content in research report

• Research Report
• Post last modified: 11 January 2022
• Reading time: 25 mins read
• Post category: Research Methodology

What is Research Report?

Research reporting is the oral or written presentation of the findings in such detail and form as to be readily understood and assessed by the society, economy or particularly by the researchers.

As earlier said that it is the final stage of the research process and its purpose is to convey to interested persons the whole result of the study. Report writing is common to both academic and managerial situations. In academics, a research report is prepared for comprehensive and application-oriented learning. In businesses or organisations, reports are used for the basis of decision making.

Table of Content

• 1 What is Research Report?
• 2 Research Report Definition
• 3.1 Preliminary Part
• 3.2 Introduction of the Report
• 3.3 Review of Literature
• 3.4 The Research Methodology
• 3.5 Results
• 3.6 Concluding Remarks
• 3.7 Bibliography
• 4 Significance of Report Writing
• 5 Qualities of Good Report
• 6.1 Analysis of the subject matter
• 6.2 Research outline
• 6.3 Preparation of rough draft
• 6.4 Rewriting and polishing
• 6.5 Writing the final draft
• 7 Precautions for Writing Research Reports
• 8.1.1 Technical Report
• 8.1.2 Popular Report
• 8.2.1 Written Report
• 8.2.2 Oral Report

Research Report Definition

According to C. A. Brown , “A report is a communication from someone who has information to someone who wants to use that information.”

According to Goode and Hatt , “The preparation of report is the final stage of research, and it’s purpose is to convey to the interested persons the whole result of the study, in sufficient detail and so arranged as to enable each reader to comprehend the data and to determine for himself the validity of the conclusions.”

It is clear from the above definitions of a research report, it is a brief account of the problem of investigation, the justification of its selection and the procedure of analysis and interpretation. It is only a summary of the entire research proceedings.

In other words, it can be defined as written documents, which presents information in a specialized and concise manner.

Contents of Research Report

Although no hard and fast rules can be laid down, the report must contain the following points.

• Acknowledgement
• Table of contents
• List of tables
• List of graphs
• Introduction
• Background of the research study
• Statement of the problem
• Brief outline of the chapters
• Books review
• Review of articles published in books, journals, periodicals, etc
• Review of articles published in leading newspapers
• Working papers / discusssion paper / study reports
• Articles on authorised websites
• A broad conclusion and indications for further research
• The theoretical framework (variables)
• Model / hypothesis
• Instruments for data collection
• Data collection
• Pilot study
• Processing of data
• Hypothesis / model testing
• Data analysis and interpretation
• Tables and figures
• Conclusions
• Shortcomings
• Suggestions to the problems
• Direction for further research

Preliminary Part

The preliminary part may have seven major components – cover, title, preface, acknowledgement, table of contents, list of tables, list of graphs. Long reports presented in book form have a cover made up of a card sheet. The cover contains title of the research report, the authority to whom the report is submitted, name of the author, etc.

The preface introduces the report to the readers. It gives a very brief introduction of the report. In the acknowledgements author mention names of persons and organisations that have extended co-operation and helped in the various stages of research. Table of contents is essential. It gives the title and page number of each chapter.

Introduction of the Report

The introduction of the research report should clearly and logically bring out the background of the problem addressed in the research. The purpose of the introduction is to introduce the research project to the readers. A clear statement of the problem with specific questions to be answered is presented in the introduction. It contains a brief outline of the chapters.

Review of Literature

The third section reviews the important literature related to the study. A comprehensive review of the research literature referred to must be made. Previous research studies and the important writings in the area under study should be reviewed. Review of literature is helpful to provide a background for the development of the present study.

The researcher may review concerned books, articles published in edited books, journals and periodicals. Researcher may also take review of articles published in leading newspapers. A researcher should study working papers/discussion papers/study reports. It is essential for a broad conclusion and indications for further research.

The Research Methodology

Research methodology is an integral part of the research. It should clearly indicate the universe and the selection of samples, techniques of data collection, analysis and interpretation, statistical techniques, etc.

Results contain pilot study, processing of data, hypothesis/model testing, data analysis and interpretation, tables and figures, etc. This is the heart of the research report. If a pilot study is planned to be used, it’s purpose should be given in the research methodology.

The collected data and the information should be edited, coded, tabulated and analysed with a view to arriving at a valid and authentic conclusion. Tables and figures are used to clarify the significant relationship. The results obtained through tables, graphs should be critically interpreted.

Concluding Remarks

The concluding remarks should discuss the results obtained in the earlier sections, as well as their usefulness and implications. It contains findings, conclusions, shortcomings, suggestions to the problem and direction for future research. Findings are statements of factual information based upon the data analysis.

Conclusions must clearly explain whether the hypothesis have been established and rejected. This part requires great expertise and preciseness. A report should also refer to the limitations of the applicability of the research inferences. It is essential to suggest the theoretical, practical and policy implications of the research. The suggestions should be supported by scientific and logical arguments. The future direction of research based on the work completed should also be outlined.

Bibliography

The bibliography is an alphabetic list of books, journal articles, reports, etc, published or unpublished, read, referred to, examined by the researcher in preparing the report. The bibliography should follow standard formats for books, journal articles, research reports.

The end of the research report may consist of appendices, listed in respect of all technical data. Appendices are for the purpose of providing detailed data or information that would be too cumbersome within the main body of the research report.

Significance of Report Writing

Report writing is an important communication medium in organisations. The most crucial findings might have come out through a research report. Report is common to academics and managers also. Reports are used for comprehensive and application oriented learning in academics. In organisations, reports are used for the basis of decision making. The importance of report writing can be discussed as under.

Through research reports, a manager or an executive can quickly get an idea of a current scenario which improves his information base for making sound decisions affecting future operations of the company or enterprise. The research report acts as a means of communication of various research findings to the interested parties, organisations and general public.

Good report writing play, a significant role of conveying unknown facts about the phenomenon to the concerned parties. This may provide new insights and new opportunities to the people. Research report plays a key role in making effective decisions in marketing, production, banking, materials, human resource development and government also. Good report writing is used for economic planning and optimum utilisation of resources for the development of a nation.

Report writing facilitates the validation of generalisation. A research report is an end product of research. As earlier said that report writing provides useful information in arriving at rational decisions that may reform the business and society. The findings, conclusions, suggestions and recommendations are useful to academicians, scholars and policymakers. Report writing provides reference material for further research in the same or similar areas of research to the concerned parties.

While preparing a research report, a researcher should take some proper precautions. Report writing should be simple, lucid and systematic. Report writing should be written speedily without interrupting the continuity of thought. The report writing should sustain the interest of readers.

Qualities of Good Report

Report writing is a highly skilled job. It is a process of analysing, understanding and consolidating the findings and projecting a meaningful view of the phenomenon studied. A good report writing is essential for effective communication.

Following are the essential qualities of good report:

• A research report is essentially a scientific documentation. It should have a suggestive title, headings and sub-headings, paragraphs arranged in a logical sequence.
• Good research report should include everything that is relevant and exclude everything that is irrelevant. It means that it should contain the facts rather than opinion.
• The language of the report should be simple and unambiguous. It means that it should be free from biases of the researchers derived from the past experience. Confusion, pretentiousness and pomposity should be carefully guarded against. It means that the language of the report should be simple, employing appropriate words, idioms and expressions.
• The report must be free from grammatical mistakes. It must be grammatically accurate. Faulty construction of sentences makes the meaning of the narrative obscure and ambiguous.
• The report has to take into consideration two facts. Firstly, for whom the report is meant and secondly, what is his level of knowledge. The report has to look to the subject matter of the report and the fact as to the level of knowledge of the person for whom it is meant. Because all reports are not meant for research scholars.

Steps in Writing Research Report

Report writing is a time consuming and expensive exercise. Therefore, reports have to be very sharply focused in purpose content and readership. There is no single universally acceptable method of writing a research report.

Following are the general steps in writing a research report:

Analysis of the subject matter

Research outline, preparation of rough draft, rewriting and polishing, writing the final draft.

This is the first and important step in writing a research report. It is concerned with the development of a subject. Subject matter should be written in a clear, logical and concise manner. The style adopted should be open, straightforward and dignified and folk style language should be avoided.

The data, the reliability and validity of the results of the statistical analysis should be in the form of tables, figures and equations. All redundancy in the data or results presented should be eliminated.

The research outline is an organisational framework prepared by the researcher well in advance. It is an aid to logical organisation of material and a reminder of the points to be stressed in the report. In the process of writing, if need be, outline may be revised accordingly.

Time and place of the study, scope and limitations of the study, study design, summary of pilot study, methods of data collection, analysis interpretation, etc., may be included in a research outline.

Having prepared the primary and secondary data, the researcher has to prepare a rough draft. While preparing the rough draft, the researcher should keep the objectives of the research in mind, and focus on one objective at a time. The researcher should make a checklist of the important points that are necessary to be covered in the manuscript. A researcher should use dictionary and relevant reference materials as and when required.

This is an important step in writing a research report. It takes more time than a rough draft. While rewriting and polishing, a researcher should check the report for weakness in logical development or presentation. He should take breaks in between rewriting and polishing since this gives the time to incubate the ideas.

The last and important step is writing the final draft. The language of the report should be simple, employing appropriate words and expressions and should avoid vague expressions such as ‘it seems’ and ‘there may be’ etc.

It should not used personal pronouns, such as I, We, My, Us, etc and should substitute these by such expressions as a researcher, investigator, etc. Before the final drafting of the report, it is advisable that the researcher should prepare a first draft for critical considerations and possible improvements. It will be helpful in writing the final draft. Finally, the report should be logically outlined with the future directions of the research based on the work completed.

Precautions for Writing Research Reports

A research report is a means of conveying the research study to a specific target audience. The following precautions should be taken while preparing a research report:

• Its hould belong enough to cover the subject and short enough to preserve interest.
• It should not be dull and complicated.
• It should be simple, without the usage of abstract terms and technical jargons.
• It should offer ready availability of findings with the help of charts, tables and graphs, as readers prefer quick knowledge of main findings.
• The layout of the report should be in accordance with the objectives of the research study.
• There should be no grammatical errors and writing should adhere to the techniques of report writing in case of quotations, footnotes and documentations.
• It should be original, intellectual and contribute to the solution of a problem or add knowledge to the concerned field.
• Appendices should been listed with respect to all the technical data in the report.
• It should be attractive, neat and clean, whether handwritten or typed.
• The report writer should refrain from confusing the possessive form of the word ‘it’ is with ‘it’s.’ The accurate possessive form of ‘it is’ is ‘its.’ The use of ‘it’s’ is the contractive form of ‘it is.
• A report should not have contractions. Examples are ‘didn’t’ or ‘it’s.’ In report writing, it is best to use the non-contractive form. Therefore, the examples would be replaced by ‘did not’ and ‘it is.’ Using ‘Figure’ instead of ‘Fig.’ and ‘Table’ instead of ‘Tab.’ will spare the reader of having to translate the abbreviations, while reading. If abbreviations are used, use them consistently throughout the report. For example, do not switch among ‘versus,’ and ‘vs’.
• It is advisable to avoid using the word ‘very’ and other such words that try to embellish a description. They do not add any extra meaning and, therefore, should be dropped.
• Repetition hampers lucidity. Report writers must avoid repeating the same word more than once within a sentence.
• When you use the word ‘this’ or ‘these’ make sure you indicate to what you are referring. This reduces the ambiguity in your writing and helps to tie sentences together.
• Do not use the word ‘they’ to refer to a singular person. You can either rewrite the sentence to avoid needing such a reference or use the singular ‘he or she.’

Types of Research Report

Research reports are designed in order to convey and record the information that will be of practical use to the reader. It is organized into distinct units of specific and highly visible information. The kind of audience addressed in the research report decides the type of report.

Research reports can be categorized on the following basis:

Classification on the Basis of Information

Classification on the basis of representation.

Following are the ways through which the results of the research report can be presented on the basis of information contained:

Technical Report

A technical report is written for other researchers. In writing the technical reports, the importance is mainly given to the methods that have been used to collect the information and data, the presumptions that are made and finally, the various presentation techniques that are used to present the findings and data.

Following are main features of a technical report:

• Summary: It covers a brief analysis of the findings of the research in a very few pages. 
• Nature: It contains the reasons for which the research is undertaken, the analysis and the data that is required in order to prepare a report. 
• Methods employed: It contains a description of the methods that were employed in order to collect the data. 
• Data: It covers a brief analysis of the various sources from which the data has been collected with their features and drawbacks 
• Analysis of data and presentation of the findings: It contains the various forms through which the data that has been analysed can be presented. 
• Conclusions: It contains a brief explanation of findings of the research. 
• Bibliography: It contains a detailed analysis of the various bibliographies that have been used in order to conduct a research. 
• Technical appendices: It contains the appendices for the technical matters and for questionnaires and mathematical derivations. 
• Index: The index of the technical report must be provided at the end of the report.

Popular Report

A popular report is formulated when there is a need to draw conclusions of the findings of the research report. One of the main points of consideration that should be kept in mind while formulating a research report is that it must be simple and attractive. It must be written in a very simple manner that is understandable to all. It must also be made attractive by using large prints, various sub-headings and by giving cartoons occasionally.

Following are the main points that must be kept in mind while preparing a popular report:

• Findings and their implications : While preparing a popular report, main importance is given to the findings of the information and the conclusions that can be drawn out of these findings.
• Recommendations for action : If there are any deviations in the report then recommendations are made for taking corrective action in order to rectify the errors.
• Objective of the study : In a popular report, the specific objective for which the research has been undertaken is presented.
• Methods employed : The report must contain the various methods that has been employed in order to conduct a research.
• Results : The results of the research findings must be presented in a suitable and appropriate manner by taking the help of charts and diagrams.
• Technical appendices : The report must contain an in-depth information used to collect the data in the form of appendices.

Following are the ways through which the results of the research report can be presented on the basis of representation:

• Writtenreport
• Oral report

Written Report

A written report plays a vital role in every business operation. The manner in which an organization writes business letters and business reports creates an impression of its standard. Therefore, the organization should emphasize on the improvement of the writing skills of the employees in order to maintain effective relations with their customers.

Writing effective written reports requires a lot of hard work. Therefore, before you begin writing, it is important to know the objective, i.e., the purpose of writing, collection and organization of required data.

Oral Report

At times, oral presentation of the results that are drawn out of research is considered effective, particularly in cases where policy recommendations are to be made. This approach proves beneficial because it provides a medium of interaction between a listener and a speaker. This leads to a better understanding of the findings and their implications.

However, the main drawback of oral presentation is the lack of any permanent records related to the research. Oral presentation of the report is also effective when it is supported with various visual devices, such as slides, wall charts and whiteboards that help in better understanding of the research reports.

