his paper without going into excessive detail.

Write an abstract summarizing your paper. Briefly introduce the topic, state your findings, and sum up what conclusions you can draw from your research. Use the word count feature of your word-processing program to make sure your abstract does not exceed one hundred fifty words.

Depending on your field of study, you may sometimes write research papers that present extensive primary research, such as your own experiment or survey. In your abstract, summarize your research question and your findings, and briefly indicate how your study relates to prior research in the field.

Margins, Pagination, and Headings

APA style requirements also address specific formatting concerns, such as margins, pagination, and heading styles, within the body of the paper. Review the following APA guidelines.

Use these general guidelines to format the paper:

• Set the top, bottom, and side margins of your paper at 1 inch.
• Use double-spaced text throughout your paper.
• Use a standard font, such as Times New Roman or Arial, in a legible size (10- to 12-point).
• Use continuous pagination throughout the paper, including the title page and the references section. Page numbers appear flush right within your header.
• Section headings and subsection headings within the body of your paper use different types of formatting depending on the level of information you are presenting. Additional details from Jorge’s paper are provided.

Begin formatting the final draft of your paper according to APA guidelines. You may work with an existing document or set up a new document if you choose. Include the following:

• Your title page
• The abstract you created in Note 13.8 “Exercise 1”
• Correct headers and page numbers for your title page and abstract

APA style uses section headings to organize information, making it easy for the reader to follow the writer’s train of thought and to know immediately what major topics are covered. Depending on the length and complexity of the paper, its major sections may also be divided into subsections, sub-subsections, and so on. These smaller sections, in turn, use different heading styles to indicate different levels of information. In essence, you are using headings to create a hierarchy of information.

The following heading styles used in APA formatting are listed in order of greatest to least importance:

• Section headings use centered, boldface type. Headings use title case, with important words in the heading capitalized.
• Subsection headings use left-aligned, boldface type. Headings use title case.
• The third level uses left-aligned, indented, boldface type. Headings use a capital letter only for the first word, and they end in a period.
• The fourth level follows the same style used for the previous level, but the headings are boldfaced and italicized.
• The fifth level follows the same style used for the previous level, but the headings are italicized and not boldfaced.

Visually, the hierarchy of information is organized as indicated in Table 13.1 “Section Headings” .

Table 13.1 Section Headings

A college research paper may not use all the heading levels shown in Table 13.1 “Section Headings” , but you are likely to encounter them in academic journal articles that use APA style. For a brief paper, you may find that level 1 headings suffice. Longer or more complex papers may need level 2 headings or other lower-level headings to organize information clearly. Use your outline to craft your major section headings and determine whether any subtopics are substantial enough to require additional levels of headings.

Working with the document you developed in Note 13.11 “Exercise 2” , begin setting up the heading structure of the final draft of your research paper according to APA guidelines. Include your title and at least two to three major section headings, and follow the formatting guidelines provided above. If your major sections should be broken into subsections, add those headings as well. Use your outline to help you.

Because Jorge used only level 1 headings, his Exercise 3 would look like the following:

Citation Guidelines

In-text citations.

Throughout the body of your paper, include a citation whenever you quote or paraphrase material from your research sources. As you learned in Chapter 11 “Writing from Research: What Will I Learn?” , the purpose of citations is twofold: to give credit to others for their ideas and to allow your reader to follow up and learn more about the topic if desired. Your in-text citations provide basic information about your source; each source you cite will have a longer entry in the references section that provides more detailed information.

In-text citations must provide the name of the author or authors and the year the source was published. (When a given source does not list an individual author, you may provide the source title or the name of the organization that published the material instead.) When directly quoting a source, it is also required that you include the page number where the quote appears in your citation.

This information may be included within the sentence or in a parenthetical reference at the end of the sentence, as in these examples.

Epstein (2010) points out that “junk food cannot be considered addictive in the same way that we think of psychoactive drugs as addictive” (p. 137).

Here, the writer names the source author when introducing the quote and provides the publication date in parentheses after the author’s name. The page number appears in parentheses after the closing quotation marks and before the period that ends the sentence.

Addiction researchers caution that “junk food cannot be considered addictive in the same way that we think of psychoactive drugs as addictive” (Epstein, 2010, p. 137).

Here, the writer provides a parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence that includes the author’s name, the year of publication, and the page number separated by commas. Again, the parenthetical citation is placed after the closing quotation marks and before the period at the end of the sentence.

As noted in the book Junk Food, Junk Science (Epstein, 2010, p. 137), “junk food cannot be considered addictive in the same way that we think of psychoactive drugs as addictive.”

Here, the writer chose to mention the source title in the sentence (an optional piece of information to include) and followed the title with a parenthetical citation. Note that the parenthetical citation is placed before the comma that signals the end of the introductory phrase.

David Epstein’s book Junk Food, Junk Science (2010) pointed out that “junk food cannot be considered addictive in the same way that we think of psychoactive drugs as addictive” (p. 137).

Another variation is to introduce the author and the source title in your sentence and include the publication date and page number in parentheses within the sentence or at the end of the sentence. As long as you have included the essential information, you can choose the option that works best for that particular sentence and source.

Citing a book with a single author is usually a straightforward task. Of course, your research may require that you cite many other types of sources, such as books or articles with more than one author or sources with no individual author listed. You may also need to cite sources available in both print and online and nonprint sources, such as websites and personal interviews. Chapter 13 “APA and MLA Documentation and Formatting” , Section 13.2 “Citing and Referencing Techniques” and Section 13.3 “Creating a References Section” provide extensive guidelines for citing a variety of source types.

Writing at Work

APA is just one of several different styles with its own guidelines for documentation, formatting, and language usage. Depending on your field of interest, you may be exposed to additional styles, such as the following:

• MLA style. Determined by the Modern Languages Association and used for papers in literature, languages, and other disciplines in the humanities.
• Chicago style. Outlined in the Chicago Manual of Style and sometimes used for papers in the humanities and the sciences; many professional organizations use this style for publications as well.
• Associated Press (AP) style. Used by professional journalists.

References List

The brief citations included in the body of your paper correspond to the more detailed citations provided at the end of the paper in the references section. In-text citations provide basic information—the author’s name, the publication date, and the page number if necessary—while the references section provides more extensive bibliographical information. Again, this information allows your reader to follow up on the sources you cited and do additional reading about the topic if desired.

The specific format of entries in the list of references varies slightly for different source types, but the entries generally include the following information:

• The name(s) of the author(s) or institution that wrote the source
• The year of publication and, where applicable, the exact date of publication
• The full title of the source
• For books, the city of publication
• For articles or essays, the name of the periodical or book in which the article or essay appears
• For magazine and journal articles, the volume number, issue number, and pages where the article appears
• For sources on the web, the URL where the source is located

The references page is double spaced and lists entries in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. If an entry continues for more than one line, the second line and each subsequent line are indented five spaces. Review the following example. ( Chapter 13 “APA and MLA Documentation and Formatting” , Section 13.3 “Creating a References Section” provides extensive guidelines for formatting reference entries for different types of sources.)

In APA style, book and article titles are formatted in sentence case, not title case. Sentence case means that only the first word is capitalized, along with any proper nouns.

Key Takeaways

• Following proper citation and formatting guidelines helps writers ensure that their work will be taken seriously, give proper credit to other authors for their work, and provide valuable information to readers.
• Working ahead and taking care to cite sources correctly the first time are ways writers can save time during the editing stage of writing a research paper.
• APA papers usually include an abstract that concisely summarizes the paper.
• APA papers use a specific headings structure to provide a clear hierarchy of information.
• In APA papers, in-text citations usually include the name(s) of the author(s) and the year of publication.
• In-text citations correspond to entries in the references section, which provide detailed bibliographical information about a source.

Writing for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Uncomplicated Reviews of Educational Research Methods

• Writing a Research Report

.pdf version of this page

This review covers the basic elements of a research report. This is a general guide for what you will see in journal articles or dissertations. This format assumes a mixed methods study, but you can leave out either quantitative or qualitative sections if you only used a single methodology.

This review is divided into sections for easy reference. There are five MAJOR parts of a Research Report:

1.    Introduction 2.    Review of Literature 3.    Methods 4.    Results 5.    Discussion

As a general guide, the Introduction, Review of Literature, and Methods should be about 1/3 of your paper, Discussion 1/3, then Results 1/3.

Section 1 : Cover Sheet (APA format cover sheet) optional, if required.

Section 2: Abstract (a basic summary of the report, including sample, treatment, design, results, and implications) (≤ 150 words) optional, if required.

Section 3 : Introduction (1-3 paragraphs) •    Basic introduction •    Supportive statistics (can be from periodicals) •    Statement of Purpose •    Statement of Significance

Section 4 : Research question(s) or hypotheses •    An overall research question (optional) •    A quantitative-based (hypotheses) •    A qualitative-based (research questions) Note: You will generally have more than one, especially if using hypotheses.

Section 5: Review of Literature ▪    Should be organized by subheadings ▪    Should adequately support your study using supporting, related, and/or refuting evidence ▪    Is a synthesis, not a collection of individual summaries

Section 6: Methods ▪    Procedure: Describe data gathering or participant recruitment, including IRB approval ▪    Sample: Describe the sample or dataset, including basic demographics ▪    Setting: Describe the setting, if applicable (generally only in qualitative designs) ▪    Treatment: If applicable, describe, in detail, how you implemented the treatment ▪    Instrument: Describe, in detail, how you implemented the instrument; Describe the reliability and validity associated with the instrument ▪    Data Analysis: Describe type of procedure (t-test, interviews, etc.) and software (if used)

Section 7: Results ▪    Restate Research Question 1 (Quantitative) ▪    Describe results ▪    Restate Research Question 2 (Qualitative) ▪    Describe results

Section 8: Discussion ▪    Restate Overall Research Question ▪    Describe how the results, when taken together, answer the overall question ▪    ***Describe how the results confirm or contrast the literature you reviewed

Section 9: Recommendations (if applicable, generally related to practice)

Section 10: Limitations ▪    Discuss, in several sentences, the limitations of this study. ▪    Research Design (overall, then info about the limitations of each separately) ▪    Sample ▪    Instrument/s ▪    Other limitations

Section 11: Conclusion (A brief closing summary)

Section 12: References (APA format)

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About research rundowns.

Research Rundowns was made possible by support from the Dewar College of Education at Valdosta State University .

• Experimental Design
• What is Educational Research?
• Writing Research Questions
• Mixed Methods Research Designs
• Qualitative Coding & Analysis
• Qualitative Research Design
• Correlation
• Effect Size
• Instrument, Validity, Reliability
• Mean & Standard Deviation
• Significance Testing (t-tests)
• Steps 1-4: Finding Research
• Steps 5-6: Analyzing & Organizing
• Steps 7-9: Citing & Writing

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Graduate Research Hub

• Preparing my thesis
• Incorporating your published work in your thesis
• Examples of thesis and chapter formats when including publications

The following examples are acceptable ways of formatting your thesis and chapters when including one or more publications.