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How to do a content analysis

What is content analysis?

Why would you use a content analysis, types of content analysis, conceptual content analysis, relational content analysis, reliability and validity, reliability, the advantages and disadvantages of content analysis, a step-by-step guide to conducting a content analysis, step 1: develop your research questions, step 2: choose the content you’ll analyze, step 3: identify your biases, step 4: define the units and categories of coding, step 5: develop a coding scheme, step 6: code the content, step 7: analyze the results, frequently asked questions about content analysis, related articles.

In research, content analysis is the process of analyzing content and its features with the aim of identifying patterns and the presence of words, themes, and concepts within the content. Simply put, content analysis is a research method that aims to present the trends, patterns, concepts, and ideas in content as objective, quantitative or qualitative data , depending on the specific use case.

As such, some of the objectives of content analysis include:

• Simplifying complex, unstructured content.
• Identifying trends, patterns, and relationships in the content.
• Determining the characteristics of the content.
• Identifying the intentions of individuals through the analysis of the content.
• Identifying the implied aspects in the content.

Typically, when doing a content analysis, you’ll gather data not only from written text sources like newspapers, books, journals, and magazines but also from a variety of other oral and visual sources of content like:

• Voice recordings, speeches, and interviews.
• Web content, blogs, and social media content.
• Films, videos, and photographs.

One of content analysis’s distinguishing features is that you'll be able to gather data for research without physically gathering data from participants. In other words, when doing a content analysis, you don't need to interact with people directly.

The process of doing a content analysis usually involves categorizing or coding concepts, words, and themes within the content and analyzing the results. We’ll look at the process in more detail below.

Typically, you’ll use content analysis when you want to:

• Identify the intentions, communication trends, or communication patterns of an individual, a group of people, or even an institution.
• Analyze and describe the behavioral and attitudinal responses of individuals to communications.
• Determine the emotional or psychological state of an individual or a group of people.
• Analyze the international differences in communication content.
• Analyzing audience responses to content.

Keep in mind, though, that these are just some examples of use cases where a content analysis might be appropriate and there are many others.

The key thing to remember is that content analysis will help you quantify the occurrence of specific words, phrases, themes, and concepts in content. Moreover, it can also be used when you want to make qualitative inferences out of the data by analyzing the semantic meanings and interrelationships between words, themes, and concepts.

In general, there are two types of content analysis: conceptual and relational analysis . Although these two types follow largely similar processes, their outcomes differ. As such, each of these types can provide different results, interpretations, and conclusions. With that in mind, let’s now look at these two types of content analysis in more detail.

With conceptual analysis, you’ll determine the existence of certain concepts within the content and identify their frequency. In other words, conceptual analysis involves the number of times a specific concept appears in the content.

Conceptual analysis is typically focused on explicit data, which means you’ll focus your analysis on a specific concept to identify its presence in the content and determine its frequency.

However, when conducting a content analysis, you can also use implicit data. This approach is more involved, complicated, and requires the use of a dictionary, contextual translation rules, or a combination of both.

No matter what type you use, conceptual analysis brings an element of quantitive analysis into a qualitative approach to research.

Relational content analysis takes conceptual analysis a step further. So, while the process starts in the same way by identifying concepts in content, it doesn’t focus on finding the frequency of these concepts, but rather on the relationships between the concepts, the context in which they appear in the content, and their interrelationships.

Before starting with a relational analysis, you’ll first need to decide on which subcategory of relational analysis you’ll use:

• Affect extraction: With this relational content analysis approach, you’ll evaluate concepts based on their emotional attributes. You’ll typically assess these emotions on a rating scale with higher values assigned to positive emotions and lower values to negative ones. In turn, this allows you to capture the emotions of the writer or speaker at the time the content is created. The main difficulty with this approach is that emotions can differ over time and across populations.
• Proximity analysis: With this approach, you’ll identify concepts as in conceptual analysis, but you’ll evaluate the way in which they occur together in the content. In other words, proximity analysis allows you to analyze the relationship between concepts and derive a concept matrix from which you’ll be able to develop meaning. Proximity analysis is typically used when you want to extract facts from the content rather than contextual, emotional, or cultural factors.
• Cognitive mapping: Finally, cognitive mapping can be used with affect extraction or proximity analysis. It’s a visualization technique that allows you to create a model that represents the overall meaning of content and presents it as a graphic map of the relationships between concepts. As such, it’s also commonly used when analyzing the changes in meanings, definitions, and terms over time.

Now that we’ve seen what content analysis is and looked at the different types of content analysis, it’s important to understand how reliable it is as a research method . We’ll also look at what criteria impact the validity of a content analysis.

There are three criteria that determine the reliability of a content analysis:

• Stability . Stability refers to the tendency of coders to consistently categorize or code the same data in the same way over time.
• Reproducibility . This criterion refers to the tendency of coders to classify categories membership in the same way.
• Accuracy . Accuracy refers to the extent to which the classification of content corresponds to a specific standard.

Keep in mind, though, that because you’ll need to code or categorize the concepts you’ll aim to identify and analyze manually, you’ll never be able to eliminate human error. However, you’ll be able to minimize it.

In turn, three criteria determine the validity of a content analysis:

• Closeness of categories . This is achieved by using multiple classifiers to get an agreed-upon definition for a specific category by using either implicit variables or synonyms. In this way, the category can be broadened to include more relevant data.
• Conclusions . Here, it’s crucial to decide what level of implication will be allowable. In other words, it’s important to consider whether the conclusions are valid based on the data or whether they can be explained using some other phenomena.
• Generalizability of the results of the analysis to a theory . Generalizability comes down to how you determine your categories as mentioned above and how reliable those categories are. In turn, this relies on how accurately the categories are at measuring the concepts or ideas that you’re looking to measure.

Considering everything mentioned above, there are definite advantages and disadvantages when it comes to content analysis:

Let’s now look at the steps you’ll need to follow when doing a content analysis.

The first step will always be to formulate your research questions. This is simply because, without clear and defined research questions, you won’t know what question to answer and, by implication, won’t be able to code your concepts.

Based on your research questions, you’ll then need to decide what content you’ll analyze. Here, you’ll use three factors to find the right content:

• The type of content . Here you’ll need to consider the various types of content you’ll use and their medium like, for example, blog posts, social media, newspapers, or online articles.
• What criteria you’ll use for inclusion . Here you’ll decide what criteria you’ll use to include content. This can, for instance, be the mentioning of a certain event or advertising a specific product.
• Your parameters . Here, you’ll decide what content you’ll include based on specified parameters in terms of date and location.

The next step is to consider your own pre-conception of the questions and identify your biases. This process is referred to as bracketing and allows you to be aware of your biases before you start your research with the result that they’ll be less likely to influence the analysis.

Your next step would be to define the units of meaning that you’ll code. This will, for example, be the number of times a concept appears in the content or the treatment of concept, words, or themes in the content. You’ll then need to define the set of categories you’ll use for coding which can be either objective or more conceptual.

Based on the above, you’ll then organize the units of meaning into your defined categories. Apart from this, your coding scheme will also determine how you’ll analyze the data.

The next step is to code the content. During this process, you’ll work through the content and record the data according to your coding scheme. It’s also here where conceptual and relational analysis starts to deviate in relation to the process you’ll need to follow.

As mentioned earlier, conceptual analysis aims to identify the number of times a specific concept, idea, word, or phrase appears in the content. So, here, you’ll need to decide what level of analysis you’ll implement.

In contrast, with relational analysis, you’ll need to decide what type of relational analysis you’ll use. So, you’ll need to determine whether you’ll use affect extraction, proximity analysis, cognitive mapping, or a combination of these approaches.

Once you’ve coded the data, you’ll be able to analyze it and draw conclusions from the data based on your research questions.

Content analysis offers an inexpensive and flexible way to identify trends and patterns in communication content. In addition, it’s unobtrusive which eliminates many ethical concerns and inaccuracies in research data. However, to be most effective, a content analysis must be planned and used carefully in order to ensure reliability and validity.

The two general types of content analysis: conceptual and relational analysis . Although these two types follow largely similar processes, their outcomes differ. As such, each of these types can provide different results, interpretations, and conclusions.

In qualitative research coding means categorizing concepts, words, and themes within your content to create a basis for analyzing the results. While coding, you work through the content and record the data according to your coding scheme.

Content analysis is the process of analyzing content and its features with the aim of identifying patterns and the presence of words, themes, and concepts within the content. The goal of a content analysis is to present the trends, patterns, concepts, and ideas in content as objective, quantitative or qualitative data, depending on the specific use case.

Content analysis is a qualitative method of data analysis and can be used in many different fields. It is particularly popular in the social sciences.

It is possible to do qualitative analysis without coding, but content analysis as a method of qualitative analysis requires coding or categorizing data to then analyze it according to your coding scheme in the next step.

What Is Qualitative Content Analysis?

Qca explained simply (with examples).

By: Jenna Crosley (PhD). Reviewed by: Dr Eunice Rautenbach (DTech) | February 2021

If you’re in the process of preparing for your dissertation, thesis or research project, you’ve probably encountered the term “ qualitative content analysis ” – it’s quite a mouthful. If you’ve landed on this post, you’re probably a bit confused about it. Well, the good news is that you’ve come to the right place…

Overview: Qualitative Content Analysis

• What (exactly) is qualitative content analysis
• The two main types of content analysis
• When to use content analysis
• How to conduct content analysis (the process)
• The advantages and disadvantages of content analysis

1. What is content analysis?

Content analysis is a  qualitative analysis method  that focuses on recorded human artefacts such as manuscripts, voice recordings and journals. Content analysis investigates these written, spoken and visual artefacts without explicitly extracting data from participants – this is called  unobtrusive  research.

In other words, with content analysis, you don’t necessarily need to interact with participants (although you can if necessary); you can simply analyse the data that they have already produced. With this type of analysis, you can analyse data such as text messages, books, Facebook posts, videos, and audio (just to mention a few).

The basics – explicit and implicit content

When working with content analysis, explicit and implicit content will play a role. Explicit data is transparent and easy to identify, while implicit data is that which requires some form of interpretation and is often of a subjective nature. Sounds a bit fluffy? Here’s an example:

Joe: Hi there, what can I help you with? 

Lauren: I recently adopted a puppy and I’m worried that I’m not feeding him the right food. Could you please advise me on what I should be feeding? 

Joe: Sure, just follow me and I’ll show you. Do you have any other pets?

Lauren: Only one, and it tweets a lot!

In this exchange, the explicit data indicates that Joe is helping Lauren to find the right puppy food. Lauren asks Joe whether she has any pets aside from her puppy. This data is explicit because it requires no interpretation.

On the other hand, implicit data , in this case, includes the fact that the speakers are in a pet store. This information is not clearly stated but can be inferred from the conversation, where Joe is helping Lauren to choose pet food. An additional piece of implicit data is that Lauren likely has some type of bird as a pet. This can be inferred from the way that Lauren states that her pet “tweets”.

As you can see, explicit and implicit data both play a role in human interaction  and are an important part of your analysis. However, it’s important to differentiate between these two types of data when you’re undertaking content analysis. Interpreting implicit data can be rather subjective as conclusions are based on the researcher’s interpretation. This can introduce an element of bias , which risks skewing your results.

2. The two types of content analysis

Now that you understand the difference between implicit and explicit data, let’s move on to the two general types of content analysis : conceptual and relational content analysis. Importantly, while conceptual and relational content analysis both follow similar steps initially, the aims and outcomes of each are different.

Conceptual analysis focuses on the number of times a concept occurs in a set of data and is generally focused on explicit data. For example, if you were to have the following conversation:

Marie: She told me that she has three cats.

Jean: What are her cats’ names?

Marie: I think the first one is Bella, the second one is Mia, and… I can’t remember the third cat’s name.

In this data, you can see that the word “cat” has been used three times. Through conceptual content analysis, you can deduce that cats are the central topic of the conversation. You can also perform a frequency analysis , where you assess the term’s frequency in the data. For example, in the exchange above, the word “cat” makes up 9% of the data. In other words, conceptual analysis brings a little bit of quantitative analysis into your qualitative analysis.

As you can see, the above data is without interpretation and focuses on explicit data . Relational content analysis, on the other hand, takes a more holistic view by focusing more on implicit data in terms of context, surrounding words and relationships.

There are three types of relational analysis:

• Affect extraction
• Proximity analysis
• Cognitive mapping

Affect extraction is when you assess concepts according to emotional attributes. These emotions are typically mapped on scales, such as a Likert scale or a rating scale ranging from 1 to 5, where 1 is “very sad” and 5 is “very happy”.

If participants are talking about their achievements, they are likely to be given a score of 4 or 5, depending on how good they feel about it. If a participant is describing a traumatic event, they are likely to have a much lower score, either 1 or 2.

Proximity analysis identifies explicit terms (such as those found in a conceptual analysis) and the patterns in terms of how they co-occur in a text. In other words, proximity analysis investigates the relationship between terms and aims to group these to extract themes and develop meaning.

Proximity analysis is typically utilised when you’re looking for hard facts rather than emotional, cultural, or contextual factors. For example, if you were to analyse a political speech, you may want to focus only on what has been said, rather than implications or hidden meanings. To do this, you would make use of explicit data, discounting any underlying meanings and implications of the speech.

Lastly, there’s cognitive mapping, which can be used in addition to, or along with, proximity analysis. Cognitive mapping involves taking different texts and comparing them in a visual format – i.e. a cognitive map. Typically, you’d use cognitive mapping in studies that assess changes in terms, definitions, and meanings over time. It can also serve as a way to visualise affect extraction or proximity analysis and is often presented in a form such as a graphic map.

To recap on the essentials, content analysis is a qualitative analysis method that focuses on recorded human artefacts . It involves both conceptual analysis (which is more numbers-based) and relational analysis (which focuses on the relationships between concepts and how they’re connected).

Need a helping hand?

3. When should you use content analysis?

Content analysis is a useful tool that provides insight into trends of communication . For example, you could use a discussion forum as the basis of your analysis and look at the types of things the members talk about as well as how they use language to express themselves. Content analysis is flexible in that it can be applied to the individual, group, and institutional level.

Content analysis is typically used in studies where the aim is to better understand factors such as behaviours, attitudes, values, emotions, and opinions . For example, you could use content analysis to investigate an issue in society, such as miscommunication between cultures. In this example, you could compare patterns of communication in participants from different cultures, which will allow you to create strategies for avoiding misunderstandings in intercultural interactions.

Another example could include conducting content analysis on a publication such as a book. Here you could gather data on the themes, topics, language use and opinions reflected in the text to draw conclusions regarding the political (such as conservative or liberal) leanings of the publication.

4. How to conduct a qualitative content analysis

Conceptual and relational content analysis differ in terms of their exact process ; however, there are some similarities. Let’s have a look at these first – i.e., the generic process:

• Recap on your research questions
• Undertake bracketing to identify biases
• Operationalise your variables and develop a coding scheme
• Code the data and undertake your analysis

Step 1 – Recap on your research questions

It’s always useful to begin a project with research questions , or at least with an idea of what you are looking for. In fact, if you’ve spent time reading this blog, you’ll know that it’s useful to recap on your research questions, aims and objectives when undertaking pretty much any research activity. In the context of content analysis, it’s difficult to know what needs to be coded and what doesn’t, without a clear view of the research questions.

For example, if you were to code a conversation focused on basic issues of social justice, you may be met with a wide range of topics that may be irrelevant to your research. However, if you approach this data set with the specific intent of investigating opinions on gender issues, you will be able to focus on this topic alone, which would allow you to code only what you need to investigate.

Step 2 – Reflect on your personal perspectives and biases

It’s vital that you reflect on your own pre-conception of the topic at hand and identify the biases that you might drag into your content analysis – this is called “ bracketing “. By identifying this upfront, you’ll be more aware of them and less likely to have them subconsciously influence your analysis.

For example, if you were to investigate how a community converses about unequal access to healthcare, it is important to assess your views to ensure that you don’t project these onto your understanding of the opinions put forth by the community. If you have access to medical aid, for instance, you should not allow this to interfere with your examination of unequal access.

Step 3 – Operationalise your variables and develop a coding scheme

Next, you need to operationalise your variables . But what does that mean? Simply put, it means that you have to define each variable or construct . Give every item a clear definition – what does it mean (include) and what does it not mean (exclude). For example, if you were to investigate children’s views on healthy foods, you would first need to define what age group/range you’re looking at, and then also define what you mean by “healthy foods”.

In combination with the above, it is important to create a coding scheme , which will consist of information about your variables (how you defined each variable), as well as a process for analysing the data. For this, you would refer back to how you operationalised/defined your variables so that you know how to code your data.

For example, when coding, when should you code a food as “healthy”? What makes a food choice healthy? Is it the absence of sugar or saturated fat? Is it the presence of fibre and protein? It’s very important to have clearly defined variables to achieve consistent coding – without this, your analysis will get very muddy, very quickly.

Step 4 – Code and analyse the data

The next step is to code the data. At this stage, there are some differences between conceptual and relational analysis.

As described earlier in this post, conceptual analysis looks at the existence and frequency of concepts, whereas a relational analysis looks at the relationships between concepts. For both types of analyses, it is important to pre-select a concept that you wish to assess in your data. Using the example of studying children’s views on healthy food, you could pre-select the concept of “healthy food” and assess the number of times the concept pops up in your data.

Here is where conceptual and relational analysis start to differ.

At this stage of conceptual analysis , it is necessary to decide on the level of analysis you’ll perform on your data, and whether this will exist on the word, phrase, sentence, or thematic level. For example, will you code the phrase “healthy food” on its own? Will you code each term relating to healthy food (e.g., broccoli, peaches, bananas, etc.) with the code “healthy food” or will these be coded individually? It is very important to establish this from the get-go to avoid inconsistencies that could result in you having to code your data all over again.

On the other hand, relational analysis looks at the type of analysis. So, will you use affect extraction? Proximity analysis? Cognitive mapping? A mix? It’s vital to determine the type of analysis before you begin to code your data so that you can maintain the reliability and validity of your research .

How to conduct conceptual analysis

First, let’s have a look at the process for conceptual analysis.

Once you’ve decided on your level of analysis, you need to establish how you will code your concepts, and how many of these you want to code. Here you can choose whether you want to code in a deductive or inductive manner. Just to recap, deductive coding is when you begin the coding process with a set of pre-determined codes, whereas inductive coding entails the codes emerging as you progress with the coding process. Here it is also important to decide what should be included and excluded from your analysis, and also what levels of implication you wish to include in your codes.

For example, if you have the concept of “tall”, can you include “up in the clouds”, derived from the sentence, “the giraffe’s head is up in the clouds” in the code, or should it be a separate code? In addition to this, you need to know what levels of words may be included in your codes or not. For example, if you say, “the panda is cute” and “look at the panda’s cuteness”, can “cute” and “cuteness” be included under the same code?

Once you’ve considered the above, it’s time to code the text . We’ve already published a detailed post about coding , so we won’t go into that process here. Once you’re done coding, you can move on to analysing your results. This is where you will aim to find generalisations in your data, and thus draw your conclusions .

How to conduct relational analysis

Now let’s return to relational analysis.

As mentioned, you want to look at the relationships between concepts . To do this, you’ll need to create categories by reducing your data (in other words, grouping similar concepts together) and then also code for words and/or patterns. These are both done with the aim of discovering whether these words exist, and if they do, what they mean.

Your next step is to assess your data and to code the relationships between your terms and meanings, so that you can move on to your final step, which is to sum up and analyse the data.

To recap, it’s important to start your analysis process by reviewing your research questions and identifying your biases . From there, you need to operationalise your variables, code your data and then analyse it.

5. What are the pros & cons of content analysis?

One of the main advantages of content analysis is that it allows you to use a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods, which results in a more scientifically rigorous analysis.

For example, with conceptual analysis, you can count the number of times that a term or a code appears in a dataset, which can be assessed from a quantitative standpoint. In addition to this, you can then use a qualitative approach to investigate the underlying meanings of these and relationships between them.

Content analysis is also unobtrusive and therefore poses fewer ethical issues than some other analysis methods. As the content you’ll analyse oftentimes already exists, you’ll analyse what has been produced previously, and so you won’t have to collect data directly from participants. When coded correctly, data is analysed in a very systematic and transparent manner, which means that issues of replicability (how possible it is to recreate research under the same conditions) are reduced greatly.

On the downside , qualitative research (in general, not just content analysis) is often critiqued for being too subjective and for not being scientifically rigorous enough. This is where reliability (how replicable a study is by other researchers) and validity (how suitable the research design is for the topic being investigated) come into play – if you take these into account, you’ll be on your way to achieving sound research results.

Recap: Qualitative content analysis

In this post, we’ve covered a lot of ground – click on any of the sections to recap:

If you have any questions about qualitative content analysis, feel free to leave a comment below. If you’d like 1-on-1 help with your qualitative content analysis, be sure to book an initial consultation with one of our friendly Research Coaches.

Psst... there’s more!

This post was based on one of our popular Research Bootcamps . If you're working on a research project, you'll definitely want to check this out ...

19 Comments

If I am having three pre-decided attributes for my research based on which a set of semi-structured questions where asked then should I conduct a conceptual content analysis or relational content analysis. please note that all three attributes are different like Agility, Resilience and AI.

Thank you very much. I really enjoyed every word.

please send me one/ two sample of content analysis

send me to any sample of qualitative content analysis as soon as possible

Many thanks for the brilliant explanation. Do you have a sample practical study of a foreign policy using content analysis?

1) It will be very much useful if a small but complete content analysis can be sent, from research question to coding and analysis. 2) Is there any software by which qualitative content analysis can be done?

Common software for qualitative analysis is nVivo, and quantitative analysis is IBM SPSS

Thank you. Can I have at least 2 copies of a sample analysis study as my reference?

Could you please send me some sample of textbook content analysis?

Can I send you my research topic, aims, objectives and questions to give me feedback on them?

please could you send me samples of content analysis?

Yes please send

really we enjoyed your knowledge thanks allot. from Ethiopia

can you please share some samples of content analysis(relational)? I am a bit confused about processing the analysis part

Is it possible for you to list the journal articles and books or other sources you used to write this article? Thank you.

can you please send some samples of content analysis ?

can you kindly send some good examples done by using content analysis ?

This was very useful. can you please send me sample for qualitative content analysis. thank you

What a brilliant explanation! Kindly help with textbooks or blogs on the context analysis method such as discourse, thematic and semiotic analysis.

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• Research Report: Definition, Types + [Writing Guide]

One of the reasons for carrying out research is to add to the existing body of knowledge. Therefore, when conducting research, you need to document your processes and findings in a research report. 

With a research report, it is easy to outline the findings of your systematic investigation and any gaps needing further inquiry. Knowing how to create a detailed research report will prove useful when you need to conduct research.  

What is a Research Report?

A research report is a well-crafted document that outlines the processes, data, and findings of a systematic investigation. It is an important document that serves as a first-hand account of the research process, and it is typically considered an objective and accurate source of information.

In many ways, a research report can be considered as a summary of the research process that clearly highlights findings, recommendations, and other important details. Reading a well-written research report should provide you with all the information you need about the core areas of the research process.

Features of a Research Report 

So how do you recognize a research report when you see one? Here are some of the basic features that define a research report. 

• It is a detailed presentation of research processes and findings, and it usually includes tables and graphs. 
• It is written in a formal language.
• A research report is usually written in the third person.
• It is informative and based on first-hand verifiable information.
• It is formally structured with headings, sections, and bullet points.
• It always includes recommendations for future actions. 

Types of Research Report 

The research report is classified based on two things; nature of research and target audience.

Nature of Research

• Qualitative Research Report

This is the type of report written for qualitative research . It outlines the methods, processes, and findings of a qualitative method of systematic investigation. In educational research, a qualitative research report provides an opportunity for one to apply his or her knowledge and develop skills in planning and executing qualitative research projects.

A qualitative research report is usually descriptive in nature. Hence, in addition to presenting details of the research process, you must also create a descriptive narrative of the information.

• Quantitative Research Report

A quantitative research report is a type of research report that is written for quantitative research. Quantitative research is a type of systematic investigation that pays attention to numerical or statistical values in a bid to find answers to research questions. 

In this type of research report, the researcher presents quantitative data to support the research process and findings. Unlike a qualitative research report that is mainly descriptive, a quantitative research report works with numbers; that is, it is numerical in nature. 

Target Audience

Also, a research report can be said to be technical or popular based on the target audience. If you’re dealing with a general audience, you would need to present a popular research report, and if you’re dealing with a specialized audience, you would submit a technical report. 

• Technical Research Report

A technical research report is a detailed document that you present after carrying out industry-based research. This report is highly specialized because it provides information for a technical audience; that is, individuals with above-average knowledge in the field of study. 

In a technical research report, the researcher is expected to provide specific information about the research process, including statistical analyses and sampling methods. Also, the use of language is highly specialized and filled with jargon. 

Examples of technical research reports include legal and medical research reports. 

• Popular Research Report

A popular research report is one for a general audience; that is, for individuals who do not necessarily have any knowledge in the field of study. A popular research report aims to make information accessible to everyone. 

It is written in very simple language, which makes it easy to understand the findings and recommendations. Examples of popular research reports are the information contained in newspapers and magazines. 

Importance of a Research Report 

• Knowledge Transfer: As already stated above, one of the reasons for carrying out research is to contribute to the existing body of knowledge, and this is made possible with a research report. A research report serves as a means to effectively communicate the findings of a systematic investigation to all and sundry.  
• Identification of Knowledge Gaps: With a research report, you’d be able to identify knowledge gaps for further inquiry. A research report shows what has been done while hinting at other areas needing systematic investigation. 
• In market research, a research report would help you understand the market needs and peculiarities at a glance. 
• A research report allows you to present information in a precise and concise manner. 
• It is time-efficient and practical because, in a research report, you do not have to spend time detailing the findings of your research work in person. You can easily send out the report via email and have stakeholders look at it. 

Guide to Writing a Research Report

A lot of detail goes into writing a research report, and getting familiar with the different requirements would help you create the ideal research report. A research report is usually broken down into multiple sections, which allows for a concise presentation of information.

Structure and Example of a Research Report

This is the title of your systematic investigation. Your title should be concise and point to the aims, objectives, and findings of a research report. 

• Table of Contents

This is like a compass that makes it easier for readers to navigate the research report.

An abstract is an overview that highlights all important aspects of the research including the research method, data collection process, and research findings. Think of an abstract as a summary of your research report that presents pertinent information in a concise manner. 

An abstract is always brief; typically 100-150 words and goes straight to the point. The focus of your research abstract should be the 5Ws and 1H format – What, Where, Why, When, Who and How. 

• Introduction

Here, the researcher highlights the aims and objectives of the systematic investigation as well as the problem which the systematic investigation sets out to solve. When writing the report introduction, it is also essential to indicate whether the purposes of the research were achieved or would require more work.

In the introduction section, the researcher specifies the research problem and also outlines the significance of the systematic investigation. Also, the researcher is expected to outline any jargons and terminologies that are contained in the research.  

• Literature Review

A literature review is a written survey of existing knowledge in the field of study. In other words, it is the section where you provide an overview and analysis of different research works that are relevant to your systematic investigation. 

It highlights existing research knowledge and areas needing further investigation, which your research has sought to fill. At this stage, you can also hint at your research hypothesis and its possible implications for the existing body of knowledge in your field of study. 

• An Account of Investigation

This is a detailed account of the research process, including the methodology, sample, and research subjects. Here, you are expected to provide in-depth information on the research process including the data collection and analysis procedures. 

In a quantitative research report, you’d need to provide information surveys, questionnaires and other quantitative data collection methods used in your research. In a qualitative research report, you are expected to describe the qualitative data collection methods used in your research including interviews and focus groups. 

In this section, you are expected to present the results of the systematic investigation. 

This section further explains the findings of the research, earlier outlined. Here, you are expected to present a justification for each outcome and show whether the results are in line with your hypotheses or if other research studies have come up with similar results.

• Conclusions

This is a summary of all the information in the report. It also outlines the significance of the entire study. 

• References and Appendices

This section contains a list of all the primary and secondary research sources. 

Tips for Writing a Research Report

• Define the Context for the Report

As is obtainable when writing an essay, defining the context for your research report would help you create a detailed yet concise document. This is why you need to create an outline before writing so that you do not miss out on anything. 

• Define your Audience

Writing with your audience in mind is essential as it determines the tone of the report. If you’re writing for a general audience, you would want to present the information in a simple and relatable manner. For a specialized audience, you would need to make use of technical and field-specific terms. 

• Include Significant Findings

The idea of a research report is to present some sort of abridged version of your systematic investigation. In your report, you should exclude irrelevant information while highlighting only important data and findings. 

• Include Illustrations

Your research report should include illustrations and other visual representations of your data. Graphs, pie charts, and relevant images lend additional credibility to your systematic investigation.

• Choose the Right Title

A good research report title is brief, precise, and contains keywords from your research. It should provide a clear idea of your systematic investigation so that readers can grasp the entire focus of your research from the title. 