Essential requirements

All theses with publications must have the following:

• Declaration
• Preface – noting collaborations, and contributions to authorship
• Acknowledgements
• Table of contents
• List of tables, figures & illustrations
• Main text/chapters
• Bibliography or list of references

Main text examples

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Literature review
• Chapter 3: Methods
• Chapter 4: Paper 1 & general discussion
• Chapter 5: Paper 2
• Chapter 6: Regular thesis chapter – results
• Chapter 7 : Regular thesis chapter/general discussion tying in published and unpublished work
• Chapter 8: Conclusion
• Appendices - May include CD, DVD or other material, also reviews & methods papers
• Chapter 2: Methods
• Chapter 3: Paper 1
• Chapter 4: Regular thesis chapter
• Chapter 6: Regular thesis chapter, final preliminary study
• Chapter 7: General discussion
• Chapter 5: Regular thesis chapter
• Chapter 6: Regular thesis chapter
• Chapter 7: Regular thesis chapter, final preliminary study
• Chapter 8: General discussion
• Chapter 4: Paper 2 - e.g. data paper, including meta analyses
• Chapter 5: Paper 3
• Chapter 6: Paper 4
• Chapter 7: Paper 5
• Chapter 3: Major paper
• Chapter 4: Normal thesis chapter, final preliminary study
• Chapter 5: General discussion

Chapter examples

• Introduction – including specific aims and hypotheses
• Introduction – including specific aims, hypotheses
• Methods – results (including validation, preliminary) not included in the paper
• Results (including validation, preliminary) not included in paper
• Discussion – expansion of paper discussion, further method development
• Resources for candidates
• Orientation and induction
• Mapping my degree
• Principles for infrastructure support
• Peer activities
• Change my commencement date
• Meeting expectations
• Working with my supervisors
• Responsible Research & Research Integrity
• Guidelines for external supervisors
• Pre-confirmation
• Confirmation
• At risk of unsatisfactory progress
• Unsatisfactory progress
• Add or drop coursework subjects
• Apply for leave
• Return from leave
• Apply for Study Away
• Return from Study Away
• Change my study rate
• Check my candidature status
• Change my current supervisors
• Request an evidence of enrolment or evidence of qualification statement
• Change my project details
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• Transfer to another graduate research degree
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• Withdraw from my research degree
• Check the status of a request
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• Extension of candidature
• Lapse candidature
• How to cancel a form in my.unimelb
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• Taking leave
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• Finishing on time
• Accepting an offer for a joint PhD online
• Tenured Study Spaces (TSS) Usage Guidelines
• Tenured Study Spaces Procedures
• Research skills
• Academic writing and communication skills
• Building professional and academic networks
• Research internships
• Commercialising my research
• Supplementary PhD Programs
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• Melbourne Research Experience Survey
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Defining components of the research process needed to conduct and critique studies

• PMID: 2046040

The research process consists of a five-chapter approach. Chapters one through three are written during the planning stages of a study. Chapter one consists of problem, purpose, hypotheses or research questions, definitions, theoretical framework, and significance for nursing. Chapter two consists of the review of literature. Chapter three consists of the methodology: sample, setting, design, data analysis methods, and ethical concerns. Chapters four and five are written after the study is completed. Chapter four consists of results of data analysis. Chapter five consists of a discussion of results, conclusions, implications for nurses, and recommended future studies. It is important for nurses to review and apply this five-chapter approach when conducting or critiquing research studies.

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• Planning to Write

Q: What do I include in chapter one of my research project?

Asked on 09 Sep, 2019

The introduction forms the first chapter or first section of any research project that you write, whether it is a project proposal, project report, thesis, or a journal article. Since you have used the word "chapter," I assume that you are referring to a project proposal/report or thesis.

Typically, chapter one of a research project proposal or thesis includes the following components:

• Study background
• Statement of the problem
• Purpose of the study
• Research question(s)
• Significance of the study
• Definition of terms
• Theoretical framework (not required for project proposal/report)
• Limitations of the study
• Basic assumptions
• Organization of the thesis (not required for project proposal/report)

For more detailed guidance, you can consider taking our course A simple guide on how to write a thesis .

Answered by Editage Insights on 23 Sep, 2019

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Six main chapters of a research paper

This document outlines the six main chapters that comprise the body of a research paper: 1) Introduction, 2) Conceptual and Theoretical Framework, 3) Methodology, 4) Presentation and Analysis of Data, 5) Summary and Conclusions, and 6) Bibliography. The Introduction includes the background of the study, statement of the problem, significance of the study, and scope and delimitation. The Conceptual and Theoretical Framework presents relevant theories and relates variables. The Methodology describes the research design and procedures for collecting and analyzing data. The Presentation and Analysis of Data section summarizes and analyzes the collected data. The Summary and Conclusions restates the problem and findings. Finally, the Bibliography provides references Read less

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• 1. THE BODY OF A RESEARCH PAPER: SIX MAIN CHAPTERS
• 2. THE BODY OF A RESEARCH PAPER:  SIX MAIN CHAPTERS 1. INTRODUCTION This is the first part of Chapter 1, and it consists of the following: background of the study, statement of the problem, significance of the study, and scope and delimination of the study,
• 3.  An effective introduction may be achieved by:  using a relevant and striking quotation  relating a relevant but striking anecdote or incident  asking a series of questions  using a striking statement of your own  Background of the Study This is a brief statement of the origin of the problem . It is an account describing the circumstances which suggest the research .
• 4. Statement of the Problem The definition of the problem is the first main step in writing the research paper. It should be stated precisely, accurately, and clearly. The problem can be expressed in question or declarative form. Ex. BroadTopic: Problems of Drug Addiction SpecificTopic: The Effects of Drug Addiction on the Human Body
• 5. Significance of the Study This part states the significance of the study and its result. It covers an expression of the study’s relevance to fill certain needs.  Scope and Delimination of the Study The scope of the study identifies a reasonable area covered by the study. A specific statement of the study must indicate the subjects, the number, and the treatment involved in the study.
• 6. 2. CONCEPTUAL ANDTHEORETICAL FRAMEWORK A conceptual framework is based on generally accepted methods, practises, etc. A theoretical framework deals with interrelated theories which must be presented in more detail as they are not totally tangible.
• 7. This part presents a theoretical or conceptual scheme for the research problem. This is usually presented in a diagram showing the interrelationship of the variables. Ex. Input Process Analysis Output Review of Related Literature and Studies
• 8. The ideas and concepts taken by the researcher from various sources should be restated in the researcher’s own words and should be woven into the paper, which he can call his own. For coherence, unity and clarity; the researcher can do the ff: • Adopt a point of view and adhere to it throughout the research; • Only ideas that will help explain the topic should be included
• 9. • Have an expression that will anticipate the next topic at the end of each paragraph; • Be consistent with the use of person and tense Hypothesis These are tentative statements about the given research topic. Definition ofTerms This part includes the operational and conceptual definition of significant terms used in the research paper.
• 10. 3. METHODOLOGY This chapter includes the research design, the procedure for data collection, and data analysis procedure. Research design is a description of the conditions for data collections and analysis. 4. PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS OF DATA This part summarizes the data collected and presents its analysis. It includes the explanations, implications and applications of the results of the collected data.
• 11. 5. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS This is the last chapter of the research, which includes an overview of the research. It consists of the restatement of the problem, the procedures and the findings.  First draft  First revision  Documentation
• 12. 6. BIBLIOGRAPHY It is an alphabetical list of source and materials that have been used in the study. It enables the reader to have a scholarly grasp of the study. This part may be divided into books, periodicals, documents and unpublished works. Ex. Books Dawson, A. C. (1993). Managing Stress. Boston: Littlefield, Adams and Co. Periodicals Delos Santos, R.G. (1998, October). How to ManageTest Anxiety. MedicalJournal. 11-15

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Chapter Summary & Overview – Writing Guide and Examples

Table of Contents

Chapter Summary

Chapter summary is a brief overview of the key points or events covered in a specific chapter of a book, academic paper, or other written work. It typically includes a concise description of the main ideas, arguments, or themes explored in the chapter, as well as any important supporting details or evidence .

Chapter summaries are often used as study aids, providing readers with a quick way to review and understand the content of a particular section of a longer work. They may also be included as part of a book’s table of contents or used as a promotional tool to entice potential readers.

How to Write Chapter Summary

Writing a chapter summary involves condensing the content of a chapter into a shorter, more concise form while still retaining its essential meaning. Here are some steps to help you write a chapter summary:

• Read the chapter carefully: Before summarizing a chapter, it is important to read it thoroughly to ensure that you understand the main ideas and points being made.
• Identify the main ideas: Identify the main ideas and arguments that the chapter is presenting. These may be explicit, or they may be implicit and require some interpretation on your part.
• Make notes: Take notes while reading to help you keep track of the main ideas and arguments. Write down key phrases, important quotes, and any examples or evidence that support the main points.
• Create an outline : Once you have identified the main ideas and arguments, create an outline for your summary. This will help you organize your thoughts and ensure that you include all the important points.
• Write the summary : Using your notes and outline, write a summary of the chapter. Start with a brief introduction that provides context for the chapter, then summarize the main ideas and arguments, and end with a conclusion that ties everything together.
• Edit and revise: After you have written the summary, review it carefully to ensure that it is accurate and concise. Make any necessary edits or revisions to improve the clarity and readability of the summary.
• Check for plagiarism : Finally, check your summary for plagiarism. Make sure that you have not copied any content directly from the chapter without proper citation.

Chapter Summary in Research Paper

In a Research Paper , a Chapter Summary is a brief description of the main points or findings covered in a particular chapter. The summary is typically included at the beginning or end of each chapter and serves as a guide for the reader to quickly understand the content of that chapter.

Here is an example of a chapter summary from a research paper on climate change:

Chapter 2: The Science of Climate Change

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the scientific consensus on climate change. We begin by discussing the greenhouse effect and the role of greenhouse gases in trapping heat in the atmosphere. We then review the evidence for climate change, including temperature records, sea level rise, and changes in the behavior of plants and animals. Finally, we examine the potential impacts of climate change on human society and the natural world. Overall, this chapter provides a foundation for understanding the scientific basis for climate change and the urgency of taking action to address this global challenge.

Chapter Summary in Thesis

In a Thesis , the Chapter Summary is a section that provides a brief overview of the main points covered in each chapter of the thesis. It is usually included at the beginning or end of each chapter and is intended to help the reader understand the key concepts and ideas presented in the chapter.

For example, in a thesis on computer science field, a chapter summary for a chapter on “Machine Learning Algorithms” might include:

Chapter 3: Machine Learning Algorithms

This chapter explores the use of machine learning algorithms in solving complex problems in computer science. We begin by discussing the basics of machine learning, including supervised and unsupervised learning, as well as different types of algorithms such as decision trees, neural networks, and support vector machines. We then present a case study on the application of machine learning algorithms in image recognition, demonstrating how these algorithms can improve accuracy and reduce error rates. Finally, we discuss the limitations and challenges of using machine learning algorithms, including issues of bias and overfitting. Overall, this chapter highlights the potential of machine learning algorithms to revolutionize the field of computer science and drive innovation in a wide range of industries.

Examples of Chapter Summary

Some Examples of Chapter Summary are as follows:

Research Title: “The Impact of Social Media on Mental Health: A Review of the Literature”

Chapter Summary:

Chapter 1: Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the research problem, which is the impact of social media on mental health. It presents the purpose of the study, the research questions, and the methodology used to conduct the research.

Research Title : “The Effects of Exercise on Cognitive Functioning in Older Adults: A Meta-Analysis”

Chapter 2: Literature Review

This chapter reviews the existing literature on the effects of exercise on cognitive functioning in older adults. It provides an overview of the theoretical framework and previous research findings related to the topic. The chapter concludes with a summary of the research gaps and limitations.

Research Title: “The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Leadership Effectiveness: A Case Study of Successful Business Leaders”

Chapter 3: Methodology

This chapter presents the research methodology used in the study, which is a case study approach. It describes the selection criteria for the participants and the data collection methods used. The chapter also provides a detailed explanation of the data analysis techniques used in the study.

Research Title: “Factors Influencing Employee Engagement in the Workplace: A Systematic Review”

Chapter 4: Results and Discussion

This chapter presents the findings of the systematic review on the factors influencing employee engagement in the workplace. It provides a detailed analysis of the results, including the strengths and limitations of the studies reviewed. The chapter also discusses the implications of the findings for practice and future research.

Purpose of Chapter Summary

Some Purposes of the Chapter Summary are as follows:

• Comprehension : A chapter summary can help readers understand the main points of a chapter or book. It can help readers remember important details, keep track of the plot or argument, and connect the key ideas.
• Review : A chapter summary can be a useful tool for reviewing the material covered in a chapter. It can help readers review the content quickly and efficiently, and it can also serve as a reference for future study.
• Study aid: A chapter summary can be used as a study aid, especially for students who are preparing for exams or writing papers. It can help students organize their thoughts and focus on the most important information.
• Teaching tool: A chapter summary can be a useful teaching tool for educators. It can help teachers introduce key concepts and ideas, facilitate class discussion, and assess student understanding.
• Communication : A chapter summary can be used as a way to communicate the main ideas of a chapter or book to others. It can be used in presentations, reports, and other forms of communication to convey important information quickly and concisely.
• Time-saving : A chapter summary can save time for busy readers who may not have the time to read an entire book or chapter in detail. By providing a brief overview of the main points, a chapter summary can help readers determine whether a book or chapter is worth further reading.
• Accessibility : A chapter summary can make complex or technical information more accessible to a wider audience. It can help break down complex ideas into simpler terms and provide a clear and concise explanation of key concepts.
• Analysis : A chapter summary can be used as a starting point for analysis and discussion. It can help readers identify themes, motifs, and other literary devices used in the chapter or book, and it can serve as a jumping-off point for further analysis.
• Personal growth : A chapter summary can be used for personal growth and development. It can help readers gain new insights, learn new skills, and develop a deeper understanding of the world around them.

When to Write Chapter Summary

Chapter summaries are usually written after you have finished reading a chapter or a book. Writing a chapter summary can be useful for several reasons, including:

• Retention : Summarizing a chapter helps you to better retain the information you have read.
• Studying : Chapter summaries can be a useful study tool when preparing for exams or writing papers.
• Review : When you need to review a book or chapter quickly, a summary can help you to refresh your memory.
• Analysis : Summarizing a chapter can help you to identify the main themes and ideas of a book, which can be useful when analyzing it.

Advantages of Chapter Summary

Chapter summaries have several advantages:

• Helps with retention : Summarizing the key points of a chapter can help you remember important information better. By condensing the information, you can identify the main ideas and focus on the most relevant points.
• Saves time : Instead of re-reading the entire chapter when you need to review information, a summary can help you quickly refresh your memory. It can also save time during note-taking and studying.
• Provides an overview : A summary can give you a quick overview of the chapter’s content and help you identify the main themes and ideas. This can help you understand the broader context of the material.
• Helps with comprehension : Summarizing the content of a chapter can help you better understand the material. It can also help you identify any areas where you might need more clarification or further study.
• Useful for review: Chapter summaries can be a useful review tool before exams or when writing papers. They can help you organize your thoughts and review key concepts and ideas.
• Facilitates discussion: When working in a group, chapter summaries can help facilitate discussion and ensure that everyone is on the same page. It can also help to identify areas of confusion or disagreement.
• Supports active reading : Creating a summary requires active reading, which means that you are engaging with the material and thinking critically about it. This can help you develop stronger reading and critical thinking skills.
• Enables comparison : When reading multiple sources on a topic, creating summaries of each chapter can help you compare and contrast the information presented. This can help you identify differences and similarities in the arguments and ideas presented.
• Helpful for long texts: In longer books or texts, chapter summaries can be especially helpful. They can help you break down the material into manageable chunks and make it easier to digest.

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• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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An Introduction to Qualitative Research

Student resources, part 1 (chapters 1 – 5): foundations of qualitative research.

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A Practical Guide to Writing Quantitative and Qualitative Research Questions and Hypotheses in Scholarly Articles

Edward barroga.

1 Department of General Education, Graduate School of Nursing Science, St. Luke’s International University, Tokyo, Japan.

Glafera Janet Matanguihan

2 Department of Biological Sciences, Messiah University, Mechanicsburg, PA, USA.

The development of research questions and the subsequent hypotheses are prerequisites to defining the main research purpose and specific objectives of a study. Consequently, these objectives determine the study design and research outcome. The development of research questions is a process based on knowledge of current trends, cutting-edge studies, and technological advances in the research field. Excellent research questions are focused and require a comprehensive literature search and in-depth understanding of the problem being investigated. Initially, research questions may be written as descriptive questions which could be developed into inferential questions. These questions must be specific and concise to provide a clear foundation for developing hypotheses. Hypotheses are more formal predictions about the research outcomes. These specify the possible results that may or may not be expected regarding the relationship between groups. Thus, research questions and hypotheses clarify the main purpose and specific objectives of the study, which in turn dictate the design of the study, its direction, and outcome. Studies developed from good research questions and hypotheses will have trustworthy outcomes with wide-ranging social and health implications.

INTRODUCTION

Scientific research is usually initiated by posing evidenced-based research questions which are then explicitly restated as hypotheses. 1 , 2 The hypotheses provide directions to guide the study, solutions, explanations, and expected results. 3 , 4 Both research questions and hypotheses are essentially formulated based on conventional theories and real-world processes, which allow the inception of novel studies and the ethical testing of ideas. 5 , 6

It is crucial to have knowledge of both quantitative and qualitative research 2 as both types of research involve writing research questions and hypotheses. 7 However, these crucial elements of research are sometimes overlooked; if not overlooked, then framed without the forethought and meticulous attention it needs. Planning and careful consideration are needed when developing quantitative or qualitative research, particularly when conceptualizing research questions and hypotheses. 4

There is a continuing need to support researchers in the creation of innovative research questions and hypotheses, as well as for journal articles that carefully review these elements. 1 When research questions and hypotheses are not carefully thought of, unethical studies and poor outcomes usually ensue. Carefully formulated research questions and hypotheses define well-founded objectives, which in turn determine the appropriate design, course, and outcome of the study. This article then aims to discuss in detail the various aspects of crafting research questions and hypotheses, with the goal of guiding researchers as they develop their own. Examples from the authors and peer-reviewed scientific articles in the healthcare field are provided to illustrate key points.

DEFINITIONS AND RELATIONSHIP OF RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES

A research question is what a study aims to answer after data analysis and interpretation. The answer is written in length in the discussion section of the paper. Thus, the research question gives a preview of the different parts and variables of the study meant to address the problem posed in the research question. 1 An excellent research question clarifies the research writing while facilitating understanding of the research topic, objective, scope, and limitations of the study. 5

On the other hand, a research hypothesis is an educated statement of an expected outcome. This statement is based on background research and current knowledge. 8 , 9 The research hypothesis makes a specific prediction about a new phenomenon 10 or a formal statement on the expected relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable. 3 , 11 It provides a tentative answer to the research question to be tested or explored. 4

Hypotheses employ reasoning to predict a theory-based outcome. 10 These can also be developed from theories by focusing on components of theories that have not yet been observed. 10 The validity of hypotheses is often based on the testability of the prediction made in a reproducible experiment. 8

Conversely, hypotheses can also be rephrased as research questions. Several hypotheses based on existing theories and knowledge may be needed to answer a research question. Developing ethical research questions and hypotheses creates a research design that has logical relationships among variables. These relationships serve as a solid foundation for the conduct of the study. 4 , 11 Haphazardly constructed research questions can result in poorly formulated hypotheses and improper study designs, leading to unreliable results. Thus, the formulations of relevant research questions and verifiable hypotheses are crucial when beginning research. 12

CHARACTERISTICS OF GOOD RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES

Excellent research questions are specific and focused. These integrate collective data and observations to confirm or refute the subsequent hypotheses. Well-constructed hypotheses are based on previous reports and verify the research context. These are realistic, in-depth, sufficiently complex, and reproducible. More importantly, these hypotheses can be addressed and tested. 13

There are several characteristics of well-developed hypotheses. Good hypotheses are 1) empirically testable 7 , 10 , 11 , 13 ; 2) backed by preliminary evidence 9 ; 3) testable by ethical research 7 , 9 ; 4) based on original ideas 9 ; 5) have evidenced-based logical reasoning 10 ; and 6) can be predicted. 11 Good hypotheses can infer ethical and positive implications, indicating the presence of a relationship or effect relevant to the research theme. 7 , 11 These are initially developed from a general theory and branch into specific hypotheses by deductive reasoning. In the absence of a theory to base the hypotheses, inductive reasoning based on specific observations or findings form more general hypotheses. 10

TYPES OF RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES

Research questions and hypotheses are developed according to the type of research, which can be broadly classified into quantitative and qualitative research. We provide a summary of the types of research questions and hypotheses under quantitative and qualitative research categories in Table 1 .

Research questions in quantitative research

In quantitative research, research questions inquire about the relationships among variables being investigated and are usually framed at the start of the study. These are precise and typically linked to the subject population, dependent and independent variables, and research design. 1 Research questions may also attempt to describe the behavior of a population in relation to one or more variables, or describe the characteristics of variables to be measured ( descriptive research questions ). 1 , 5 , 14 These questions may also aim to discover differences between groups within the context of an outcome variable ( comparative research questions ), 1 , 5 , 14 or elucidate trends and interactions among variables ( relationship research questions ). 1 , 5 We provide examples of descriptive, comparative, and relationship research questions in quantitative research in Table 2 .

Hypotheses in quantitative research

In quantitative research, hypotheses predict the expected relationships among variables. 15 Relationships among variables that can be predicted include 1) between a single dependent variable and a single independent variable ( simple hypothesis ) or 2) between two or more independent and dependent variables ( complex hypothesis ). 4 , 11 Hypotheses may also specify the expected direction to be followed and imply an intellectual commitment to a particular outcome ( directional hypothesis ) 4 . On the other hand, hypotheses may not predict the exact direction and are used in the absence of a theory, or when findings contradict previous studies ( non-directional hypothesis ). 4 In addition, hypotheses can 1) define interdependency between variables ( associative hypothesis ), 4 2) propose an effect on the dependent variable from manipulation of the independent variable ( causal hypothesis ), 4 3) state a negative relationship between two variables ( null hypothesis ), 4 , 11 , 15 4) replace the working hypothesis if rejected ( alternative hypothesis ), 15 explain the relationship of phenomena to possibly generate a theory ( working hypothesis ), 11 5) involve quantifiable variables that can be tested statistically ( statistical hypothesis ), 11 6) or express a relationship whose interlinks can be verified logically ( logical hypothesis ). 11 We provide examples of simple, complex, directional, non-directional, associative, causal, null, alternative, working, statistical, and logical hypotheses in quantitative research, as well as the definition of quantitative hypothesis-testing research in Table 3 .

Research questions in qualitative research

Unlike research questions in quantitative research, research questions in qualitative research are usually continuously reviewed and reformulated. The central question and associated subquestions are stated more than the hypotheses. 15 The central question broadly explores a complex set of factors surrounding the central phenomenon, aiming to present the varied perspectives of participants. 15

There are varied goals for which qualitative research questions are developed. These questions can function in several ways, such as to 1) identify and describe existing conditions ( contextual research question s); 2) describe a phenomenon ( descriptive research questions ); 3) assess the effectiveness of existing methods, protocols, theories, or procedures ( evaluation research questions ); 4) examine a phenomenon or analyze the reasons or relationships between subjects or phenomena ( explanatory research questions ); or 5) focus on unknown aspects of a particular topic ( exploratory research questions ). 5 In addition, some qualitative research questions provide new ideas for the development of theories and actions ( generative research questions ) or advance specific ideologies of a position ( ideological research questions ). 1 Other qualitative research questions may build on a body of existing literature and become working guidelines ( ethnographic research questions ). Research questions may also be broadly stated without specific reference to the existing literature or a typology of questions ( phenomenological research questions ), may be directed towards generating a theory of some process ( grounded theory questions ), or may address a description of the case and the emerging themes ( qualitative case study questions ). 15 We provide examples of contextual, descriptive, evaluation, explanatory, exploratory, generative, ideological, ethnographic, phenomenological, grounded theory, and qualitative case study research questions in qualitative research in Table 4 , and the definition of qualitative hypothesis-generating research in Table 5 .