• Proofread the Report

Before publishing the document, ensure that you give it a second look to authenticate the information. If you can, get someone else to go through the report, too, and you can also run it through proofreading and editing software. 

How to Gather Research Data for Your Report  

• Understand the Problem

Every research aims at solving a specific problem or set of problems, and this should be at the back of your mind when writing your research report. Understanding the problem would help you to filter the information you have and include only important data in your report. 

• Know what your report seeks to achieve

This is somewhat similar to the point above because, in some way, the aim of your research report is intertwined with the objectives of your systematic investigation. Identifying the primary purpose of writing a research report would help you to identify and present the required information accordingly. 

• Identify your audience

Knowing your target audience plays a crucial role in data collection for a research report. If your research report is specifically for an organization, you would want to present industry-specific information or show how the research findings are relevant to the work that the company does. 

• Create Surveys/Questionnaires

A survey is a research method that is used to gather data from a specific group of people through a set of questions. It can be either quantitative or qualitative. 

A survey is usually made up of structured questions, and it can be administered online or offline. However, an online survey is a more effective method of research data collection because it helps you save time and gather data with ease. 

You can seamlessly create an online questionnaire for your research on Formplus . With the multiple sharing options available in the builder, you would be able to administer your survey to respondents in little or no time. 

Formplus also has a report summary too l that you can use to create custom visual reports for your research.

Step-by-step guide on how to create an online questionnaire using Formplus  

• Sign into Formplus

In the Formplus builder, you can easily create different online questionnaires for your research by dragging and dropping preferred fields into your form. To access the Formplus builder, you will need to create an account on Formplus. 

Once you do this, sign in to your account and click on Create new form to begin. 

• Edit Form Title : Click on the field provided to input your form title, for example, “Research Questionnaire.”
• Edit Form : Click on the edit icon to edit the form.
• Add Fields : Drag and drop preferred form fields into your form in the Formplus builder inputs column. There are several field input options for questionnaires in the Formplus builder. 
• Edit fields
• Click on “Save”
• Form Customization: With the form customization options in the form builder, you can easily change the outlook of your form and make it more unique and personalized. Formplus allows you to change your form theme, add background images, and even change the font according to your needs. 
• Multiple Sharing Options: Formplus offers various form-sharing options, which enables you to share your questionnaire with respondents easily. You can use the direct social media sharing buttons to share your form link to your organization’s social media pages.  You can also send out your survey form as email invitations to your research subjects too. If you wish, you can share your form’s QR code or embed it on your organization’s website for easy access. 

Conclusion  

Always remember that a research report is just as important as the actual systematic investigation because it plays a vital role in communicating research findings to everyone else. This is why you must take care to create a concise document summarizing the process of conducting any research. 

In this article, we’ve outlined essential tips to help you create a research report. When writing your report, you should always have the audience at the back of your mind, as this would set the tone for the document. 

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Research Reports: Definition and How to Write Them

Reports are usually spread across a vast horizon of topics but are focused on communicating information about a particular topic and a niche target market. The primary motive of research reports is to convey integral details about a study for marketers to consider while designing new strategies.

Certain events, facts, and other information based on incidents need to be relayed to the people in charge, and creating research reports is the most effective communication tool. Ideal research reports are extremely accurate in the offered information with a clear objective and conclusion. These reports should have a clean and structured format to relay information effectively.

What are Research Reports?

Research reports are recorded data prepared by researchers or statisticians after analyzing the information gathered by conducting organized research, typically in the form of surveys or qualitative methods .

A research report is a reliable source to recount details about a conducted research. It is most often considered to be a true testimony of all the work done to garner specificities of research.

The various sections of a research report are:

• Background/Introduction
• Implemented Methods
• Results based on Analysis
• Deliberation

Learn more: Quantitative Research

Components of Research Reports

Research is imperative for launching a new product/service or a new feature. The markets today are extremely volatile and competitive due to new entrants every day who may or may not provide effective products. An organization needs to make the right decisions at the right time to be relevant in such a market with updated products that suffice customer demands.

The details of a research report may change with the purpose of research but the main components of a report will remain constant. The research approach of the market researcher also influences the style of writing reports. Here are seven main components of a productive research report:

• Research Report Summary: The entire objective along with the overview of research are to be included in a summary which is a couple of paragraphs in length. All the multiple components of the research are explained in brief under the report summary.  It should be interesting enough to capture all the key elements of the report.
• Research Introduction: There always is a primary goal that the researcher is trying to achieve through a report. In the introduction section, he/she can cover answers related to this goal and establish a thesis which will be included to strive and answer it in detail.  This section should answer an integral question: “What is the current situation of the goal?”.  After the research design was conducted, did the organization conclude the goal successfully or they are still a work in progress –  provide such details in the introduction part of the research report.
• Research Methodology: This is the most important section of the report where all the important information lies. The readers can gain data for the topic along with analyzing the quality of provided content and the research can also be approved by other market researchers . Thus, this section needs to be highly informative with each aspect of research discussed in detail.  Information needs to be expressed in chronological order according to its priority and importance. Researchers should include references in case they gained information from existing techniques.
• Research Results: A short description of the results along with calculations conducted to achieve the goal will form this section of results. Usually, the exposition after data analysis is carried out in the discussion part of the report.

Learn more: Quantitative Data

• Research Discussion: The results are discussed in extreme detail in this section along with a comparative analysis of reports that could probably exist in the same domain. Any abnormality uncovered during research will be deliberated in the discussion section.  While writing research reports, the researcher will have to connect the dots on how the results will be applicable in the real world.
• Research References and Conclusion: Conclude all the research findings along with mentioning each and every author, article or any content piece from where references were taken.

Learn more: Qualitative Observation

15 Tips for Writing Research Reports

Writing research reports in the manner can lead to all the efforts going down the drain. Here are 15 tips for writing impactful research reports:

• Prepare the context before starting to write and start from the basics:  This was always taught to us in school – be well-prepared before taking a plunge into new topics. The order of survey questions might not be the ideal or most effective order for writing research reports. The idea is to start with a broader topic and work towards a more specific one and focus on a conclusion or support, which a research should support with the facts.  The most difficult thing to do in reporting, without a doubt is to start. Start with the title, the introduction, then document the first discoveries and continue from that. Once the marketers have the information well documented, they can write a general conclusion.
• Keep the target audience in mind while selecting a format that is clear, logical and obvious to them:  Will the research reports be presented to decision makers or other researchers? What are the general perceptions around that topic? This requires more care and diligence. A researcher will need a significant amount of information to start writing the research report. Be consistent with the wording, the numbering of the annexes and so on. Follow the approved format of the company for the delivery of research reports and demonstrate the integrity of the project with the objectives of the company.
• Have a clear research objective: A researcher should read the entire proposal again, and make sure that the data they provide contributes to the objectives that were raised from the beginning. Remember that speculations are for conversations, not for research reports, if a researcher speculates, they directly question their own research.
• Establish a working model:  Each study must have an internal logic, which will have to be established in the report and in the evidence. The researchers’ worst nightmare is to be required to write research reports and realize that key questions were not included.

Learn more: Quantitative Observation

• Gather all the information about the research topic. Who are the competitors of our customers? Talk to other researchers who have studied the subject of research, know the language of the industry. Misuse of the terms can discourage the readers of research reports from reading further.
• Read aloud while writing. While reading the report, if the researcher hears something inappropriate, for example, if they stumble over the words when reading them, surely the reader will too. If the researcher can’t put an idea in a single sentence, then it is very long and they must change it so that the idea is clear to everyone.
• Check grammar and spelling. Without a doubt, good practices help to understand the report. Use verbs in the present tense. Consider using the present tense, which makes the results sound more immediate. Find new words and other ways of saying things. Have fun with the language whenever possible.
• Discuss only the discoveries that are significant. If some data are not really significant, do not mention them. Remember that not everything is truly important or essential within research reports.

Learn more: Qualitative Data

• Try and stick to the survey questions. For example, do not say that the people surveyed “were worried” about an research issue , when there are different degrees of concern.
• The graphs must be clear enough so that they understand themselves. Do not let graphs lead the reader to make mistakes: give them a title, include the indications, the size of the sample, and the correct wording of the question.
• Be clear with messages. A researcher should always write every section of the report with an accuracy of details and language.
• Be creative with titles – Particularly in segmentation studies choose names “that give life to research”. Such names can survive for a long time after the initial investigation.
• Create an effective conclusion: The conclusion in the research reports is the most difficult to write, but it is an incredible opportunity to excel. Make a precise summary. Sometimes it helps to start the conclusion with something specific, then it describes the most important part of the study, and finally, it provides the implications of the conclusions.
• Get a couple more pair of eyes to read the report. Writers have trouble detecting their own mistakes. But they are responsible for what is presented. Ensure it has been approved by colleagues or friends before sending the find draft out.

Learn more: Market Research and Analysis

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Research report guide: Definition, types, and tips

Last updated

5 March 2024

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From successful product launches or software releases to planning major business decisions, research reports serve many vital functions. They can summarize evidence and deliver insights and recommendations to save companies time and resources. They can reveal the most value-adding actions a company should take.

However, poorly constructed reports can have the opposite effect! Taking the time to learn established research-reporting rules and approaches will equip you with in-demand skills. You’ll be able to capture and communicate information applicable to numerous situations and industries, adding another string to your resume bow.

• What are research reports?

A research report is a collection of contextual data, gathered through organized research, that provides new insights into a particular challenge (which, for this article, is business-related). Research reports are a time-tested method for distilling large amounts of data into a narrow band of focus.

Their effectiveness often hinges on whether the report provides:

Strong, well-researched evidence

Comprehensive analysis

Well-considered conclusions and recommendations

Though the topic possibilities are endless, an effective research report keeps a laser-like focus on the specific questions or objectives the researcher believes are key to achieving success. Many research reports begin as research proposals, which usually include the need for a report to capture the findings of the study and recommend a course of action.

A description of the research method used, e.g., qualitative, quantitative, or other

Statistical analysis

Causal (or explanatory) research (i.e., research identifying relationships between two variables)

Inductive research, also known as ‘theory-building’

Deductive research, such as that used to test theories

Action research, where the research is actively used to drive change

• Importance of a research report

Research reports can unify and direct a company's focus toward the most appropriate strategic action. Of course, spending resources on a report takes up some of the company's human and financial resources. Choosing when a report is called for is a matter of judgment and experience.

Some development models used heavily in the engineering world, such as Waterfall development, are notorious for over-relying on research reports. With Waterfall development, there is a linear progression through each step of a project, and each stage is precisely documented and reported on before moving to the next.

The pace of the business world is faster than the speed at which your authors can produce and disseminate reports. So how do companies strike the right balance between creating and acting on research reports?

The answer lies, again, in the report's defined objectives. By paring down your most pressing interests and those of your stakeholders, your research and reporting skills will be the lenses that keep your company's priorities in constant focus.

Honing your company's primary objectives can save significant amounts of time and align research and reporting efforts with ever-greater precision.

Some examples of well-designed research objectives are:

Proving whether or not a product or service meets customer expectations

Demonstrating the value of a service, product, or business process to your stakeholders and investors

Improving business decision-making when faced with a lack of time or other constraints

Clarifying the relationship between a critical cause and effect for problematic business processes

Prioritizing the development of a backlog of products or product features

Comparing business or production strategies

Evaluating past decisions and predicting future outcomes

• Features of a research report

Research reports generally require a research design phase, where the report author(s) determine the most important elements the report must contain.

Just as there are various kinds of research, there are many types of reports.

Here are the standard elements of almost any research-reporting format:

Report summary. A broad but comprehensive overview of what readers will learn in the full report. Summaries are usually no more than one or two paragraphs and address all key elements of the report. Think of the key takeaways your primary stakeholders will want to know if they don’t have time to read the full document.

Introduction. Include a brief background of the topic, the type of research, and the research sample. Consider the primary goal of the report, who is most affected, and how far along the company is in meeting its objectives.

Methods. A description of how the researcher carried out data collection, analysis, and final interpretations of the data. Include the reasons for choosing a particular method. The methods section should strike a balance between clearly presenting the approach taken to gather data and discussing how it is designed to achieve the report's objectives.

Data analysis. This section contains interpretations that lead readers through the results relevant to the report's thesis. If there were unexpected results, include here a discussion on why that might be. Charts, calculations, statistics, and other supporting information also belong here (or, if lengthy, as an appendix). This should be the most detailed section of the research report, with references for further study. Present the information in a logical order, whether chronologically or in order of importance to the report's objectives.

Conclusion. This should be written with sound reasoning, often containing useful recommendations. The conclusion must be backed by a continuous thread of logic throughout the report.

• How to write a research paper

With a clear outline and robust pool of research, a research paper can start to write itself, but what's a good way to start a research report?

Research report examples are often the quickest way to gain inspiration for your report. Look for the types of research reports most relevant to your industry and consider which makes the most sense for your data and goals.

The research report outline will help you organize the elements of your report. One of the most time-tested report outlines is the IMRaD structure:

Introduction

...and Discussion

Pay close attention to the most well-established research reporting format in your industry, and consider your tone and language from your audience's perspective. Learn the key terms inside and out; incorrect jargon could easily harm the perceived authority of your research paper.

Along with a foundation in high-quality research and razor-sharp analysis, the most effective research reports will also demonstrate well-developed:

Internal logic

Narrative flow

Conclusions and recommendations

Readability, striking a balance between simple phrasing and technical insight

How to gather research data for your report

The validity of research data is critical. Because the research phase usually occurs well before the writing phase, you normally have plenty of time to vet your data.

However, research reports could involve ongoing research, where report authors (sometimes the researchers themselves) write portions of the report alongside ongoing research.

One such research-report example would be an R&D department that knows its primary stakeholders are eager to learn about a lengthy work in progress and any potentially important outcomes.

However you choose to manage the research and reporting, your data must meet robust quality standards before you can rely on it. Vet any research with the following questions in mind:

Does it use statistically valid analysis methods?

Do the researchers clearly explain their research, analysis, and sampling methods?

Did the researchers provide any caveats or advice on how to interpret their data?

Have you gathered the data yourself or were you in close contact with those who did?

Is the source biased?

Usually, flawed research methods become more apparent the further you get through a research report.

It's perfectly natural for good research to raise new questions, but the reader should have no uncertainty about what the data represents. There should be no doubt about matters such as:

Whether the sampling or analysis methods were based on sound and consistent logic

What the research samples are and where they came from

The accuracy of any statistical functions or equations

Validation of testing and measuring processes

When does a report require design validation?