Qualitative studies usually pose at least one central research question and several subquestions starting with How or What . These research questions use exploratory verbs such as explore or describe . These also focus on one central phenomenon of interest, and may mention the participants and research site. 15

Hypotheses in qualitative research

Hypotheses in qualitative research are stated in the form of a clear statement concerning the problem to be investigated. Unlike in quantitative research where hypotheses are usually developed to be tested, qualitative research can lead to both hypothesis-testing and hypothesis-generating outcomes. 2 When studies require both quantitative and qualitative research questions, this suggests an integrative process between both research methods wherein a single mixed-methods research question can be developed. 1

FRAMEWORKS FOR DEVELOPING RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES

Research questions followed by hypotheses should be developed before the start of the study. 1 , 12 , 14 It is crucial to develop feasible research questions on a topic that is interesting to both the researcher and the scientific community. This can be achieved by a meticulous review of previous and current studies to establish a novel topic. Specific areas are subsequently focused on to generate ethical research questions. The relevance of the research questions is evaluated in terms of clarity of the resulting data, specificity of the methodology, objectivity of the outcome, depth of the research, and impact of the study. 1 , 5 These aspects constitute the FINER criteria (i.e., Feasible, Interesting, Novel, Ethical, and Relevant). 1 Clarity and effectiveness are achieved if research questions meet the FINER criteria. In addition to the FINER criteria, Ratan et al. described focus, complexity, novelty, feasibility, and measurability for evaluating the effectiveness of research questions. 14

The PICOT and PEO frameworks are also used when developing research questions. 1 The following elements are addressed in these frameworks, PICOT: P-population/patients/problem, I-intervention or indicator being studied, C-comparison group, O-outcome of interest, and T-timeframe of the study; PEO: P-population being studied, E-exposure to preexisting conditions, and O-outcome of interest. 1 Research questions are also considered good if these meet the “FINERMAPS” framework: Feasible, Interesting, Novel, Ethical, Relevant, Manageable, Appropriate, Potential value/publishable, and Systematic. 14

As we indicated earlier, research questions and hypotheses that are not carefully formulated result in unethical studies or poor outcomes. To illustrate this, we provide some examples of ambiguous research question and hypotheses that result in unclear and weak research objectives in quantitative research ( Table 6 ) 16 and qualitative research ( Table 7 ) 17 , and how to transform these ambiguous research question(s) and hypothesis(es) into clear and good statements.

a These statements were composed for comparison and illustrative purposes only.

b These statements are direct quotes from Higashihara and Horiuchi. 16

a This statement is a direct quote from Shimoda et al. 17

The other statements were composed for comparison and illustrative purposes only.

CONSTRUCTING RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES

To construct effective research questions and hypotheses, it is very important to 1) clarify the background and 2) identify the research problem at the outset of the research, within a specific timeframe. 9 Then, 3) review or conduct preliminary research to collect all available knowledge about the possible research questions by studying theories and previous studies. 18 Afterwards, 4) construct research questions to investigate the research problem. Identify variables to be accessed from the research questions 4 and make operational definitions of constructs from the research problem and questions. Thereafter, 5) construct specific deductive or inductive predictions in the form of hypotheses. 4 Finally, 6) state the study aims . This general flow for constructing effective research questions and hypotheses prior to conducting research is shown in Fig. 1 .

Research questions are used more frequently in qualitative research than objectives or hypotheses. 3 These questions seek to discover, understand, explore or describe experiences by asking “What” or “How.” The questions are open-ended to elicit a description rather than to relate variables or compare groups. The questions are continually reviewed, reformulated, and changed during the qualitative study. 3 Research questions are also used more frequently in survey projects than hypotheses in experiments in quantitative research to compare variables and their relationships.

Hypotheses are constructed based on the variables identified and as an if-then statement, following the template, ‘If a specific action is taken, then a certain outcome is expected.’ At this stage, some ideas regarding expectations from the research to be conducted must be drawn. 18 Then, the variables to be manipulated (independent) and influenced (dependent) are defined. 4 Thereafter, the hypothesis is stated and refined, and reproducible data tailored to the hypothesis are identified, collected, and analyzed. 4 The hypotheses must be testable and specific, 18 and should describe the variables and their relationships, the specific group being studied, and the predicted research outcome. 18 Hypotheses construction involves a testable proposition to be deduced from theory, and independent and dependent variables to be separated and measured separately. 3 Therefore, good hypotheses must be based on good research questions constructed at the start of a study or trial. 12

In summary, research questions are constructed after establishing the background of the study. Hypotheses are then developed based on the research questions. Thus, it is crucial to have excellent research questions to generate superior hypotheses. In turn, these would determine the research objectives and the design of the study, and ultimately, the outcome of the research. 12 Algorithms for building research questions and hypotheses are shown in Fig. 2 for quantitative research and in Fig. 3 for qualitative research.

EXAMPLES OF RESEARCH QUESTIONS FROM PUBLISHED ARTICLES

• EXAMPLE 1. Descriptive research question (quantitative research)
• - Presents research variables to be assessed (distinct phenotypes and subphenotypes)
• “BACKGROUND: Since COVID-19 was identified, its clinical and biological heterogeneity has been recognized. Identifying COVID-19 phenotypes might help guide basic, clinical, and translational research efforts.
• RESEARCH QUESTION: Does the clinical spectrum of patients with COVID-19 contain distinct phenotypes and subphenotypes? ” 19
• EXAMPLE 2. Relationship research question (quantitative research)
• - Shows interactions between dependent variable (static postural control) and independent variable (peripheral visual field loss)
• “Background: Integration of visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive sensations contributes to postural control. People with peripheral visual field loss have serious postural instability. However, the directional specificity of postural stability and sensory reweighting caused by gradual peripheral visual field loss remain unclear.
• Research question: What are the effects of peripheral visual field loss on static postural control ?” 20
• EXAMPLE 3. Comparative research question (quantitative research)
• - Clarifies the difference among groups with an outcome variable (patients enrolled in COMPERA with moderate PH or severe PH in COPD) and another group without the outcome variable (patients with idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension (IPAH))
• “BACKGROUND: Pulmonary hypertension (PH) in COPD is a poorly investigated clinical condition.
• RESEARCH QUESTION: Which factors determine the outcome of PH in COPD?
• STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: We analyzed the characteristics and outcome of patients enrolled in the Comparative, Prospective Registry of Newly Initiated Therapies for Pulmonary Hypertension (COMPERA) with moderate or severe PH in COPD as defined during the 6th PH World Symposium who received medical therapy for PH and compared them with patients with idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension (IPAH) .” 21
• EXAMPLE 4. Exploratory research question (qualitative research)
• - Explores areas that have not been fully investigated (perspectives of families and children who receive care in clinic-based child obesity treatment) to have a deeper understanding of the research problem
• “Problem: Interventions for children with obesity lead to only modest improvements in BMI and long-term outcomes, and data are limited on the perspectives of families of children with obesity in clinic-based treatment. This scoping review seeks to answer the question: What is known about the perspectives of families and children who receive care in clinic-based child obesity treatment? This review aims to explore the scope of perspectives reported by families of children with obesity who have received individualized outpatient clinic-based obesity treatment.” 22
• EXAMPLE 5. Relationship research question (quantitative research)
• - Defines interactions between dependent variable (use of ankle strategies) and independent variable (changes in muscle tone)
• “Background: To maintain an upright standing posture against external disturbances, the human body mainly employs two types of postural control strategies: “ankle strategy” and “hip strategy.” While it has been reported that the magnitude of the disturbance alters the use of postural control strategies, it has not been elucidated how the level of muscle tone, one of the crucial parameters of bodily function, determines the use of each strategy. We have previously confirmed using forward dynamics simulations of human musculoskeletal models that an increased muscle tone promotes the use of ankle strategies. The objective of the present study was to experimentally evaluate a hypothesis: an increased muscle tone promotes the use of ankle strategies. Research question: Do changes in the muscle tone affect the use of ankle strategies ?” 23

EXAMPLES OF HYPOTHESES IN PUBLISHED ARTICLES

• EXAMPLE 1. Working hypothesis (quantitative research)
• - A hypothesis that is initially accepted for further research to produce a feasible theory
• “As fever may have benefit in shortening the duration of viral illness, it is plausible to hypothesize that the antipyretic efficacy of ibuprofen may be hindering the benefits of a fever response when taken during the early stages of COVID-19 illness .” 24
• “In conclusion, it is plausible to hypothesize that the antipyretic efficacy of ibuprofen may be hindering the benefits of a fever response . The difference in perceived safety of these agents in COVID-19 illness could be related to the more potent efficacy to reduce fever with ibuprofen compared to acetaminophen. Compelling data on the benefit of fever warrant further research and review to determine when to treat or withhold ibuprofen for early stage fever for COVID-19 and other related viral illnesses .” 24
• EXAMPLE 2. Exploratory hypothesis (qualitative research)
• - Explores particular areas deeper to clarify subjective experience and develop a formal hypothesis potentially testable in a future quantitative approach
• “We hypothesized that when thinking about a past experience of help-seeking, a self distancing prompt would cause increased help-seeking intentions and more favorable help-seeking outcome expectations .” 25
• “Conclusion
• Although a priori hypotheses were not supported, further research is warranted as results indicate the potential for using self-distancing approaches to increasing help-seeking among some people with depressive symptomatology.” 25
• EXAMPLE 3. Hypothesis-generating research to establish a framework for hypothesis testing (qualitative research)
• “We hypothesize that compassionate care is beneficial for patients (better outcomes), healthcare systems and payers (lower costs), and healthcare providers (lower burnout). ” 26
• Compassionomics is the branch of knowledge and scientific study of the effects of compassionate healthcare. Our main hypotheses are that compassionate healthcare is beneficial for (1) patients, by improving clinical outcomes, (2) healthcare systems and payers, by supporting financial sustainability, and (3) HCPs, by lowering burnout and promoting resilience and well-being. The purpose of this paper is to establish a scientific framework for testing the hypotheses above . If these hypotheses are confirmed through rigorous research, compassionomics will belong in the science of evidence-based medicine, with major implications for all healthcare domains.” 26
• EXAMPLE 4. Statistical hypothesis (quantitative research)
• - An assumption is made about the relationship among several population characteristics ( gender differences in sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of adults with ADHD ). Validity is tested by statistical experiment or analysis ( chi-square test, Students t-test, and logistic regression analysis)
• “Our research investigated gender differences in sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of adults with ADHD in a Japanese clinical sample. Due to unique Japanese cultural ideals and expectations of women's behavior that are in opposition to ADHD symptoms, we hypothesized that women with ADHD experience more difficulties and present more dysfunctions than men . We tested the following hypotheses: first, women with ADHD have more comorbidities than men with ADHD; second, women with ADHD experience more social hardships than men, such as having less full-time employment and being more likely to be divorced.” 27
• “Statistical Analysis
• ( text omitted ) Between-gender comparisons were made using the chi-squared test for categorical variables and Students t-test for continuous variables…( text omitted ). A logistic regression analysis was performed for employment status, marital status, and comorbidity to evaluate the independent effects of gender on these dependent variables.” 27

EXAMPLES OF HYPOTHESIS AS WRITTEN IN PUBLISHED ARTICLES IN RELATION TO OTHER PARTS

• EXAMPLE 1. Background, hypotheses, and aims are provided
• “Pregnant women need skilled care during pregnancy and childbirth, but that skilled care is often delayed in some countries …( text omitted ). The focused antenatal care (FANC) model of WHO recommends that nurses provide information or counseling to all pregnant women …( text omitted ). Job aids are visual support materials that provide the right kind of information using graphics and words in a simple and yet effective manner. When nurses are not highly trained or have many work details to attend to, these job aids can serve as a content reminder for the nurses and can be used for educating their patients (Jennings, Yebadokpo, Affo, & Agbogbe, 2010) ( text omitted ). Importantly, additional evidence is needed to confirm how job aids can further improve the quality of ANC counseling by health workers in maternal care …( text omitted )” 28
• “ This has led us to hypothesize that the quality of ANC counseling would be better if supported by job aids. Consequently, a better quality of ANC counseling is expected to produce higher levels of awareness concerning the danger signs of pregnancy and a more favorable impression of the caring behavior of nurses .” 28
• “This study aimed to examine the differences in the responses of pregnant women to a job aid-supported intervention during ANC visit in terms of 1) their understanding of the danger signs of pregnancy and 2) their impression of the caring behaviors of nurses to pregnant women in rural Tanzania.” 28
• EXAMPLE 2. Background, hypotheses, and aims are provided
• “We conducted a two-arm randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate and compare changes in salivary cortisol and oxytocin levels of first-time pregnant women between experimental and control groups. The women in the experimental group touched and held an infant for 30 min (experimental intervention protocol), whereas those in the control group watched a DVD movie of an infant (control intervention protocol). The primary outcome was salivary cortisol level and the secondary outcome was salivary oxytocin level.” 29
• “ We hypothesize that at 30 min after touching and holding an infant, the salivary cortisol level will significantly decrease and the salivary oxytocin level will increase in the experimental group compared with the control group .” 29
• EXAMPLE 3. Background, aim, and hypothesis are provided
• “In countries where the maternal mortality ratio remains high, antenatal education to increase Birth Preparedness and Complication Readiness (BPCR) is considered one of the top priorities [1]. BPCR includes birth plans during the antenatal period, such as the birthplace, birth attendant, transportation, health facility for complications, expenses, and birth materials, as well as family coordination to achieve such birth plans. In Tanzania, although increasing, only about half of all pregnant women attend an antenatal clinic more than four times [4]. Moreover, the information provided during antenatal care (ANC) is insufficient. In the resource-poor settings, antenatal group education is a potential approach because of the limited time for individual counseling at antenatal clinics.” 30
• “This study aimed to evaluate an antenatal group education program among pregnant women and their families with respect to birth-preparedness and maternal and infant outcomes in rural villages of Tanzania.” 30
• “ The study hypothesis was if Tanzanian pregnant women and their families received a family-oriented antenatal group education, they would (1) have a higher level of BPCR, (2) attend antenatal clinic four or more times, (3) give birth in a health facility, (4) have less complications of women at birth, and (5) have less complications and deaths of infants than those who did not receive the education .” 30

Research questions and hypotheses are crucial components to any type of research, whether quantitative or qualitative. These questions should be developed at the very beginning of the study. Excellent research questions lead to superior hypotheses, which, like a compass, set the direction of research, and can often determine the successful conduct of the study. Many research studies have floundered because the development of research questions and subsequent hypotheses was not given the thought and meticulous attention needed. The development of research questions and hypotheses is an iterative process based on extensive knowledge of the literature and insightful grasp of the knowledge gap. Focused, concise, and specific research questions provide a strong foundation for constructing hypotheses which serve as formal predictions about the research outcomes. Research questions and hypotheses are crucial elements of research that should not be overlooked. They should be carefully thought of and constructed when planning research. This avoids unethical studies and poor outcomes by defining well-founded objectives that determine the design, course, and outcome of the study.

Disclosure: The authors have no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.

Author Contributions:

• Conceptualization: Barroga E, Matanguihan GJ.
• Methodology: Barroga E, Matanguihan GJ.
• Writing - original draft: Barroga E, Matanguihan GJ.
• Writing - review & editing: Barroga E, Matanguihan GJ.

How To Write The Results/Findings Chapter

For qualitative studies (dissertations & theses).

By: Jenna Crossley (PhD). Expert Reviewed By: Dr. Eunice Rautenbach | August 2021

So, you’ve collected and analysed your qualitative data, and it’s time to write up your results chapter. But where do you start? In this post, we’ll guide you through the qualitative results chapter (also called the findings chapter), step by step. 

Overview: Qualitative Results Chapter

• What (exactly) the qualitative results chapter is
• What to include in your results chapter
• How to write up your results chapter
• A few tips and tricks to help you along the way
• Free results chapter template

What exactly is the results chapter?

The results chapter in a dissertation or thesis (or any formal academic research piece) is where you objectively and neutrally present the findings of your qualitative analysis (or analyses if you used multiple qualitative analysis methods ). This chapter can sometimes be combined with the discussion chapter (where you interpret the data and discuss its meaning), depending on your university’s preference.  We’ll treat the two chapters as separate, as that’s the most common approach.

In contrast to a quantitative results chapter that presents numbers and statistics, a qualitative results chapter presents data primarily in the form of words . But this doesn’t mean that a qualitative study can’t have quantitative elements – you could, for example, present the number of times a theme or topic pops up in your data, depending on the analysis method(s) you adopt.

Adding a quantitative element to your study can add some rigour, which strengthens your results by providing more evidence for your claims. This is particularly common when using qualitative content analysis. Keep in mind though that qualitative research aims to achieve depth, richness and identify nuances , so don’t get tunnel vision by focusing on the numbers. They’re just cream on top in a qualitative analysis.

So, to recap, the results chapter is where you objectively present the findings of your analysis, without interpreting them (you’ll save that for the discussion chapter). With that out the way, let’s take a look at what you should include in your results chapter.

What should you include in the results chapter?

As we’ve mentioned, your qualitative results chapter should purely present and describe your results , not interpret them in relation to the existing literature or your research questions . Any speculations or discussion about the implications of your findings should be reserved for your discussion chapter.

In your results chapter, you’ll want to talk about your analysis findings and whether or not they support your hypotheses (if you have any). Naturally, the exact contents of your results chapter will depend on which qualitative analysis method (or methods) you use. For example, if you were to use thematic analysis, you’d detail the themes identified in your analysis, using extracts from the transcripts or text to support your claims.

While you do need to present your analysis findings in some detail, you should avoid dumping large amounts of raw data in this chapter. Instead, focus on presenting the key findings and using a handful of select quotes or text extracts to support each finding . The reams of data and analysis can be relegated to your appendices.

While it’s tempting to include every last detail you found in your qualitative analysis, it is important to make sure that you report only that which is relevant to your research aims, objectives and research questions .  Always keep these three components, as well as your hypotheses (if you have any) front of mind when writing the chapter and use them as a filter to decide what’s relevant and what’s not.

Need a helping hand?

How do I write the results chapter?

Now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time to look at how to structure your chapter. Broadly speaking, the results chapter needs to contain three core components – the introduction, the body and the concluding summary. Let’s take a look at each of these.

Section 1: Introduction

The first step is to craft a brief introduction to the chapter. This intro is vital as it provides some context for your findings. In your introduction, you should begin by reiterating your problem statement and research questions and highlight the purpose of your research . Make sure that you spell this out for the reader so that the rest of your chapter is well contextualised.

The next step is to briefly outline the structure of your results chapter. In other words, explain what’s included in the chapter and what the reader can expect. In the results chapter, you want to tell a story that is coherent, flows logically, and is easy to follow , so make sure that you plan your structure out well and convey that structure (at a high level), so that your reader is well oriented.

The introduction section shouldn’t be lengthy. Two or three short paragraphs should be more than adequate. It is merely an introduction and overview, not a summary of the chapter.

Pro Tip – To help you structure your chapter, it can be useful to set up an initial draft with (sub)section headings so that you’re able to easily (re)arrange parts of your chapter. This will also help your reader to follow your results and give your chapter some coherence.  Be sure to use level-based heading styles (e.g. Heading 1, 2, 3 styles) to help the reader differentiate between levels visually. You can find these options in Word (example below).

Section 2: Body

Before we get started on what to include in the body of your chapter, it’s vital to remember that a results section should be completely objective and descriptive, not interpretive . So, be careful not to use words such as, “suggests” or “implies”, as these usually accompany some form of interpretation – that’s reserved for your discussion chapter.

The structure of your body section is very important , so make sure that you plan it out well. When planning out your qualitative results chapter, create sections and subsections so that you can maintain the flow of the story you’re trying to tell. Be sure to systematically and consistently describe each portion of results. Try to adopt a standardised structure for each portion so that you achieve a high level of consistency throughout the chapter.

For qualitative studies, results chapters tend to be structured according to themes , which makes it easier for readers to follow. However, keep in mind that not all results chapters have to be structured in this manner. For example, if you’re conducting a longitudinal study, you may want to structure your chapter chronologically. Similarly, you might structure this chapter based on your theoretical framework . The exact structure of your chapter will depend on the nature of your study , especially your research questions.

As you work through the body of your chapter, make sure that you use quotes to substantiate every one of your claims . You can present these quotes in italics to differentiate them from your own words. A general rule of thumb is to use at least two pieces of evidence per claim, and these should be linked directly to your data. Also, remember that you need to include all relevant results , not just the ones that support your assumptions or initial leanings.

In addition to including quotes, you can also link your claims to the data by using appendices , which you should reference throughout your text. When you reference, make sure that you include both the name/number of the appendix , as well as the line(s) from which you drew your data.

As referencing styles can vary greatly, be sure to look up the appendix referencing conventions of your university’s prescribed style (e.g. APA , Harvard, etc) and keep this consistent throughout your chapter.

Section 3: Concluding summary

The concluding summary is very important because it summarises your key findings and lays the foundation for the discussion chapter . Keep in mind that some readers may skip directly to this section (from the introduction section), so make sure that it can be read and understood well in isolation.

In this section, you need to remind the reader of the key findings. That is, the results that directly relate to your research questions and that you will build upon in your discussion chapter. Remember, your reader has digested a lot of information in this chapter, so you need to use this section to remind them of the most important takeaways.

Importantly, the concluding summary should not present any new information and should only describe what you’ve already presented in your chapter. Keep it concise – you’re not summarising the whole chapter, just the essentials.

Tips for writing an A-grade results chapter

Now that you’ve got a clear picture of what the qualitative results chapter is all about, here are some quick tips and reminders to help you craft a high-quality chapter:

• Your results chapter should be written in the past tense . You’ve done the work already, so you want to tell the reader what you found , not what you are currently finding .
• Make sure that you review your work multiple times and check that every claim is adequately backed up by evidence . Aim for at least two examples per claim, and make use of an appendix to reference these.
• When writing up your results, make sure that you stick to only what is relevant . Don’t waste time on data that are not relevant to your research objectives and research questions.
• Use headings and subheadings to create an intuitive, easy to follow piece of writing. Make use of Microsoft Word’s “heading styles” and be sure to use them consistently.
• When referring to numerical data, tables and figures can provide a useful visual aid. When using these, make sure that they can be read and understood independent of your body text (i.e. that they can stand-alone). To this end, use clear, concise labels for each of your tables or figures and make use of colours to code indicate differences or hierarchy.
• Similarly, when you’re writing up your chapter, it can be useful to highlight topics and themes in different colours . This can help you to differentiate between your data if you get a bit overwhelmed and will also help you to ensure that your results flow logically and coherently.

If you have any questions, leave a comment below and we’ll do our best to help. If you’d like 1-on-1 help with your results chapter (or any chapter of your dissertation or thesis), check out our private dissertation coaching service here or book a free initial consultation to discuss how we can help you.

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20 Comments

This was extremely helpful. Thanks a lot guys

Hi, thanks for the great research support platform created by the gradcoach team!

I wanted to ask- While “suggests” or “implies” are interpretive terms, what terms could we use for the results chapter? Could you share some examples of descriptive terms?

I think that instead of saying, ‘The data suggested, or The data implied,’ you can say, ‘The Data showed or revealed, or illustrated or outlined’…If interview data, you may say Jane Doe illuminated or elaborated, or Jane Doe described… or Jane Doe expressed or stated.

I found this article very useful. Thank you very much for the outstanding work you are doing.

What if i have 3 different interviewees answering the same interview questions? Should i then present the results in form of the table with the division on the 3 perspectives or rather give a results in form of the text and highlight who said what?

I think this tabular representation of results is a great idea. I am doing it too along with the text. Thanks

That was helpful was struggling to separate the discussion from the findings

this was very useful, Thank you.

Very helpful, I am confident to write my results chapter now.

It is so helpful! It is a good job. Thank you very much!

Very useful, well explained. Many thanks.

Hello, I appreciate the way you provided a supportive comments about qualitative results presenting tips

I loved this! It explains everything needed, and it has helped me better organize my thoughts. What words should I not use while writing my results section, other than subjective ones.

Thanks a lot, it is really helpful

Thank you so much dear, i really appropriate your nice explanations about this.

Thank you so much for this! I was wondering if anyone could help with how to prproperly integrate quotations (Excerpts) from interviews in the finding chapter in a qualitative research. Please GradCoach, address this issue and provide examples.

what if I’m not doing any interviews myself and all the information is coming from case studies that have already done the research.

Very helpful thank you.

This was very helpful as I was wondering how to structure this part of my dissertation, to include the quotes… Thanks for this explanation

This is very helpful, thanks! I am required to write up my results chapters with the discussion in each of them – any tips and tricks for this strategy?

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No matter what college or university you attend, whether it’s in your native country or elsewhere, you will need to complete a capstone project before you can graduate. A final year project is a piece of work that every student in an undergraduate program must do to get their degrees.

In doing so, students hope to showcase the information and abilities they’ve developed over their academic careers.

The purpose of capstone projects is to challenge students’ imaginations by having them create something completely new. Students’ verbal and written communication skills are also strengthened by participation in such projects.