A robust design validation process is often a gold standard in highly technical research reports. Design validation ensures the objects of a study are measured accurately, which lends more weight to your report and makes it valuable to more specialized industries.

Product development and engineering projects are the most common research-report examples that typically involve a design validation process. Depending on the scope and complexity of your research, you might face additional steps to validate your data and research procedures.

If you’re including design validation in the report (or report proposal), explain and justify your data-collection processes. Good design validation builds greater trust in a research report and lends more weight to its conclusions.

Choosing the right analysis method

Just as the quality of your report depends on properly validated research, a useful conclusion requires the most contextually relevant analysis method. This means comparing different statistical methods and choosing the one that makes the most sense for your research.

Most broadly, research analysis comes down to quantitative or qualitative methods (respectively: measurable by a number vs subjectively qualified values). There are also mixed research methods, which bridge the need for merging hard data with qualified assessments and still reach a cohesive set of conclusions.

Some of the most common analysis methods in research reports include:

Significance testing (aka hypothesis analysis), which compares test and control groups to determine how likely the data was the result of random chance.

Regression analysis , to establish relationships between variables, control for extraneous variables , and support correlation analysis.

Correlation analysis (aka bivariate testing), a method to identify and determine the strength of linear relationships between variables. It’s effective for detecting patterns from complex data, but care must be exercised to not confuse correlation with causation.

With any analysis method, it's important to justify which method you chose in the report. You should also provide estimates of the statistical accuracy (e.g., the p-value or confidence level of quantifiable data) of any data analysis.

This requires a commitment to the report's primary aim. For instance, this may be achieving a certain level of customer satisfaction by analyzing the cause and effect of changes to how service is delivered. Even better, use statistical analysis to calculate which change is most positively correlated with improved levels of customer satisfaction.

• Tips for writing research reports

There's endless good advice for writing effective research reports, and it almost all depends on the subjective aims of the people behind the report. Due to the wide variety of research reports, the best tips will be unique to each author's purpose.

Consider the following research report tips in any order, and take note of the ones most relevant to you:

No matter how in depth or detailed your report might be, provide a well-considered, succinct summary. At the very least, give your readers a quick and effective way to get up to speed.

Pare down your target audience (e.g., other researchers, employees, laypersons, etc.), and adjust your voice for their background knowledge and interest levels

For all but the most open-ended research, clarify your objectives, both for yourself and within the report.

Leverage your team members’ talents to fill in any knowledge gaps you might have. Your team is only as good as the sum of its parts.

Justify why your research proposal’s topic will endure long enough to derive value from the finished report.

Consolidate all research and analysis functions onto a single user-friendly platform. There's no reason to settle for less than developer-grade tools suitable for non-developers.

What's the format of a research report?

The research-reporting format is how the report is structured—a framework the authors use to organize their data, conclusions, arguments, and recommendations. The format heavily determines how the report's outline develops, because the format dictates the overall structure and order of information (based on the report's goals and research objectives).

What's the purpose of a research-report outline?

A good report outline gives form and substance to the report's objectives, presenting the results in a readable, engaging way. For any research-report format, the outline should create momentum along a chain of logic that builds up to a conclusion or interpretation.

What's the difference between a research essay and a research report?

There are several key differences between research reports and essays:

Research report:

Ordered into separate sections

More commercial in nature

Often includes infographics

Heavily descriptive

More self-referential

Usually provides recommendations

Research essay

Does not rely on research report formatting

More academically minded

Normally text-only

Less detailed

Omits discussion of methods

Usually non-prescriptive 

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• Creating an APA Style table of contents

How to Create an APA Table of Contents | Format & Examples

Published on November 5, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on January 17, 2024.

A table of contents is not required in an APA Style paper , but if you include one, follow these guidelines:

• Include all level 1 and level 2 headings (other levels are optional).
• Indicate different heading levels with indents. Adhere to general APA format in terms of font, spacing, etc.

You can automatically create the table of contents by applying APA heading styles in Word.

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Table of contents

Apa format guidelines for the table of contents, how to generate a table of contents in word.

In a thesis or dissertation , the table of contents comes between your abstract and your introduction . It should be written in the same font and size as the rest of your text (usually 12 pt Times New Roman). At the top of the page, write Contents , centered and in bold.

In APA Style, you can use up to five levels of heading , each with its own formatting style. In the table of contents, you should include all level 1 and 2 headings, left-aligned and formatted as plain text. Level 2 headings are indented.

Including lower-level headings in the table of contents is optional. Add an additional indent for each level. If you have a lot of headings in your text, you may not be able to include them all—your table of contents should not be more than two pages long in total.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

To automatically generate a table of contents in Word, you’ll first have to apply heading styles throughout your text. After that, you can generate the table of contents.

Applying heading styles

First, go through your text making sure that each level of heading is in keeping with APA Style rules.

Next, update the heading styles listed in the Home tab at the top:

• Highlight a level 1 heading
• Right-click the Heading 1 style and select Update Heading 1 to match selection
• Do the same for each level of heading

Once you’ve done this you can update any other headings quickly using the heading styles. Make sure all headings are in the appropriate style before proceeding.

Generating the table of contents

Now you can generate your table of contents. First write the title “Contents” (in the style of a level 1 heading). Then place your cursor two lines below this and go to the References tab.

Click on Table of Contents and select Custom Table of Contents… In the popup window, select how many levels of heading you wish to include (at least two) under Show levels , then click OK :

Updating your table of contents

Now you have a table of contents based on your current headings and page numbers. If you continue working on your text after this, be sure to go back and update your table of contents at the end, as headings and page numbers might change.

You can do this by right-clicking on the table of contents and selecting Update Field . Then you can choose whether to update all information or just the page numbers. It’s best to update everything, just to be sure.

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• Writing Tips

How to Structure the Table of Contents for a Research Paper

4-minute read

• 16th July 2023

So you’ve made it to the important step of writing the table of contents for your paper. Congratulations on making it this far! Whether you’re writing a research paper or a dissertation , the table of contents not only provides the reader with guidance on where to find the sections of your paper, but it also signals that a quality piece of research is to follow. Here, we will provide detailed instructions on how to structure the table of contents for your research paper.

Steps to Create a Table of Contents

• Insert the table of contents after the title page.

Within the structure of your research paper , you should place the table of contents after the title page but before the introduction or the beginning of the content. If your research paper includes an abstract or an acknowledgements section , place the table of contents after it.

• List all the paper’s sections and subsections in chronological order.

Depending on the complexity of your paper, this list will include chapters (first-level headings), chapter sections (second-level headings), and perhaps subsections (third-level headings). If you have a chapter outline , it will come in handy during this step. You should include the bibliography and all appendices in your table of contents. If you have more than a few charts and figures (more often the case in a dissertation than in a research paper), you should add them to a separate list of charts and figures that immediately follows the table of contents. (Check out our FAQs below for additional guidance on items that should not be in your table of contents.)

• Paginate each section.

Label each section and subsection with the page number it begins on. Be sure to do a check after you’ve made your final edits to ensure that you don’t need to update the page numbers.

• Format your table of contents.

The way you format your table of contents will depend on the style guide you use for the rest of your paper. For example, there are table of contents formatting guidelines for Turabian/Chicago and MLA styles, and although the APA recommends checking with your instructor for formatting instructions (always a good rule of thumb), you can also create a table of contents for a research paper that follows APA style .

• Add hyperlinks if you like.

Depending on the word processing software you’re using, you may also be able to hyperlink the sections of your table of contents for easier navigation through your paper. (Instructions for this feature are available for both Microsoft Word and Google Docs .)

To summarize, the following steps will help you create a clear and concise table of contents to guide readers through your research paper:

1. Insert the table of contents after the title page.

2. List all the sections and subsections in chronological order.

3. Paginate each section.

4. Format the table of contents according to your style guide.

5. Add optional hyperlinks.

If you’d like help formatting and proofreading your research paper , check out some of our services. You can even submit a sample for free . Best of luck writing your research paper table of contents!

What is a table of contents?

A table of contents is a listing of each section of a document in chronological order, accompanied by the page number where the section begins. A table of contents gives the reader an overview of the contents of a document, as well as providing guidance on where to find each section.

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What should I include in my table of contents?

If your paper contains any of the following sections, they should be included in your table of contents:

●  Chapters, chapter sections, and subsections

●  Introduction

●  Conclusion

●  Appendices

●  Bibliography

Although recommendations may differ among institutions, you generally should not include the following in your table of contents:

●  Title page

●  Abstract

●  Acknowledgements

●  Forward or preface

If you have several charts, figures, or tables, consider creating a separate list for them that will immediately follow the table of contents. Also, you don’t need to include the table of contents itself in your table of contents.

Is there more than one way to format a table of contents?

Yes! In addition to following any recommendations from your instructor or institution, you should follow the stipulations of your style guide .

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Home » Research Methodology » Contents and Layout of Research Report

Contents and Layout of Research Report

Contents of research report.

The researcher must keep in mind that his research report must contain following aspects:

• Purpose of study
• Significance of his study or statement of the problem
• Review of literature
• Methodology
• Interpretation of data
• Conclusions and suggestions
• Bibliography

These can be discussed in detail as under:

Research is one direction oriented study. He should discuss the problem of his study. He must give background of the problem. He must lay down his hypothesis of the study. Hypothesis is the statement indicating the nature of the problem. He should be able to collect data, analyze it and prove the hypothesis . The importance of the problem for the advancement of knowledge or removed of some evil may also be explained. He must use review of literature or the data from secondary source for explaining the statement of the problems.

(2) Significance of study:

(3) Review of Literature :

Research is a continuous process. He cannot avoid earlier research work. He must start with earlier work. He should note down all such research work, published in books, journals or unpublished thesis. He will get guidelines for his research from taking a review of literature . He should collect information in respect of earlier research work. He should enlist them in the given below:

• Author/researcher
• Title of research /Name of book
• Year of publication
• Objectives of his study
• Conclusion/suggestions

(4) Methodology:

It is related to collection of data. There are two sources for collecting data; primary and secondary. Primary data is original and collected in field work, either through questionnaire interviews. The secondary data relied on library work. Such primary data are collected by sampling method . The procedure for selecting the sample must be mentioned. The methodology must give various aspects of the problem that are studied for valid generalization about the phenomena. The scales of measurement must be explained along with different concepts used in the study.

(5) Interpretation of data :

Mainly the data collected from primary source need to be interpreted in systematic manner. The tabulation must be completed to draw conclusions. All the questions are not useful for report writing . One has to select them or club them according to hypothesis or objectives of study .

Data analysis forms the crux of the research problem . The information collected in field work is useful to draw conclusions of study. In relation with the objectives of study the analysis of data may lead the researcher to pin point his suggestions. This is the most important part of study. The conclusions must be based on logical and statistical reasoning. The report should contain not only the generalization of inference but also the basis on which the inferences are drawn. All sorts of proofs, numerical and logical, must be given in support of any theory that has been advanced. He should point out the limitations of his study.

(7) Bibliography:

(8) Appendices:

The general information in tabular form which is not directly used in the analysis of data but which is useful to understand the background of study can be given in appendix.

Layout of the Research Report

• Preliminary Page

(1) Preliminary Pages:

These must be title of the research topic and data. There must be preface of foreword to the research work. It should be followed by table of contents. The list of tables, maps should be given.

It provides the complete outline of research report along with all details. The title page is reported in the main text. Details of text are given continuously as divided in different chapters.

• (a) Introduction
• (b) Statement of the problem
• (c) The analysis of data
• (d) The implications drawn from the results
• (e) The summary

(a) Introduction :

The methodology should point out the method of study, the research design and method of data collection.

(b) Statement of the problem :

(c) Analysis of data :

Data so collected should be presented in systematic manner and with its help, conclusions can be drawn. This helps to test the hypothesis . Data analysis must be made to confirm the objectives of the study.

The results based on the analysis of data must be valid. This is the main body of research. It contains statistical summaries and analysis of data. There should be logical sequence in the analysis of data. The primary data may lead to establish the results. He must have separate chapter on conclusions and recommendations. The conclusions must be based on data analysis. The conclusions must be such which may lead to generalization and its applicability in similar circumstances. The conditions of research work limiting its scope for generalization must be made clear by the researcher.

(e) Summary :

(3) End Matter:

It covers relevant appendices covering general information, the concepts and bibliography. The index may also be added to the report.

Related posts:

• Writing the Research Report
• Preparing a Research Report
• Referencing a Research Report
• Steps Involved in Drafting a Research Report
• The Research Problem
• The Purpose of Research
• Significance of Research
• The Basic Types of Research
• Classification and Tabulation of Data in Research
• Documentary Sources of Information in Research

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Contents of the research report.

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After reading this article you will learn about the contents of a research report. It includes:- 1. Introduction 2. Method 3. Results of the Study 4. Discussion 5. Summary or Abstract 6. References 7. Appendix.

1. Introduction:

The research report should ordinarily start with a statement of the problem selected for investigation. The reporter should introduce the background and nature of the problem under investigation.

Although quite a few times the study might be posing a simple empirical question about human behaviour or might be directed toward a practical problem or some policy-issue, the researcher must place the question or the issue into a larger, theoretical or practical context. This helps the readers to appreciate why the problem is of a general significance and theoretic import.

If the enquiry was planned with a view to making some contribution to certain aspects of social theory, the reporter should summarise the theory or conceptual scheme within which the reporter/researcher is working. Regardless of the nature of the study, it is important that an intelligent but, may be, a non-professional person would be able to understand the nature of problem and appreciate its larger relevance.

The report should not contain a lot of jargon except when there is no feasible alternative to it, certain constraints warranting its use. The reader is not always prepared to intelligibly appreciate the problem of research, he is often not conversant with the relevant theoretic structure.

Hence, it is important that the general reader is gradually led up to the formal theoretic statement of the problem. Intelligible examples are necessary for illustrating theoretic ideas and the technical terms.

It is extremely desirable that a summary of the current state of knowledge in the area of investigation is presented, once the problem of the study is explained. The summary should comprise allusions to the previous researches conducted in the problem-area, and pertinent theories relating to the phenomena (if any).

A researcher must have familiarized himself with the previous work in the field before designing the study. Most of the literature search should have been done by the time the researcher is ready to write the report.

If the researcher was required to recast his study in a somewhat different framework than his initial problem would warrant, he would need to give references he had not previously consulted.

That is, he will be obliged to go back to the literature which in the light of the above shift has become relevant. Review of previous work should comprise only the pertinent findings and insights relating to the issue the researcher is dealing with.

If such a review article already exists, the researcher will do well to simply address his readers to the review article and present only the bare highlights in the report. Books and articles need to be cited with the author’s last name and year of publication.