To complete this assignment, you will conduct a scientific inquiry utilizing scientific procedures to determine the answers to certain research questions. You’ll be supervised by faculty members who will have to sign off on your research paper’s subject.

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Typically a research project consists of five(5) chapters, the introduction which is chapter one of the research project, The literature review, the research methodology, the data presentation and analysis which is chapter four, and the last chapter which comprises the summary, findings, and recommendation. We will take a brief look into each chapter of a research project.

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Your project’s first chapter should serve as an introduction. In this section, you should explain in general terms what the project entails. It gives information about the topic that your research will address. Any interested party can read your introduction and have a good, if not in-depth, grasp of your research project’s purpose and methodology. The body of your paper should expand upon the points you make in the beginning. Here is the format your introduction will normally follow:

The study’s context provides an overview of the research question, the state of knowledge about the topic, and a summary of previous studies that have addressed the same or related questions. In this section, you will lay out exactly what it is that your study aims to fix or enhance.

It ought to logically lead to the research goals by demonstrating what has been done previously and what will be done in this study. The goals of the study, or research objectives, are a brief explanation of the investigation’s intended outcomes. It clearly shows the aims and objectives of the research; both broad and specific.

It also includes the research questions, research hypothesis, meaningful contribution to knowledge, and how it will help others all aspects that can be discussed in the context of a study’s significance, Scope of the study, and lastly a glossary of terminology used in the study, along with a definition of each term in a standard format.

Chapter Two

The second chapter should be your project’s literature review. Researching the available scholarly materials on your chosen research topic is an essential first step in writing your literature review. In your literature review, you should elaborate on what is already known about your issue, highlight key findings, and highlight the major contributions of earlier studies.

This section should demonstrate to the reader that you have read and comprehended the most important books in your field. Be sure to critically evaluate the many arguments, hypotheses, and research methodologies presented in the works of other scholars, rather than just describing them.

Your study goals and objectives should inform the assessment. For your research, you’ll need to assemble a library of relevant books and periodicals and evaluate their usefulness.

Chapter Three

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Information on your research’s structure, population, sampling methods, data collection strategies, data analysis, ethical considerations, etc., can all be found in this section. It should be possible for another researcher to follow your steps and come to the same findings you did. There needs to be enough detail for others to duplicate your findings.

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The presentation and analysis of data are often contained in Chapter 4 of a senior thesis or capstone project (results and discussion). After you’ve done your research and written chapters 1-3, it’s time to evaluate your data, display your results, and talk about what you’ve learned.

Beginning with this section, you should restate the research problem from the introduction. Then, you can answer each study question and report your findings. You should summarize your findings in tables, figures, or some other visual format.

Chapter Five

Titles for this section vary from institution to institution, but commonly include “Summary,” “Conclusions,” and “Recommendations.” Talk it over with your supervisor first. You should have finished all of your research and be drafting your final report at this point in the project.

It would be helpful to begin this section by restating your research’s overarching goal. You should review the first four chapters of your project to refresh your readers’ memories on the overall purpose of your research. You should make conclusions from the results and state what the research found.

You should also explain the scope and depth of your research. You will next make suggestions in light of the results, drawing on the findings, conclusions, and limits you’ve identified. Also included in the recommendations are suggestions for how future scholars might build upon the work done and what other areas of study are similar to those already undertaken.

Remember, Writing chapters one through five of your research project isn’t enough; you’ll also need to include a reference and appendix section in your report.

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Empty spaces and hybrid places: The pandemic’s lasting impact on real estate

At a glance.

• Hybrid work is here to stay . As a result, office attendance has stabilized at 30 percent below prepandemic norms.
• The ripple effects of hybrid work are substantial. Untethered from their offices, residents have left urban cores and shifted their shopping elsewhere. For example, New York City’s urban core lost 5 percent of its population from mid-2020 to mid-2022, and San Francisco’s lost 7 percent. Urban vacancy rates have shot up. Foot traffic near stores in metropolitan areas remains 10 to 20 percent below prepandemic levels.
• Demand for office and retail space in superstar cities will remain below prepandemic levels. In a moderate scenario that we modeled, demand for office space is 13 percent lower in 2030 than it was in 2019 for the median city in our study. In a severe scenario, demand falls by 38 percent in the most heavily affected city.
• Real estate is local, and demand will vary substantially by neighborhood and city. Demand may be lower in neighborhoods and cities characterized by dense office space, expensive housing, and large employers in the knowledge economy.
• Cities and buildings can adapt and thrive by taking hybrid approaches themselves. Priorities might include developing mixed-use neighborhoods, constructing more adaptable buildings, and designing multiuse office and retail space.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, it dramatically changed the way people worked, lived, and shopped in cities around the world. The starkest change was where and how they worked. Obeying lockdowns and office closures, tired of uncomfortable masks, and enabled by remote-work technology, many employees abruptly retreated from traditional offices to home offices. Many of those employees, newly freed from their daily commutes, chose to move out of urban cores. And now that fewer of them were working and living near urban stores, fewer of them shopped there. In recent months, some of those behavioral shifts have slowed. Others persist, particularly among office employees continuing to engage in hybrid work (that is, a combination of remote and in-office work).

The behavioral shifts have already had major effects on real estate in “superstar” cities—roughly speaking, cities with a disproportionate share of the world’s urban GDP and GDP growth. In superstar cities’ urban cores, the percentage of office and retail space that is vacant has grown sharply since 2019, and home prices have increased more slowly than in the suburbs and other cities.

Acknowledgments

This report is a collaborative effort by the McKinsey Global Institute and McKinsey’s Real Estate Practice.

The research was led by Jan Mischke , an MGI partner in Zurich; Ryan Luby, a senior knowledge expert and associate partner in New York; Brian Vickery, a McKinsey partner in Boston; Jonathan Woetzel , an MGI director and senior partner in Shanghai; Olivia White , an MGI director and senior partner in San Francisco; Aditya Sanghvi , a McKinsey senior partner in New York City; Rob Palter , a McKinsey senior partner in Toronto; André Dua , a McKinsey senior partner in Miami; and Sven Smit , a McKinsey senior partner in Amsterdam and MGI chairman. The project team was led by Jinnie Rhee, a consultant in San Francisco; Anna Fu, a consultant in New York; Isabella Mayorga, an alumna; and Chris Longman, an alumnus. The team included Cristina Barrantes, Maclaine Fields, Lily Highman, Ricardo Huapaya, Marty Kang, Gaby Pierre, Jose Maria Quiros, Akanksha Raina, Surya Tahliani, Paula Trejos, Valeria Valverde, Caitlin Wischermann, and Cody Wollin.

We thank Nicholas Bloom, professor, Stanford University; Michael Joyce, senior managing director, Greystar; Jonathan Lurie, managing partner, Realty Corporation; Janet Pogue McLaurin, global director of workplace research, Gensler; Andrew Min, senior vice president, RXR; Alan M. Taylor, professor, University of California, Davis; and Ko Wang, professor, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School for kindly sharing their insights.

The project benefited immensely from the expertise and perspectives of many McKinsey colleagues. Thanks go to Colleen Baum, Gemma D’Auria, Kevin Heidenreich, Phil Kirschner, Dymfke Kuijpers, Adrian Kwok, Daniel Läubli, James Patchett, Ben Safran, Anthony Shorris, and Alex Wolkomir.

The report was edited by MGI senior editor Benjamin Plotinsky, together with senior data visualization editor Chuck Burke and editorial operations manager Vasudha Gupta. We also thank our colleagues David Batcheck, Cecilia Bayer, Tim Beacom, Amanda Covington, Shannon Ensor, Vero Henze, Karen Jones, Stephen Landau, Janet Michaud, Diane Rice, Rebeca Robboy, Rachel Robinson, and Katie Shearer for their support.

This research contributes to MGI’s mission to help business and policy leaders understand the forces transforming the global economy. As with all MGI research, it is independent and has not been commissioned or sponsored in any way by any business, government, or other institution.

To what extent could real estate in superstar cities continue to suffer? In this research, the McKinsey Global Institute has modeled future demand for office, residential, and retail space in several scenarios. 1 The research considers only those three asset classes: office, residential, and retail space. Others, such as industrial space and self-storage space, are outside the scope of the research. In those scenarios, demand for office and retail space is generally lower in 2030 than it was in 2019, though the anticipated reductions in our moderate scenario are smaller than those projected by many other researchers. Our analysis also shows that the ripple effects will be complex—for example, that certain kinds of cities and neighborhoods will be more heavily affected than others. We considered a wide variety of factors, including long-term population trends; employment trends, such as the ongoing effects of automation; office attendance patterns by industry; employee coordination, defined as the maximum share of workers in the office at a given time; workers’ ages and incomes; the share of a city’s population that commutes from elsewhere; housing price variation among neighborhoods; and shopping trends, such as the ongoing increase in online shopping. In addition to many secondary sources, our modeling includes information from a large global survey that we conducted to understand the behavioral shifts caused by the pandemic.

We performed this research during a time of exceptional macroeconomic uncertainty. Inflation and interest rates are high; fears of recession are mounting; stress in the financial system has been making headlines. Actual outcomes, of course, will depend on how those variables and others play out.

What is certain is that urban real estate in superstar cities around the world faces substantial challenges. And those challenges could imperil the fiscal health of cities, many of which are already straining to address homelessness, transit needs, and other pressing issues. But the challenges also provide an opportunity to spur a historic transformation of urban spaces. By becoming more flexible and adaptable in everything from the makeup of neighborhoods to the design of buildings—in essence, becoming more “hybrid” themselves—superstar cities can not only adapt but thrive.

How hybrid work has changed the way people work, live, and shop

During the pandemic, workers’ office attendance plummeted. Untethered from their daily commutes, urbanites moved away from urban cores in greater numbers than they had before the pandemic (and fewer people moved in), and people spent less in urban stores (see sidebar, “How we define cities”). The rate of out-migration has now returned to its prepandemic trend, but our research suggests that few of the people who left will return and that urban shopping will not fully recover.

How we define cities

This report is about real estate in superstar cities—roughly speaking, cities with a disproportionate share of the world’s urban GDP and GDP growth. We have borrowed the term and the concept from the 2018 MGI report Superstars: The dynamics of firms, sectors, and cities leading the global economy . The report does not examine real estate outside superstar cities.

By city , we usually mean a large metropolitan area. Our analysis often separates such a metropolitan area into two parts: the urban core , which refers to the densest part of the area, and the suburbs , which refers to everything outside the urban core. For example, when we discuss San Francisco’s urban core, we mean San Francisco County, Alameda County, and San Mateo County. And when we discuss San Francisco’s suburbs, we mean the rest of the San Francisco metropolitan area (that is, Marin County and Contra Costa County).

We focus most closely on nine superstar cities: Beijing, Houston, London, New York City, Paris, Munich, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Tokyo. However, in the survey that underlies much of this report, we collected data from a larger set of 17 superstar cities in six countries in order to better understand behavior. At one point in our research, we were able to extend our analysis to a still larger set of 24 superstar cities to help us identify patterns in suburbanization.

Hybrid work is here to stay, and office attendance is down by 30 percent

Employees still spend far less time working at the office than they did before the pandemic, according to our survey. In early 2020, as they adopted remote work and hybrid work in response to lockdowns and health concerns, office attendance in the metropolitan areas we studied dropped by up to 90 percent. It has since recovered substantially but remains down by about 30 percent, on average. As of October 2022, office workers were visiting the office about 3.5 days per week. That number varied among cities, from 3.1 days in London to 3.9 in Beijing. (For more information about the survey, see the technical appendix.)

Office attendance also varies by industry and neighborhood. In large firms in the knowledge economy—which we define as the professional services, information, and finance industries—employees tend to go to the office fewer days per week (Exhibit E1). Characteristics of areas with lower office attendance include expensive housing, a higher ratio of inbound commuters to residents, and a small share of retail, according to our research on US counties. Local culture also plays a role.

There are several reasons to believe that the current rate of office attendance could persist. First, the rate has remained fairly stable since mid-2022. Second, three key numbers—the number of days per week that survey respondents go to the office (3.5), the number of days they expect to go to the office after the pandemic ends (3.7), and their preferred number (3.2)—are not far apart. Third, 10 percent of the people we surveyed said that they were both likely to quit their jobs if required to work at the office every day and willing to take a substantial pay cut if doing so let them work from home when they wanted. That group contains many senior, high-income employees, suggesting that they may wield influence over companies’ decisions. Nevertheless, it is not certain that the current rate of office attendance will persist; it could change, for example, if labor market dynamics shift or if research conclusively indicates either a negative or a positive relationship between hybrid work and productivity.

Up to 7 percent of the people in urban cores left for good

During the pandemic, a wave of households left the urban cores of superstar cities, and fewer households moved in. For example, New York City’s urban core lost 5 percent of its population from mid-2020 to mid-2022, and San Francisco’s lost 7 percent. The main reason was out-migration. In the suburbs, by contrast, populations grew, or they shrank less dramatically than populations in the urban cores did. In the United States, suburbanization had already been happening before the pandemic, and the shock accelerated an existing trend; by contrast, in most of the European and Japanese cities we studied, urbanization gave way to suburbanization (Exhibit E2).

The urban cores where population growth was smallest in relation to their suburbs tended to be those with expensive homes, high office density, a high share of workers in the knowledge economy, and limited retail presence—some of the same characteristics that shaped office attendance. London, Dallas, New York, San Francisco, and Boston were the most affected. In general, US urban cores were more affected than European and Japanese ones, which tend to have more mixed-use development, in which office, residential, and retail space exist alongside one another. The migration trends in Beijing were primarily shaped by prepandemic efforts to control the population size in urban cores by encouraging out-migration, efforts that were paused during the pandemic.

Out-migration from urban cores of superstar cities seems to have slowed, but it is still above prepandemic levels.

Hybrid work seems to have contributed significantly to out-migration. In our survey, among respondents who moved after March 2020, 20 percent said that their move was possible only because they could now work from home more frequently. In the United Kingdom and the United States, people who had moved from urban cores to suburbs, and who said that their move was possible only because they could now work from home, said that they were drawn by housing conditions: better neighborhoods, the prospect of homeownership, and outdoor space. In Japan and China, wanting to own a home was far and away the strongest factor motivating people’s moves to the suburbs.

Out-migration from urban cores of superstar cities seems to have slowed, but it is still above prepandemic levels. From 2019 to 2021, net out-migration from US superstar city cores doubled; then it fell in 2022, although it remained above 2019 rates. In other words, the people who moved out during the pandemic are not moving back, and others keep leaving.

Shopping remains depressed, especially in urban cores

As people stayed home during the pandemic, they radically shifted the way they shopped. Foot traffic plummeted near stores in the cities we studied, and online spending as a share of retail spending spiked.

More recently, foot traffic near stores in metropolitan areas has risen again, but it is still 10 to 20 percent lower than it was before the pandemic. A major reason for the decline is that online spending as a share of retail spending, which admittedly grew more slowly after the initial spike, nevertheless remains higher than it was in 2019.

Retailers in urban cores face particularly acute challenges in attracting customers. As of October 2022, foot traffic had recovered noticeably less near those stores than near suburban ones (Exhibit E3). In New York, for example, foot traffic near suburban stores was 16 percent lower than it had been in January 2020, but foot traffic near urban stores was 36 percent lower. And office-dense neighborhoods in urban cores are facing even more challenges. The reason seems to be that when people come to the office less often, they shop less often near the office. In our survey, respondents in the United States who worked at the office no more than one day per week reported doing much less of their total retail spending near the office than did those who worked in the office two to five days a week.

The impact on real estate

The behavioral changes caused by the pandemic—lower office attendance, accelerated out-migration from cities, and less shopping in office-heavy neighborhoods—will push down demand for real estate in most superstar cities. By 2030, in the scenarios we modeled, demand for office and retail space is generally lower than it was in 2019 (Exhibit E4). Residential space is less affected, though the price differences between urban cores and suburbs are narrower than they used to be. (Note that our model does not consider price elasticity; that is, it does not account for the fact that when demand decreases, prices fall, pushing demand partway back up. For more information about the model, see the technical appendix.)

There will be 13 percent less demand for office space in the median city we studied

Demand for office space has already declined, partly because of the increase in remote work and partly because of a challenging macroeconomic environment. Vacancy rates have increased in all the cities we studied. In the US cities, transaction volume (the total dollar value of all sales) fell by 57 percent, average sale price per square foot fell by 20 percent, and asking rents fell by nearly 22 percent (all in real terms) from 2019 to 2022. In San Francisco, the most strongly affected city in the United States, the share of office space that was vacant was ten percentage points higher in 2022 than it was in 2019, transaction volume was 79 percent lower, sale prices per square foot were 24 percent lower, and asking rents were 28 percent lower (also in real terms). The decline in demand has prompted tenants—wary about current macroeconomic conditions, uncertain about how much their workers will come to the office, and therefore uncertain about how much space they will need—to negotiate shorter leases from owners. Shorter leases, in turn, may make it more difficult for owners to obtain financing or may cause banks to adjust valuation models, which rely in part on the duration of existing leases.

In the scenarios we modeled, the amount of office space demanded in most cities does not return to prepandemic levels for decades. By 2030, demand is as much as 20 percent lower than it was in 2019, depending on the city. 2 When we projected demand for office space in Beijing and Shanghai, we studied only the urban cores of those cities. When we projected demand for office space in the other superstar cities, we studied larger areas, usually but not always the entire metropolitan areas. That estimate is what our model yields in a moderate scenario—one in which, by 2025, office attendance is higher than it is now but still lower than it was before the pandemic, and that partial recovery continues indefinitely. 3 Our model considers peak weekly attendance rather than average weekly attendance. It also takes into account the continued trend toward more desks in less space as well as projections of population growth, shifts in urban migration, and the share of office workers as the knowledge economy grows but feels the impact of automation. In a more severe scenario, in which attendance for all office workers in 2030 falls to the rate already seen in large firms in the knowledge economy, demand is as much as 38 percent lower than it was in 2019, again depending on the city.

Falling demand will drive down value. In the nine cities we studied, a total of $800 billion (in real terms) in value is at stake by 2030 in the moderate scenario. On average, the total value of office space declines by 26 percent from 2019 to 2030 in the moderate scenario and by 42 percent in the severe one. The impact on value could be even stronger if rising interest rates compound it. Similarly, the impact could be stronger if troubled financial institutions decide to more quickly reduce the price of property they finance or own.

Falling demand will also result in a surplus of office space, particularly in the lower-quality and older buildings that the real estate industry calls Class B and Class C. From 2020 to 2022, rents, demand, and sometimes prices generally grew more quickly (or fell less sharply) for Class A buildings than for Class B buildings in US superstar cities. For example, in New York City during that period, the average sale price per square foot rose 3 percent for Class A buildings but fell by 8 percent for Class B buildings. 4 Data from CoStar. There are a number of reasons for this “flight to quality.” One is that many employers see high-quality space as a way to encourage office attendance among their employees. Another is that Class B and Class C office space is often not suited to hybrid work; for example, it may have less sophisticated audiovisual equipment. Also, now that hybrid work has reduced the total amount of space that employers need, they can spend their budgets on smaller amounts of higher-quality space rather than larger amounts of lower-quality space.

Demand growth for residences will be muted, especially in urban cores

During the pandemic, partly because of out-migration, demand for residences grew less quickly in superstar urban cores than it did in suburbs and other cities. Residential vacancy rates increased from 2019 to 2022 in every superstar urban core that we studied, from a 0.8-percentage-point increase in Tokyo to a 9.9-percentage-point increase in London; meanwhile, in the suburbs, vacancy rates grew much less or even declined. 5 Estimate excludes China because of data limitations. Prices followed suit, rising eight percentage points more slowly in US superstar urban cores than in their suburbs and 13 percentage points more slowly than in non-superstar urban cores. In San Francisco, nominal prices in some neighborhoods fell by 12 percent from the end of 2019 to 2022. Residences in San Francisco’s urban core are now worth $750 billion less than they would have been if prices there had risen at the national average rate. The effect seems to be a global phenomenon.

Before price adjustments are accounted for, the demand for residences in superstar urban cores that we modeled is up to 10 percent lower by 2030 than it would have been if not for the pandemic. It is nevertheless higher than it was in 2019 in every city we studied except San Francisco and Paris. That estimate rests on the assumption that the wave of residents who left urban cores will not return but that population growth in each city will return to its prepandemic rate by 2024. Should population growth remain depressed for longer, the impact on demand would be even bigger.

However, prices will probably adjust, and so will rents. Again, our model does not account for such price adjustments, so we could not create demand scenarios that incorporated them. But we can say that homes in urban cores are unlikely to stay empty. Residential space differs from office space in that regard: once prices and rents fall, any available floor space is usually taken up quickly. Indeed, vacancy rates in urban cores have already increased less sharply than urban out-migration would suggest. Unfortunately, the downward pressure on prices and rents is unlikely to make residences in superstar cities—many of which suffer from expensive housing and homelessness—much more affordable.

There will be 9 percent less demand for retail space in the median city we studied

Because of reduced foot traffic near urban stores during the pandemic, vacancy in retail space has increased and rents have declined, particularly in office-dense locations. As with office and residential space, vacancy rates increased from 2019 to 2022 in all the superstar urban cores we studied, ranging from a 1.8-percentage-point increase in San Francisco to a 6.2-percentage-point increase in London. From 2019 to 2022, asking retail rents declined an average of 5.4 percent (in real terms) in the cities we studied. The rents that were actually paid may have fallen even more.

Before price adjustments are accounted for, the demand for retail space in superstar urban cores that we modeled is lower in 2030 than it was in 2019, putting downward pressure on rents. 6 Our model accounts for population growth, shifts toward remote work, per capita spending growth, increasing online spending as a share of retail spending, shifts in migration patterns, and increased shopping in the suburbs. In San Francisco’s urban core, for example, demand will be 17 percent lower. That estimate is what our model yields in a scenario in which there is a partial return to office (and therefore a partial recovery of retail spending near the office), people’s adoption of online shopping returns to its prepandemic rate of growth by 2025, and people who moved during the pandemic do not move back. In a more severe scenario, the decline in demand in San Francisco’s urban core would be as high as 26 percent. In most superstar urban cores, demand would be projected to decline even if the pandemic had not happened; the reasons are population trends and the increasing move to online shopping. As with residential real estate, however, prices are likely to adjust.

What strongly affected neighborhoods and cities have in common

A review of various components of this research—regression analyses, survey responses, and literature reviews—suggests that cities where the pandemic has strongly affected real estate demand tend to have certain characteristics. (We were unable to determine which of those characteristics correlated most strongly with the impact on demand.)

Some of the characteristics are related to the business mix in a city. Specifically, cities with a larger share of workers in the knowledge economy, a higher number of large firms, a higher ratio of commuters to residents, and more cultural acceptance of remote work have tended to experience a greater impact on demand. Those factors lead to lower rates of office attendance, which reduce demand for office space directly, reduce demand for retail space by diminishing the number of office workers shopping at urban stores, and reduce demand for residential space by prompting people to move out of cities’ urban cores.

The larger the share of real estate in a neighborhood that was occupied by offices, the more out-migration from that neighborhood.

Other characteristics that correlate with the impact on demand are related to the urban structure of a city. Specifically, cities with office-dense real estate and little mixed-use development, as well as expensive housing and little green space, have tended to experience a greater impact on demand. Such characteristics make places less desirable for working, living, and shopping.

Two of those characteristics seem to correlate with the impact on demand at the neighborhood level as well. We examined neighborhoods defined by zip codes in Manhattan and San Francisco County (Exhibit E5). According to our analysis, the larger the share of real estate in a neighborhood that was occupied by offices, the more out-migration from that neighborhood. Similarly, home prices correlated with out-migration: pricier neighborhoods experienced more out-migration. (Data limitations prevented us from finding out whether the other characteristics also correlated with demand at the neighborhood level.)