Towards the end of the section on introduction, it is desirable that the researcher introduces his own study in a brief overview. This affords a smooth transition into the method section which follows the introductory section.

2. Method (Design of Study):

The readers of the report do like to know in detail how the research was carried out and what its basic design was like. Suppose the research involved experimentation, the readers would like to know the nature of experimental manipulation; the method and points at which measurements were taken and so on.

The readers also need to know, in case of the descriptive and exploratory studies, how the data were collected, the nature of questions asked, the strategies adopted by interviewers during the collection of data, the training they had and the recording procedure adopted for recording of responses.

The readers also need to know how the observations or replies to questions were translated into measures of the variables with which the enquiry was concerned, in the main, e.g., what questions were asked to estimate the degree of ‘commitment’ or alienation.

In regard to the sample covered by the study with a view to arriving at general conclusions about the population which the sample supposedly represents, the readers are expected to be told about the general character of the subjects, the number of them covered by the sample, mode of selection etc.

Information on these points is crucial for understanding the probable limits of generalizability of the findings, i.e., whether there is any justifiable basis for extending the sample findings to the population.

This information can betray the biases of the researcher in selecting the subjects for the study. Thus, the claim of the researcher as to generalizability of findings to population at large could be evaluated.

Although meaningful studies based on a small number of cases barely representing a specifiable population are possible, nevertheless, the number of characteristics of the respondent on which the findings are based must be plainly reported so that readers are enabled to arrive at their own verdict regarding the applicability of the given findings to other groups similarly placed in the social structure.

If the researcher has conducted a complex experiment, the report should include some description of the study as it was seen from the viewpoint of the subjects.

This would involve a description of the subjects, the experimental setting, and the variables assessed. The sequence of events in a chronological order also needs to be presented to the reader, who, in a sense, is carried through the experience as though he was a subject.

Even if the reporter customarily reproduces the complete questionnaire/schedule or testing scales in the appendix to the report, a summary of stimulus items, a sample of questionnaire items and scale-items should be included in this section of the report. All this goes a long way toward giving the reader a feel of what it would have been like to be a subject.

This has an important bearing on the interpretation of study results, and understandably, the reader is placed thereby in a position to judge the worth of the study results. In quite a few studies the subject/participants are called upon to co­operate actively in the research enterprise.

The report should advisedly make a mention of how the participants in the research were compensated for their time and effort and if there was deception practiced on them in the course of the study. Such unethical practices like deception or misinformation about the procedure cannot unfortunately be dispensed with in certain studies.

The readers need to be told how these human participants were told about these practices afterwards, the amount of freedom afforded to subjects in the matter of withdrawing their participation, subjection to threats, concealed observations of them, strategies for protecting their anonymity etc., should also be faithfully reported.

3. Results of the Study:

The section is closed generally with statement that informs the conclusions reached as also the qualifications imposed upon them by the conceptual and practical difficulties faced by the researcher in executing the study-design in a manner he would ideally have desired.

But if the researcher wishes to present different kinds of results before he is able to integrate them or draw any inferences based on them or if he wants to discuss certain matters in the final discussion then the discussion section is better presented separately.

Of course, even here there cannot be a pure results section without an attendant discussion. Before the researcher can present his main results there are, in the main, ‘ two preliminary things that must concern him. Firstly, he needs to present proof that his study has ensured the conditions for testing the hypotheses and/or for answering the research questions.

For example, if the study required of the researcher that he produce two groups radically differing from each other in the character of their emotions, the report must demonstrate that the ratings on the two groups were conclusively different and it was not that the difference occasioned as a matter of chance.

In case the investigation required observers to record behaviour of the judges entrusted with rating the responses, the report should present quantitative proof of reliability of the recordings or ratings.

The result section should usually begin with a discussion on the safeguards and strategies adopted by the researcher to negate bias and unreliability in the course of the study. It is quite possible that some of these matters would have already found a place in the meth od section.

It is equally likely that in some studies discussion on these matters is rightly postponed to the final discussion section, where researcher tries to adduce alternative explanations of the study results.

What should be included at the beginning of the results section so that the readers are satisfied that the stage was successfully set for testing the research hypotheses, is a decision which would be governed by an understanding of the overall state of study results. No hard and fast rules lead to this decision.

Secondly, the method of data-analysis is a matter to be dealt with at the beginning of the results section. The researcher needs to describe the procedure adopted by him in converting his observations into data that may be readily analysed and the procedure adopted for coding and articulation of different observer’s ratings.

The readers must be told next, about the statistical analysis itself. If this analysis was unconventional or unorthodox and warranted certain statistical assumptions, a detailed discussion giving out the rationale for it, is called for. This could be the place in the report to afford the readers an overview of the results section, if it is fairly complicated.

The general rule of reporting research findings is to commence with the central findings and then move on to the more peripheral ones. This rule is also applicable to the sub-sections and it is advisable that the basic findings are stated first, followed by elaborations of them, as needed.

If the beginning is made with the most central results, the progress in reporting should follow the line suggested below:

(1) The researcher should remind the readers in a conceptual mould, about the question he is asking. For example, is democratic classroom atmosphere more conducive to learning by students as compared to the authoritarian atmosphere?

(2) Secondly, the reporter should remind the readers of the actual operations performed or the actual behaviour measured (which was assumed to be the empirical referent of learning or democratic atmosphere, in our example).

(3) The answer to the question which surfaced as a result of the study should be made known to the readers immediately and unequivocally.

(4) Relevant supporting numbers or figures, substantiating the study result should be given out. For example, x 2 = 11.2, df = 2. This should be followed by an elaboration of the overall conclusions. Limitations imposed upon these conclusions by certain factors which might have operated to produce results that may not be expected in a larger class of such situations should be honestly spelt out.

(5) It is necessary that every finding involving a comparison, e.g., between democratic and authoritarian classroom atmospheres, between certain groups or relationship between variables should be accompanied by its statistical level of significance. Failing this, the readers would have no basis of knowing whether or not the findings may be attributed to the chance factor.

The inferential statistics though important, do no constitute the core of the narrative and should be subordinated to the substantive results. The real purpose of descriptive statistics or indices should be to present to the readers the behaviour of people as vividly as possible. Effective reporting aims at giving to the readers a ‘feel’ of the observed behaviour.

(6) Ordinarily, in a detailed research report intended for a knowledgeable readership, every finding considered sufficiently important as to merit some emphasis should be accompanied by a table or graph or figure showing the relevant data. Thus, the reader is in a position to grasp the findings by reading the narration or by looking at the tables or figures, embodying result of interest.

As the writing on the section on results progresses, the reporter should continually keep summarizing and updating the readers’ fund of information lest they should be required to look back time and again, to keep in touch with the major points of the researcher’s thesis.

Towards the end of this section, is demonstrated the statistical reliability of the results. It is often useful to illustrate how particular individuals covered by the study behaved. Besides the illustrative function, this adds richness to the study-findings.

4. Discussion:

Especially for the more complex studies having more abstract and extensive implications, discussion constitutes a separate section. The section on discussion forms a coherent narration with the introductory section of the report.

Concerns of central importance to the researcher in view of his problem and hence embodied in the introduction section should appear again in the discussion for the discussion proceeds from the specific matters about the study through the more abiding and general concerns to the most inclusive generalization the researcher wishes to make.

Each of the new statements made in the discussion section should contribute something fresh to the reader’s understanding of the problem. The inferences that may be drawn from the findings should be clearly presented. These may often be at a high level of abstraction. If this be the case, the conceptual or theoretic linkages would need to be explicated.

Let us take an example. If the investigator has found better performance in terms of learning on the part of students, in classroom situations characterized by a ‘democratic’ atmosphere (democratic atmosphere in the classroom may be said to be characterized tentatively by the freedom allowed to students in respect of choosing the problems for discussion, electing the discussion leader, counter questioning the teacher, etc.), the investigator may conclude that in other situations where such freedom is allowed to participants, i.e., of choosing their problems for discussion or electing their own discussion leader, etc., similar effects will be seen.

However, the researcher may wish to carry his inference to a higher level of abstraction, especially if there is some partially developed theory to which it may be possible to link his finding or if there have been other studies in which the specific phenomena are different but these can be understood in terms of the same abstract principle.

For example, the investigator may find that the teachers in general feel dissatisfied or unhappy despite the improvement in their salary scales because the ‘others’ in comparable jobs whose salary scales too were subjected to an upward revision appear to them to have benefitted more by this scale revision.

The investigator may treat this state of affairs (characterized by dissatisfaction among teachers despite improvement in salary scales) as an instance of the more abstract concept of ‘relative’ deprivation.

On the basis of this abstract concept, the researcher may be able to link up the finding of his study to those of some other study which reported that in a community hit by a natural disaster some people who had themselves suffered loss of property and bereavement went out to help certain other families because the loss and bereavement suffered by these families as viewed by those who went out to help, was much greater compared to their own.

This phenomenon though different from the earlier one in concrete content, can be understood in terms of the same abstract principle which explains the dissatisfaction among teachers despite the increased objective gain.

The people who had incurred loss and bereavement in the second example compared their losses to those of the ‘significant others’ in the community and found that their own losses were much less or that they were much better compared to the ‘others’, and hence developed sympathy for these ‘others’ although objectively viewed, they themselves needed to be sympathized with.

The questions that still lie unanswered may also be alluded to. It is quite in order at this point to compare the results of the study with those reported by other investigators. The possible short-comings of the study should be honestly brought out.

The readers must be told about the conditions that might have limited the extent of legitimate generalization. Here, the readers should be reminded of the characteristics of the sample studied as also about the possibility that it might differ from the ‘population’ or ‘universe’ to which the researcher might want to generalize.

The specific characteristics of the method employed by the researcher which might have influenced the results or some factors that might have led to atypical results merit mention. The researcher should not, however, try to invest long involved long involved theories to explain away every ‘bump’ in the data.

On the contrary, if the study results suggest the beginnings of a new theory which injects amazing clarity into the data and affords a very meaningful view of the problem- area, it would be advisable to rewrite the entire report beginning with the new theory. The aim of scientific reporting is to provide the most informative, instructive and compelling framework for the study right from the first sentence.

5. Summary or Abstract:

In a way, the title of research report itself serve as part of the summary or abstract. Ideally, it conveys the content of the study as accurately and clearly as possible. A potential reader can on this basis decide whether or not to go ahead to read it. Those titles that mention both the dependent and independent variables are obviously the most informative ones.

6. References:

The section on references comprises a list of all books and articles cited in the text of the research report. These books and articles are arranged alphabetically according to the author’s last name, a format that corresponds to the way in which they are cited in a book.

The reference should clearly indicate the name of the author, the title of the book or article, the journal in which it appears, the publisher, place of publication and the year of publication.

7. Appendix:

The appendix to a report consists of copies of materials used in the study, like questionnaire, attitude scale, stimulus materials, drawings of apparatuses, etc. This is expected to help a person who would like to replicate the study.

A second appendix might contain tables of data which are too extensive and seemingly too marginal to be included in the body of the report. This is in the nature of a good turn done to the potential researchers, for this enables them to explore the researcher’s data in fine detail and to answer certain questions about the results that might not have occurred to the researcher.

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Research , Social Research , Research Report , Contents , Contents of the Research Report

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This paper is in the following e-collection/theme issue:

Published on 6.8.2024 in Vol 26 (2024)

A Quarter-Century of Online Informatics Education: Learners Served and Lessons Learned

Authors of this article:

• William Hersh, MD  

Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology, School of Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, OR, United States

Corresponding Author:

William Hersh, MD

Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology

School of Medicine

Oregon Health & Science University

3181 SW Sam Jackson Park Rd

Biomedical Information Communication Center

Portland, OR, 97239

United States

Phone: 1 5034944563

Email: [email protected]

The value and methods of online learning have changed tremendously over the last 25 years. The goal of this paper is to review a quarter-century of experience with online learning by the author in the field of biomedical and health informatics, describing the learners served and the lessons learned. The author details the history of the decision to pursue online education in informatics, describing the approaches taken as educational technology evolved over time. A large number of learners have been served, and the online learning approach has been well-received, with many lessons learned to optimize the educational experience. Online education in biomedical and health informatics has provided a scalable and exemplary approach to learning in this field.

Introduction

Twenty-five years ago, in early 1999, I made a decision that seemed like just another project at the time but turned out to profoundly affect the work of my career. This was a decision to investigate the interest and subsequently move my introductory biomedical and health informatics course in our graduate program at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) to an online format. It was just a single course, but would lead to profound new directions not only for my career but also for the graduate program I led.

In 1999, the internet and online educational environment were much different from that in the present. Although many people had wired internet connections of decent bandwidth at their work, broadband internet to the home was relatively new. There was no wireless connectivity to speak of. The online educational environment was similarly nascent at the time, and distance learning was viewed as a second-class method of education. A quarter-century later, we can look back at the learners who were served and the lessons learned.

The decision to move my introductory course online was driven by potential students expressing interest in the course being offered online. In early 1999, we gauged interest by conducting a mail survey of 500 random people each on the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) listservs [ 1 ]. From the 288 surveys returned, there was definite interest in the course, its delivery on the World Wide Web, the need to have access by dial-up modem (not everyone had broadband internet in their homes), and content covering a range of topics similar to what was in the existing on-campus course I was already teaching. Although the OHSU School of Nursing and the Educational Communications Department had started pursuing distance learning, there was no institutional infrastructure to support our effort.

I had already been teaching my introductory course for over half a decade. In the early 1990s, I was relatively a new Assistant Professor at OHSU, where I had come after completing medical training at the University of Illinois Chicago and a National Library of Medicine (NLM)–funded postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. I was recruited to OHSU as part of a new academic informatics program funded by the Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems initiative of NLM [ 2 ]. My early focus, like most in informatics, was developing a research program.

However, I always had an interest in teaching and had the opportunity to develop an introductory informatics course in 1993 that was an elective in OHSU’s relatively new Master of Public Health program. The course initially consisted of lectures by half a dozen informatics faculty who were part of the program. Although others enjoyed lecturing on their areas of expertise, I had larger ambitions, and under the mentorship of the OHSU Provost at the time, Lesley Hallick, PhD, set out to launch a Master of Science (MS) in Medical Informatics program. OHSU had already been funded under the NLM T15 Training Grant program since 1992.

In 1996, OHSU received approval from the state of Oregon to launch our MS program. We welcomed 7 entering students, all of whom graduated in 1998 or 1999. The introductory course that was previously identified as Public Health 549 now became Medical Informatics (MINF) 510. The course was taught with 3 hours of lecture and other classroom activities once a week. Other courses were developed for the program, including clinical decision support, computer science, and organizational behavior and management. One interesting finding for me was that many of our students aspired to assume informatics careers outside of the main path for the field in the 20th century, which was as an academic researcher that was typically grant-funded. A number of them, however, saw health care institutions, industry, and other sites beginning to hire operational informatics professionals. Many were adult learners who wanted to learn more but could not quit their day jobs nor uproot their families to places like Oregon to pursue in-person education.