Business mix and urban structure make a difference at the neighborhood level

Two very different Manhattan neighborhoods show that business mix and urban structure correlate with demand at the neighborhood level. The business mix of the first neighborhood, the Financial District, is heavily skewed toward the knowledge economy; 50 percent of all office space there is occupied by knowledge-economy tenants. The Financial District’s urban structure is office dense: 80 percent of real estate is dedicated to offices. And the average price of a home is roughly $1.5 million. Now consider the nearby Lower East Side, where just 22 percent of office space is dedicated to the knowledge economy, 7 percent of all space is dedicated to offices, and the average home price is about $1.0 million.

Those factors help us understand why the pandemic has driven such different outcomes in the two neighborhoods. The domestic out-migration rate from the start of 2020 to the start of 2022 was 2.2 times higher in the Financial District than in the Lower East Side, for example. It stands to reason that residents of the Financial District could easily work from home, as the prevalence of the knowledge economy there suggests, and were therefore likelier to move to bigger homes far from their offices; meanwhile, expensive housing may have given them another reason to leave.

At the city level too, business mix and urban structure drive differences

San Francisco’s business mix helps explain the pandemic’s heavy impact there. The city has long cultivated a technology-focused economy with a large population of office workers, especially knowledge-economy workers. It has many inbound commuters, as the employment-to-population ratio shows: that ratio, a proxy for the prevalence of commuters, is 0.87 in San Francisco, starkly higher than the national average of 0.48. And the city’s employers, many of which are in the technology industry, may have been more likely to be aware of and adopt remote work technology when the pandemic began. San Francisco’s urban structure also helps explain why the pandemic affected demand so strongly there. Home prices in San Francisco County are five times higher than the national average and almost twice as high as prices in the suburbs. Furthermore, San Francisco has limited mixed-use development: offices represent 30 percent or more of all real estate in nine of San Francisco’s 26 neighborhoods.

The pandemic has affected demand less strongly in Paris than in San Francisco. Paris’s business mix helps show why: unlike San Francisco, which is heavily dependent on tech firms and the knowledge economy, Paris is home to companies that are global leaders in a wide variety of industries, such as beauty, hospitality, and consumer retail. But the city’s urban structure has features that push residents away as well as those that pull them in. On the one hand, home prices are twice as high in Paris’s urban core as in its suburbs and four times higher than the national average. On the other hand, Paris has a great deal of mixed-use development.

Finally, consider Tokyo, where real estate demand has been affected less than in most cities we studied. Most of Tokyo’s workers are in wholesale and retail trade, in contrast with technology-dependent San Francisco. Like Paris, Japan has a culture that values being present in the office, in particular among employees of small and medium-size businesses; in our survey, respondents in Tokyo said that they expected to be required to be in the office 3.7 days per week, a response noticeably higher than Paris’s 3.3. Loyalty to employers is also common in Japan, as are lower rates of technology adoption than in San Francisco. Furthermore, online spending as a share of retail spending was lower in Japan than in any other country we studied; that may have contributed to higher office attendance and continued in-person retail shopping. And in Tokyo, home prices in the urban core are 2.1 times higher than the national average—a starkly smaller number than Paris’s 4.1 and San Francisco’s 5.0.

Thriving in hybrid places

Superstar cities are facing a new reality in which hybrid work worsens vacancy rates, threatens the vibrancy of neighborhoods, and thus makes urban cores less attractive to employers, employees, and residents. To adapt to that new reality, urban stakeholders could consider adopting more hybrid approaches themselves. At the neighborhood and building levels, and even in the design of the floors of buildings, choosing diversity, adaptability, and flexibility rather than homogeneity can help cities thrive.

At the neighborhood level, consider mixed-use development

One way cities could adapt is through mixed-use neighborhoods—that is, neighborhoods that are not dominated by a single type of real estate (especially offices) but instead incorporate a diverse mix of office, residential, and retail space. Such hybrid neighborhoods were becoming more popular even before the pandemic. And now that the pandemic has reduced demand for offices, cities have been left with vacant space that could be converted to other uses. Furthermore, our research shows that mixed-use neighborhoods have suffered less during the pandemic than office-dense neighborhoods have. That resilience gives investors, developers, and cities still more reason to engage in placemaking.

Redeveloping neighborhoods is an enormous undertaking, of course, so mobilizing the many stakeholders is important. Governments may be particularly helpful in reforming restrictive zoning policies. Investors would be needed to finance redevelopment. And developers would be the ones to turn mixed-use visions into realities.

Suburbs can benefit from hybridity as well. City dwellers, untethered from their daily commutes and thus less concerned about living far from urban cores, are increasingly seeking larger homes in greener areas. More housing and retail in the suburbs could help satisfy their preferences. More multifamily housing could be particularly beneficial because it would accommodate more people than single-family homes do. So long as the apartments are larger and more comfortable than apartments in urban cores, they could attract urbanites seeking space. Suburban policy makers could consider encouraging multifamily development by adjusting zoning, offering incentives to developers, and reexamining regulations that prevent housing from being built, such as those governing minimum dwelling sizes and window requirements.

Furthermore, multifamily housing is more energy-efficient than single-family homes, so it could help push down carbon emissions. And because it accommodates many people, it could help alleviate the shortage of housing that many metropolitan areas suffer from, making living in those areas more affordable.

At the building level, construct space that is adaptable and flexible

To adapt to declining demand for traditional office and retail space, developers could create hybrid buildings. The most ambitious vision is a universal, “neutral-use” building whose design, infrastructure, and technology could be easily modified to serve different uses. Imagine a medical building that could be easily converted into, say, a hotel or an apartment building if customers’ preferences changed. More modestly, buildings could be designed to accommodate different degrees of collaborative and individual work or different arrangements of open and closed offices. They could also include technology that promotes flexibility, such as sensors to track patterns of usage that could inform an employer’s approach to hybrid work.

Hybrid buildings would bring at least two advantages. One is that they would protect owners from shifts in preferences that are impossible to predict now. The second relates to a current trend toward shorter leases in the office sector. Because tenants will now be moving in and out more frequently, buildings might become more valuable if they grow more adaptable.

Developers could also try to convert offices into the kinds of space for which there is more demand, such as apartments, hotels, and schools. Conversions are very hard, however. Obstacles include rezoning, renegotiating existing lease commitments to allow for renovations, and dealing with physical limitations. Furthermore, in the cities we studied, even if all excess office space were converted into housing, the amount of residential space in each city would grow by less than 3 percent. 7 Excess office space means space projected to be vacant beyond what would result from the structural vacancy rate (defined as the average vacancy rate from 2014 to 2019). Still, for owners facing the prospect of lower occupancy and lower rents in their office buildings, the opportunity cost of conversion has fallen, and the number of successful conversions may grow.

Developers of retail space too could keep adaptability in mind. Of late, retail tenants have been evaluating their footprints with a stricter eye, shutting down stores or moving into smaller spaces. If developers built more adaptable spaces, they would be likelier to remain relevant to tenants’ shifting needs. Developers might also offer new store formats, such as spaces intended for delivery and fulfillment or for logistics rather than traditional retail. Or they might design buildings that are more integrated with their environments—for example, with dining spaces that extend onto sidewalks.

At the floor level, design space that is modular and multiuse

Tenants in urban cores—both the employers who rent office space and the merchants who rent retail space—may have to start “earning the commute” from office workers and shoppers who would otherwise visit less often. Here too, thinking flexibly and adaptably can help. For example, the office does not have to be just a place to work; it can also be a place where employees genuinely enjoy spending time or where they can take part in compelling events and activities. Office tenants might try to attract them by building magnetic, hospitality-oriented workplaces. Office tenants might also design more modular spaces that can adapt to changes in work patterns from week to week. And the most forward-thinking tenants will provide an efficient, digital way to organize hybrid work patterns and preferences.

Turning empty spaces into hybrid places could be a way to transform superstar cities and prepare them for a dynamic, prosperous future.

Retailers too may have to “earn the commute” by designing spaces that cater to many different uses. A prime example is stores that easily accommodate omnichannel retail—a single, seamless experience for customers, whether they shop online or in person. Similarly, stores can provide experiential retail. For example, one department store brand is launching smaller stores where customers can pick up products bought online, get clothes altered, find style advice, and patronize a beauty salon.

Indeed, it is not hard to imagine more “hybrid floors” in which offices, residences, and stores exist side by side. For floors—as for buildings and neighborhoods—turning empty spaces into hybrid places may not simply be a way to counter the damage wrought by the pandemic. It could be a way to transform superstar cities and prepare them for a dynamic, prosperous future.

Jan Mischke is a McKinsey Global Institute partner in Zurich; Ryan Luby is a senior knowledge expert and associate partner in New York; Brian Vickery is a partner in Boston; Lola Woetzel  is an MGI director and senior partner in Shanghai; Olivia White  is an MGI director and senior partner in San Francisco; Aditya Sanghvi  is a senior partner in New York; Jinnie Rhee is a consultant in San Francisco; Anna Fu is a consultant in New York; Rob Palter  is a senior partner in Toronto; André Dua  is a senior partner in Miami; and Sven Smit  is a senior partner in Amsterdam and MGI chairman.

This report was edited by Benjamin Plotinsky, an MGI senior editor in Washington, DC.

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2. What Americans say is causing a migration surge at the U.S.-Mexico border

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Americans see several factors as reasons why there are so many people seeking to migrate to the United States at the southwestern border.

Large bipartisan majorities point to economic factors as major reasons for the surge, with 75% of Americans saying bad economic conditions in migrants’ home countries are a major reason, and 71% saying the same about good economic opportunities in the U.S.

Smaller majorities also say violence in migrants’ home countries (65%), and migrants’ belief that U.S. policies allow for them to easily stay once they arrive (58%) are major factors. But there are wide partisan differences in views about the importance of these two factors.

Less than half of adults (44%) view greater political freedoms in the U.S. as a major reason for why people are seeking to migrate to the U.S.

Very few Americans say any of these factors is not a reason at all – fewer than two-in-ten say this about any of the five reasons asked about in the survey.

U.S. immigration policy

Roughly three-quarters of Republicans and GOP leaners (76%) point to a belief among migrants that U.S. immigration policies will make it easy to stay in the country as a major reason for the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. Of the five reasons asked about in this survey, this ranks highest among Republicans.

By contrast, a far smaller share of Democrats (39%) point to this as a major reason for the large number of migrants seeking to enter at the U.S.-Mexico border. It is the lowest-ranked item among Democrats.   

Still, an additional 39% of Democrats say this is a minor reason. Another 21% say it is not a reason (compared with just 7% of Republicans).

Violence in home countries

Nearly eight-in-ten Democrats (79%) say violence in migrants’ home countries is a major reason for the number of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. This is among the top reasons (alongside economic factors) Democrats see for the migration surge.

Republicans are far less likely to see this as a major factor for the surge in migrants, though about half (49%) say that it is.

Economic factors

Large majorities in both parties identify good economic opportunities in the U.S. and bad economic conditions in migrants’ home countries as major reasons for the migrant situation at the border.

Democrats are slightly more likely than Republicans to say each of these are major reasons.

Political freedoms

About four-in-ten Republicans (41%) and nearly half of Democrats (47%) view greater political freedoms in the U.S. as a major reason for why large numbers of people are seeking to migrate to the U.S. at the southwestern border. More than a third in both parties view this as a minor reason.

Conservative Republicans (81%) overwhelming say that migrants’ beliefs that U.S. policy will make it easy to stay in the country once they arrive is a major reason for the large number of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

A smaller – though still substantial – majority of moderate and liberal Republicans (67%) also see this as a major reason for the buildup of migrants.

But Democrats – particularly liberal Democrats – are not nearly as likely to see the belief that U.S. immigration policy is loose as a factor. Just 29% of liberal Democrats say it is a major reason why migrants are seeking to enter, while another 42% say it is a minor factor. Nearly three-in-ten (28%) say this is not a reason at all.

By comparison, more than eight-in-ten liberal Democrats point to violence in the countries migrants are coming from as a major reason for their migration.

About three-quarters of conservative and moderate Democrats (73%), and roughly six-in-ten moderate and liberal Republicans (58%) also view violence as a major factor behind why migrants are coming to the U.S.

But conservative Republicans are less likely to see this as a significant contributing factor: 44% say it is a major reason why migrants at the southwest border seek to enter the U.S., while another 42% say it is a minor reason.

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