Initial Course

Before 1999, people were inquiring about the availability of my course and our program online. The prospect of adopting this technology was not daunting, but having very little experience and understanding of online education was. I had no formal training in education. I taught as many faculty did in the 1990s—lecturing with overhead transparencies that gave way to PowerPoint slides along with assigned readings, homework exercises, and a course project that was typically a term paper on a topic of the student’s interest.

Nonetheless, after the survey of interest conducted in 1999, I decided to offer a version of my introductory course in an online format. I did not abandon the in-person classroom, but rather offered a second section of the course, with my standing up in front of class lecturing replaced with recorded lectures that were made available online. I had started to learn some about what were considered state-of-the-art approaches to online lectures for the late 20th century. One key point was to be cognizant of bandwidth, as many people still connected to the internet via a telephone modem, especially from home. As such, we needed to be careful that all materials, including the recorded lectures, could be delivered over telephone modem speeds, that is, 28-56 Kb/s modems. This precluded the use of video, high-resolution images, or other bandwidth-intensive media.

Textbox 1 shows the weekly course outline for the course at the time, which was later moved to an online format. The topics covered then are still pertinent in the present, but many new ones have come to the fore. Figures 1 and 2 show the learning management system (LMS) and lecture screenshots from the first course offering.

• Acquisition, storage, and use of medical data
• Medical computing
• Medical decision-making and evidence-based medicine
• The electronic medical record
• Standards, security, and confidentiality
• Information retrieval and digital libraries
• Imaging and telemedicine
• Artificial intelligence and decision support
• Computer networks and the internet
• Nursing and consumer health informatics
• Evaluation of medical informatics applications

Fortunately, I already had the lecture slides for the course; therefore, I was able to add narration to them, that is, voice-over PowerPoint. Another adage at the time was that online lectures be parsed into segments typically of about 15-20 minutes each. As such, I broke my PowerPoint lecture files into segments and I soon came to learn how much narration I typically used per slide, which to this day is an average of about 90 seconds.

The most common format for the delivery of media in the early days of the World Wide Web was RealMedia (RealNetworks). Producing RealMedia files required recording the entire lecture and compiling the output using a tool called Real Presenter. Our department had no LMS before we started this journey, and the leading system at the time was Blackboard (Anthology), which we installed on a Unix server in our department. Fortunately, the hardware and software costs for this were modest at the time.

The initial course was successful by metrics of student performance on homework assignments and examinations being comparable to those of on-campus students, although they were admittedly different audiences [ 1 ]. The 15 students completing the course expressed great satisfaction and were interested in taking additional courses. Another interesting finding was that the volume of the interactive messages in the discussion forum vastly exceeded the amount of discussion that took place in the on-campus course, showing that online courses could be at least as interactive as those taught in-person.

Additional Courses and Development of Educational Programs

There was enough demand for the online course that I started offering it every academic quarter, which I have done continuously since 1999. The success of the first course led us to develop our first credential, a Graduate Certificate, which was launched in 2000 [ 3 ]. This allowed other faculty to move their courses to an online format. We initially did not think that there would be interest in or a market for a full MS program online. However, many students in the Graduate Certificate Program did express an interest in obtaining an online MS degree, thus leading to the launch of that program in 2002.

When our online MS program was launched, we believed that students should spend some time on our campus. We did this by teaching some courses in a short-course format, where the course was taught intensively for 3-5 days, often with additional activity before or after the on-campus intensive. These courses were typically offered during the summer when students had more flexible schedules and the weather was nicer in the Pacific Northwest.

I also moved other courses that I taught to an online format. I taught a course on information retrieval, the area of my research, and moved that online in 2002. I also started teaching a new course on evidence-based medicine based on the McMaster University model [ 4 ], exclusively online. Unlike the other courses, the latter only had modest amounts of online lecture material and mainly consisted of students critically appraising journal papers and presenting them to their classmates.

All through this time, we maintained our on-campus graduate program. We launched our PhD program in 2003, which funded students mainly from our NLM T15 grant. Our first PhD graduate was Adam Wright, who is now a professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) at Vanderbilt University. Another graduate from the program at the time was Peter Embi, MD, MS, who is now Chair of the Vanderbilt DBMI.

Around this time, we made some other changes in our graduate program. One was to bifurcate the program into 2 tracks, which are now called majors. The original track/major is now called Health & Clinical Informatics (HCIN), while the newer track/major is now called Bioinformatics/Computational Biomedicine (BCB). At this time, we also changed the prefix name of our courses from MINF to Biomedical Informatics (BMI), that is, my introductory course became BMI 510.

Evolution of Tools and Platforms

As the internet evolved, so did the availability of new and improved tools for developing and disseminating content. In 2004, we began producing lectures in the Adobe Flash format, initially via the Adobe Presenter tool. In 2009, we moved to a different tool for producing Flash content, called Articulate Presenter. This tool had a new feature of allowing each slide to be recorded individually and then exported into a single Flash file. This turned out to be a major time-saver, as only new slides or those with updated content needed to recorded again. In addition, the output of Articulate Presenter added some additional navigational tools, such as a list of the slides and incorporation of notes, which were used for accessibility. In the mid-2010s, as the use of Flash was replaced by HTML5, Articulate Presenter allowed output in that format, allowing us to transition content from Flash to HTML5 without having to change any underlying source material.

I made a personal transition in 2012 when returning to using the Apple Macintosh after a hiatus using Microsoft Windows computers from 1995 to 2012. A big hesitancy for switching was my use of Articulate Presenter, which only ran under Windows. However, Apple had recently moved to Intel chips, with the ability to run Windows. Even though it was clunky, I was able to maintain the use of Articulate Presenter by using the virtual-machine software Parallels. Many users of Articulate Presenter, mostly academicians, requested for the software to have a native Mac version, but Articulate never developed one. Additional dissatisfaction with Articulate was caused by its movement to an expensive subscription model.

By 2021, I had another reason to move on from Articulate Presenter, which was when Apple moved from Intel to ARM (Advanced Reduced Instruction Set Computing Machines) processors. Fortunately, the slide narration and export options of PowerPoint itself had improved markedly, and I was able to produce narrated lectures exclusively with PowerPoint. I exported the slideshow as an MP4 video and uploaded the file to Echo360, which had been adopted by OHSU as a media server.

Another transition was OHSU adopting an institutional LMS in 2007. This enabled our department to not have to maintain our own LMS or server for it. The university adopted Sakai, an open-source LMS. OHSU chose the option of a vendor to run Sakai in their data center. Sakai provides most of the features seen in an LMS, including organization of courses, provision of content or links to it, multiple choice questions, discussion forums, gradebooks, and linkage to student management systems.

AMIA 10x10 Program

Another major event in my online teaching journey was the AMIA 10x10 (ten by ten) program. In 2005, when Charles Safran, MD, was President of AMIA, he was convinced that the United States needed more people, especially physicians and nurses, trained in informatics [ 5 ]. Dr Safran advocated that the United States needed at least 1 physician and 1 nurse trained in informatics in the nearly 6000 hospitals in the United States. This led him to ask a number of educational program directors, including myself, how much capacity they had to increase the size of their programs. Although most of them said perhaps they could increase 2- or 3-fold, my reply to him was “all of them.” This was because I knew that distance learning was very scalable, and with enough lead time could be scaled up with faculty to support much larger numbers of learners.

At that time, AMIA was looking to develop some sort of introductory course in BMI. However, the prices quoted to them by vendors were beyond AMIA’s means. As I already had my online introductory course from our graduate program, I proposed to AMIA and Don Detmer, MD, MS, its President and Chief Executive Officer, a repackaging of my online course. I proposed the name 10x10 based on Dr Safran’s stated need of 1 physician and nurse trained in informatics in 5000+ US hospitals and set a goal for doing so by 2010. Because the course already existed, we were able to quickly put in place a memorandum of understanding between OHSU and AMIA, which was based on an agreement of mutual nonexclusivity: OHSU would maintain the ownership of the 10x10 course content (for use in other programs, including our graduate program) and AMIA could offer other 10x10 courses. Dr Detmer later called 10x10 one of the most successful AMIA initiatives ever undertaken.

In the summer of 2005, the first offering of 10x10 was launched, with 51 people enrolled [ 6 ]. Unlike our graduate course that was only online, an in-person session would bring course participants together at the AMIA Annual Symposium. A total of 44 people completed the first offering, and almost all of them showed up for the first face-to-face session in November.

One of the participants in the original 10x10 course was Paula Otero, MD, a pediatrician from Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires in Argentina. After the course ended, she proposed an interesting idea: translating the course into Spanish [ 7 ]. This started a very productive collaboration that resulted in the later awarding of an informatics training grant from the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center. This allowed Dr Otero to further develop her online offering in Spanish, while also sending faculty for informatics fellowship training to OHSU.

The 10x10 course was successful by many metrics, attracting large numbers and achieving strong satisfaction from students completing it [ 8 ]. We structured the course such that those who received a grade of B or better on an optional final examination could obtain an academic credit in our program at OHSU. This would also then allow them to enroll in the OHSU Graduate Certificate or MS program (or obtain credit and transfer it to other graduate programs). About 10%-15% of those completing the 10x10 course have gone on to further study in the field.

Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Era

As my own interest in informatics education and training grew, I began to develop a research interest in the informatics workforce [ 9 ]. Unable to find any definitive data about the workforce, I came across the HIMSS Analytics Database. Although not an optimal source of data to answer questions about the workforce, I was able to use the database to gain the first estimate of the size of the workforce and its potential growth, as hospitals moved to higher levels of electronic health record adoption [ 10 ]. In addition to presenting this work at the AMIA Annual Symposium in 2008, I also had the opportunity to present it in Capitol Hill earlier that year, which was fortuitous due to the imminent Great Recession coming, with the US government creating the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that aimed to stimulate the economy and create jobs.

A major part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, with investment over US $30 billion to facilitate the adoption and meaningful use of the electronic health records [ 11 ]. In part because of my workforce research, a US $118 million workforce development program was made part of the HITECH investment. OHSU played a large role in the grants that were competitively awarded in 2010 by the workforce development program, including serving as the National Coordination and Dissemination Center for the health information technology curriculum that was funded for development [ 12 ].

During and after HITECH, I continued to provide leadership around informatics education and how it advanced other careers in the field. I was also a leader in the new clinical informatics physician subspecialty [ 13 ], being appointed by AMIA to direct the Clinical Informatics Board Review Course (CIBRC), which was offered in time for the first board examination in 2013. I recruited an excellent team to help teach the course, including Thomas Payne, MD; Bimal Desai, MD; and Diane Montella, MD. As I was eligible for the board examination myself (even though I was no longer clinically active, I had completed my internal medicine residency in the era of lifetime certification), I took the examination and even passed! The next year, I laid the groundwork at OHSU to establish one of the first 4 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education–accredited fellowships for the new subspecialty, which launched in 2015 under the leadership of Vishnu Mohan, MD [ 14 ].

The Last Frontier: Medical Education

Although I had been interested in informatics education for others besides informaticians dating to the 1990s, I was never able to make headway in obtaining any significant content into the OHSU Doctor of Medicine (MD) educational program. Finally, in 2012, with the arrival of a new supportive Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education, George Mejicano, MD, MS, the door was opened for me and my colleagues in our department. We were also aided by being one of the 11 institutions awarded grants by the American Medical Association to accelerate change in medical education. Our work in clinical informatics education for medical students led to a 2014 paper that laid out the competencies for medical students, although as noted in the paper, could actually be applied to all health care students and professionals [ 15 ]. Along with colleagues at OHSU, we began to implement informatics education in the MD curriculum. We have started working with local colleagues in nursing, biomedical basic sciences, and public health to add informatics to their curricula.

Another medical education opportunity arose at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic resulted in many medical students being displaced from ward and clinic rotations, there was a need at OHSU and other medical schools to find virtual education opportunities. It was easy to quickly adopt the introductory course curriculum to a medical school-style block course. Some colleagues from other medical schools learned of the availability of the online course and asked if it could be used at their institutions. In the first few months of the pandemic, the course was delivered to both OHSU students (3 offerings to a total of 44 students) and non-OHSU students (8 offerings to a total of 178 students). The excess workload required me to stop offering the course outside OHSU, but the course continues as a medical student elective at OHSU.

Learners Served

I have been gratified that my online teaching has attracted so many learners over the years. Since the inception of the introductory course (MINF/BMI 510) in 1996, 1683 students have completed the course in its on-campus and online versions. Since the introduction of the AMIA 10x10 course in 2005, 3253 people have completed the OHSU offering of the course through early 2024. The medical student elective at OHSU continues to attract about 30 medical students per year. The OHSU BMI graduate program has 984 alumni, with 499 Graduate Certificates, 444 MS degrees, and 41 PhD degrees awarded.

There are now about 3000 physicians who are board-certified in the clinical informatics subspecialty. A large majority of those passing the exam have taken the CIBRC. I was gratified in 2016 when attending a reception for physicians at the Epic Advanced User’s Group meeting in Madison, WI, and finding that at least half of those I spoke with had taken one of the above educational experiences I had developed. It is not infrequent to find myself walking through an airport or another venue and have someone introduce themselves as having taken a course of mine, usually 10x10.

Although the main 10x10 course has been offered through AMIA, we have partnered with other organizations to offer versions tailored to individuals within them. The online curriculum content does not change, but rather, the student composition, discussion, related activities, and in-person sessions are modified to meet the needs of those organizations. Table 1 shows the partnerships with the number of course offerings and students completing them for both United States and international partners. The most prominent international collaboration has been with Gateway Consulting of Singapore, and the course continues to be cotaught with KC Lun, PhD.

Lessons Learned

My experience in developing all of the above educational offerings have resulted in many lessons learned. Although I ventured into online learning with little formal training, I discovered over time what works well for the kinds of teaching I prefer. Although academic lectures receive their share of criticism, I find that an engaging speaker can provide a highly effective learning experience, especially if he or she explains the big picture and fills in the necessary details. I know that PowerPoint also has its critics, yet it too can be highly effective, and perhaps more so in an asynchronous setting where lectures can be paused or reviewed. As such, my main teaching modality has always been lectures using voice-over PowerPoint slides. A typical 3 hours’ worth of lecture is segmented into 6-9 lectures. I also provide students with PDF handouts of the slides and an exhaustive list of references cited in the slides. The homework in the course consists of 10 multiple choice questions per unit. In the questions, I aim to require students to apply the material. The course does not have a required textbook, although I do tell students that it follows the contents of a textbook that I edited [ 16 ].

I have also learned that online teaching does not deserve what many perceive as lacking interaction. I have always taught from an LMS that featured discussion forums and advise students to think of such discussion forums as the online equivalent of a classroom. Students are encouraged to speak up, not feel intimidated, and remember that everyone has something valuable to say. In the introductory course, I seed the discussion with 1-2 questions but encourage students to also post their own questions, including asking about things they do not understand (rather than emailing me, to which my reply is usually to post their questions on the forum).

Another lesson learned is to advise students at the outset to follow some simple etiquette for the discussion forums. Messages should be neither too short nor too long. Everyone should be constructive and respectful. Students should reply to messages in their respective threads so that everyone can see the evolving discussion. Students should not copy and paste from websites but rather use their own words and provide a link if desired. They should also not discuss homework multiple choice questions until 1 week after the due date.

In addition, I have learned to lay out what I consider to be my expectations of students. They should complete the lectures and participate in the discussion. They should not be afraid to speak up in the discussion forums. They should ask questions about anything that is unclear in lectures or other materials. Most of all, they should feel free to challenge the instructor. Students should complete all assignments by the due dates. I do allow them to occasionally complete assignments late but warn them not to fall too far behind, since they will have difficulty in catching up.

By the same token, I tell students that they should have expectations for me. They should expect me to create an environment of learning and objective inquiry. I should maintain high availability, replying to emails as quickly as I can. They should expect that I am there to serve them, as students are not wasting my time. The best method of initial contact is email, and we can talk via video or phone as needed.

For lectures, students should expect the quality to be very good although not perfect. I am not a talking head and try to convey my view of informatics, getting into the details but never losing the big picture. One of my best compliments ever came in a course evaluation from a student who said, “I like that Dr Hersh pauses and makes mistakes and corrects himself … It shows he is thinking about what he is saying instead of reading off a paper” (even though I have more recently adopted using a script to make sure I cover everything on each slide). Students should also expect that in the discussion forums, I should read all postings even if I cannot reply to each post. I usually try to reply to threads where dialogue has developed and reply to different students and not the same ones each time.

An additional lesson learned is that online curricula, like any course curricula, need time and effort to be maintained. Fortunately, the large audience for my introductory course gives me the time and resources to keep the curriculum up-to-date. My basic approach is to update the course content once a year, refreshing the existing content and adding new material. This demonstrates a challenge for materials developed for posting online, such as the HITECH curriculum described above [ 12 ], that is, static content becomes outdated quickly. As such, the content soon diminishes in value for teaching.

Another lesson learned has been that my online materials prove very useful for in-person teaching and classes. This is typically done using a flipped classroom approach, where students listen to recorded lectures before coming to in-person class to discuss concepts, ask questions, give presentations, and more. Since moving my teaching to online lectures, it has been extremely rare for me to stand in front of a classroom and give a traditional lecture.

A final lesson learned is that online education is quite scalable. It requires a substantial fixed effort to develop and maintain content, although it has a very low marginal effort to provide that content to additional learners. Fortunately, the collection, curation, and maintenance of course materials is something I enjoy, even if the time commitment is substantial. However, once the content is produced, the additional work of developing new courses by repurposing it is modest.

Conclusions

The seemingly small decision to start offering my introductory informatics course in an online format had far-reaching implications for my academic informatics career. In the early days, many educational traditionalists scoffed at the notion of teaching online. But in modern times, education has had to adapt to different learners. Especially in knowledge-based fields, we no longer stop our education with obtaining a degree. Many professionals change direction as they move through their careers, with a common example being health care and other professionals moving into fields such as informatics. For many, the ability to learn online and asynchronously offers educational opportunities that cannot be met by traditional in-person classrooms. Figure 3 highlights the major course or program milestones by year.

Acknowledgments

The faculty and staff of the Oregon Health & Science University Department of Medical Informatics & Clinical Epidemiology have been highly supportive of developing and implementing online education in biomedical and health informatics. Important staff contributors have been Andrea Ilg, Lauren Ludwig, Lynne Schwabe, Vanessa Reeves, Kathryn Pyle, Anne Marshall, Diane Doctor, and Virginia Lankes. Also critical in the success of this effort have been various teaching assistants over the years, including Katherine Gorris, Amy Carter, Kelly Brougham, and Kate Fultz Hollis.

Conflicts of Interest

None declared.

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• Ash J, Hersh W, Krages K, Morgan J, Schumacher R. The Oregon IAIMS: then and now. Bull Med Libr Assoc. Jul 1999;87(3):347-349. [ FREE Full text ] [ Medline ]
• Hersh W. Methods Inf Med. Jan 24, 2018;46(01):80-83. [ CrossRef ]
• Straus S, Glasziou P, Richardson W, Haynes R. Evidence-Based Medicine - How to Practice and Teach EBM. Amsterdam, Netherlands. Elsevier; 2018.
• Safran C. Informatics training for clinicians is more important than hardware and software. Yearb Med Inform. Mar 07, 2018;18(01):164-165. [ CrossRef ]
• Hersh W, Williamson J. Educating 10,000 informaticians by 2010: the AMIA 10x10 program. Int J Med Inform. 2007;76(5-6):377-382. [ CrossRef ] [ Medline ]
• Otero P, Hersh W, Luna D, González Bernaldo de Quirós F. A medical informatics distance-learning course for Latin America. Methods Inf Med. Jan 17, 2018;49(03):310-315. [ CrossRef ]
• Feldman SS, Hersh W. Evaluating the AMIA-OHSU 10x10 program to train healthcare professionals in medical informatics. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. Nov 06, 2008;2008:182-186. [ FREE Full text ] [ Medline ]
• Hersh W. Who are the informaticians? What we know and should know. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Mar 01, 2006;13(2):166-170. [ CrossRef ]
• Hersh W, Wright A. What workforce is needed to implement the health information technology agenda? Analysis from the HIMSS analytics database. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. Nov 06, 2008;2008:303-307. [ FREE Full text ] [ Medline ]
• Blumenthal D. Implementation of the Federal Health Information Technology initiative. N Engl J Med. Dec 22, 2011;365(25):2426-2431. [ CrossRef ]
• Mohan V, Abbott P, Acteson S, Berner ES, Devlin C, Hammond WE, et al. Design and evaluation of the ONC health information technology curriculum. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2014;21(3):509-516. [ FREE Full text ] [ CrossRef ] [ Medline ]
• Detmer DE, Shortliffe EH. Clinical informatics: prospects for a new medical subspecialty. JAMA. May 2014;311(20):2067-2068. [ CrossRef ] [ Medline ]
• Longhurst C, Pageler N, Palma J, Finnell J, Levy B, Yackel T, et al. Early experiences of accredited clinical informatics fellowships. J Am Med Inform Assoc. Jul 2016;23(4):829-834. [ FREE Full text ] [ CrossRef ] [ Medline ]
• Hersh WR, Gorman P, Biagioli F, Mohan V, Gold J, Mejicano G. Beyond information retrieval and electronic health record use: competencies in clinical informatics for medical education. AMEP. Jul 2014:205. [ CrossRef ]
• Hersh W, editor. Health Informatics - Practical Guide, 8th Edition. Morrisville, NC, USA. Lulu.com; 2022.

Abbreviations

Edited by G Eysenbach; submitted 01.04.24; peer-reviewed by C Lokker, J Xia; comments to author 29.05.24; revised version received 01.06.24; accepted 16.07.24; published 06.08.24.

©William Hersh. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 06.08.2024.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (ISSN 1438-8871), is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on https://www.jmir.org/, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.

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Dementia Research Progress Reports and Professional Judgment Budget Proposals

Each year, NIH issues an annual progress report featuring highlights of NIH-funded Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias research advances. The report provides a comprehensive overview of meaningful prevention, diagnostic, treatment, and care discoveries scientists have made toward addressing the enormous challenges of these devastating diseases.

Additionally, NIH annually submits to the President and then Congress a Professional Judgment Budget that estimates additional future funding needed to most effectively leverage promising scientific opportunities in dementia research.

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NIH Scientific Progress Report 2024

Read the 2024 NIH report on scientific progress, which provides an overview of the meaningful progress researchers made over the past year in areas including drug development, lifestyle interventions, biomarker research, and more.

Professional Judgment Budget Proposal for Fiscal Year 2026

This budget proposal outlines the additional funding needed in Fiscal Year 2026 to advance NIH-supported research toward achieving the goals outlined by the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease.

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Heavy metals, including lead, found in many dark chocolate bars, research shows

A new study finds that dark chocolate products sold nationwide may contain excessive amounts of heavy metals. 

The research, led by scientists at George Washington University and published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed Frontiers in Nutrition, examined over 70 dark chocolate products from retailers such as Whole Foods Market, Amazon and GNC. The products were tested to see whether the heavy metals lead, cadmium or arsenic were in them. 

Overall, 43% of the products studied exceeded acceptable levels of lead and 35% exceeded cadmium levels, according to the study, which was based on a California law that sets maximum allowable dose levels for heavy metals in food. Food researchers often use the 1986 regulations, known as Prop 65, as a safety standard because the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t set limits on heavy metals in most foods, said Leigh Frame, director of integrative medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences and lead author of the study.

The FDA does have suggested limits for chocolate and sugar-based candy but only for children.

According to the California guidelines, the threshold for heavy metals in foods is 0.5 micrograms a day. For the study, the scientists estimated the number of micrograms a day people would be exposed to if they ate the suggested serving amounts on the chocolate product labels. They found that the chocolate samples ranged from 0 to as high as 3.316 mcg per daily serving. Levels of cadmium, a carcinogen at high levels, ranged from 0.29 to 14.12 mcg, with the limit being 4.1 mcg per day.

None of the products exceeded the maximum level for arsenic. 

Frame said that because the products had varying amounts of lead in them, limiting consumption is the only sure way to reduce exposure.

“Don’t have large amounts of chocolate every single day,” she said. “One ounce serving size is what we recommend, or maybe you have 2 ounces every other day.” 

How to avoid lead in foods

Researchers agree that avoiding heavy metals entirely in our diet is nearly impossible. Foods such as rice, fish, fruits and vegetables have been known to contain varying amounts of metals. While heavy metals can be naturally excreted by the body through sweat and urine, if they are consumed in high amounts they can accumulate in the body and damage major organs. 

“You actually cannot avoid exposure to heavy metals in the diet,” Frame said. “It’s really not about avoiding them; it’s about making sure you’re not getting too much.” 

She emphasized a diversity in diet to avoid excessive exposure to any particular substance.

“Not eating the same thing day after day is going to help protect you from many different things, including heavy metals,” she said.

The authors intentionally left out which brands had what concentrations of metals given that levels could vary even within the same company. Interestingly, the study found that organic cocoa products were more likely to have higher levels of cadmium and lead. 

“Organic food doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s been checked for exposure to toxic metals like lead, cadmium and arsenic,” said Manish Arora, vice chairman of the department of environmental medicine and climate science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.   

“I think to most of the public ‘organic’ just means cleaner, and in this case it’s counterintuitive,” he said. 

Arora, who was not involved with the study, said that while the new research was strong, a big unknown with the paper is how the heavy metals got into the chocolate products in the first place. 

“Is it the processing, the farming or the type of soil or the fertilizer or any other farming process that they’re using?” he asked. “We are left not being sure where the metal actually entered the food chain.”

Previous research has found that lead and cadmium can enter dark chocolate through different ways. Cadmium comes primarily through the cacao plant’s taking it up from the soil, while lead can be introduced at various points in the manufacturing process, including the harvesting, drying and fermenting of the cocoa bean. 

There is no safe level of lead. While the FDA does not set limits for cadmium or arsenic, almost all of the chocolate bars in the study were below its recommended level for lead: 2.2 mcg a day for children under age 7 and 8.8 mcg a day for women of child-bearing age.

That contrasts with the California guidance because levels set by Prop 65 tend to be more conservative, Frame said.

Tewodros Godebo, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, said that in his opinion the Prop 65 standards are too conservative and may cause unnecessary panic. He has published his own study this year, in which his team tested over 100 chocolate products. 

Instead of the Prop 65 limits, Godebo's research used a method proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency that found levels of heavy metals in chocolate were not enough to be concerning to adults. The EPA commonly uses the formula, called the hazard quotient, to determine a substance’s toxicity. 

Still, he recommended consuming no more than an ounce of dark chocolate per day and limiting consumption for children and pregnant women. 

The new study did not examine milk chocolate, but theoretically it should have a lower risk of heavy metal contamination, Frame said. That is because the metals are believed to come from the cocoa powder itself, which is present in higher levels in dark chocolate. 

Akshay Syal, M.D., is a medical fellow with the NBC News Health and Medical Unit. 

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Research department working papers, explaining the great moderation exchange rate volatility puzzle.

This paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the drivers of trends in exchange rate volatility. Using data from the last five decades, the authors find that, against the USD, the volatility of financial center currencies (CHF, DEM/EUR, and JPY) has declined, while the volatility of commodity producer currencies (AUD, CAD, and NZD) has risen. Through the prism of the Great Moderation hypothesis—that macroeconomic volatility has decreased around the world since the mid-1970s—they study how macroeconomic factors relate to these trends. The authors do so using both a reduced-form approach and a novel asset-pricing-based decomposition of exchange rate changes that is disciplined with professional forecasts.

By Dani Blum

New research published Wednesday found heavy metals in dark chocolate, the latest in a string of studies to raise concerns about toxins in cocoa products.

The researchers tested 72 dark chocolate bars, cocoa powders and nibs to see if they were contaminated with heavy metals in concentrations higher than those deemed safe by California’s Proposition 65, one of the nation’s strictest chemical regulations.

Among the products tested, 43 percent contained higher levels of lead than the law considers safe, and 35 percent had higher concentrations of cadmium. Both metals are considered toxic and have been associated with a range of health issues. The study did not name specific brands, but found that organic products were more likely to have higher concentrations. Products certified as “fair trade” did not have lower levels of heavy metals.

But on the whole, the levels were not so high that the average consumer should be concerned about eating dark chocolate in moderation, said Jacob Hands, the lead author on the paper and a medical student at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Nearly all of the chocolates contained less than the Food and Drug Administration’s reference limits for lead, which are less stringent than the California requirement. And while both cadmium and lead can carry significant health risks, it’s not clear at this point that eating a few squares of dark chocolate poses a risk to most healthy adults.

“Just the fact that it exists doesn’t necessarily mean immediately there’s going to be some terrible health consequence,” said Laura Corlin, an associate professor of public health and community medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study.

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