How to Write a Discussion Section | Tips & Examples

The discussion section is where you delve into the meaning, importance, and relevance of your results.

It should focus on explaining and evaluating what you found, showing how it relates to your literature review and paper or dissertation topic, and making an argument in support of your overall conclusion. It should not be a second results section.

There are different ways to write this section, but you can focus your writing around these key elements:

• Summary: A brief recap of your key results
• Interpretations: What do your results mean?
• Implications: Why do your results matter?
• Limitations: What can’t your results tell us?
• Recommendations: Avenues for further studies or analyses

What not to include in your discussion section

There are a few common mistakes to avoid when writing the discussion section of your paper.

• Don’t introduce new results: You should only discuss the data that you have already reported in your results section.
• Don’t make inflated claims: Avoid overinterpretation and speculation that isn’t directly supported by your data.
• Don’t undermine your research: The discussion of limitations should aim to strengthen your credibility, not emphasize weaknesses or failures.

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Step 1: Summarize your key findings

Start this section by reiterating your research problem and concisely summarizing your major findings. To speed up the process you can use a summarizer to quickly get an overview of all important findings. Don’t just repeat all the data you have already reported—aim for a clear statement of the overall result that directly answers your main research question. This should be no more than one paragraph.

Many students struggle with the differences between a discussion section and a results section. The crux of the matter is that your results sections should present your results, and your discussion section should subjectively evaluate them. Try not to blend elements of these two sections, in order to keep your paper sharp.

Step 2: Give your interpretations

The meaning of your results may seem obvious to you, but it’s important to spell out their significance for your reader, showing exactly how they answer your research question.

The form of your interpretations will depend on the type of research, but some typical approaches to interpreting the data include:

• Identifying correlations, patterns, and relationships among the data
• Discussing whether the results met your expectations or supported your hypotheses
• Contextualizing your findings within previous research and theory
• Explaining unexpected results and evaluating their significance
• Considering possible alternative explanations and making an argument for your position

You can organize your discussion around key themes, hypotheses, or research questions, following the same structure as your results section. Alternatively, you can also begin by highlighting the most significant or unexpected results.

Step 3: Discuss the implications

As well as giving your own interpretations, make sure to relate your results back to the scholarly work that you surveyed in the literature review. The discussion should show how your findings fit with existing knowledge, what new insights they contribute, and what consequences they have for theory or practice.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Do your results support or challenge existing theories? If they support existing theories, what new information do they contribute? If they challenge existing theories, why do you think that is?
• Are there any practical implications?

Your overall aim is to show the reader exactly what your research has contributed, and why they should care.

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Step 4: Acknowledge the limitations

Even the best research has its limitations. Acknowledging these is important to demonstrate your credibility. Limitations aren’t about listing your errors, but about providing an accurate picture of what can and cannot be concluded from your study.

Limitations might be due to your overall research design, specific methodological choices, or unanticipated obstacles that emerged during your research process.

Here are a few common possibilities:

• If your sample size was small or limited to a specific group of people, explain how generalizability is limited.
• If you encountered problems when gathering or analyzing data, explain how these influenced the results.
• If there are potential confounding variables that you were unable to control, acknowledge the effect these may have had.

After noting the limitations, you can reiterate why the results are nonetheless valid for the purpose of answering your research question.

Step 5: Share your recommendations

Based on the discussion of your results, you can make recommendations for practical implementation or further research. Sometimes, the recommendations are saved for the conclusion.

Suggestions for further research can lead directly from the limitations. Don’t just state that more studies should be done—give concrete ideas for how future work can build on areas that your own research was unable to address.

Discussion section example

Here is an example of how you can introduce your discussion section. Note that it includes everything mentioned above: notably research outcomes, limitations, interpretations, and avenues for future research.

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Frequently asked questions about discussion sections

What goes in the discussion chapter of a dissertation?

In the discussion, you explore the meaning and relevance of your research results, explaining how they fit with existing research and theory. Discuss:

• Your interpretations: what do the results tell us?
• The implications: why do the results matter?
• The limitations: what can’t the results tell us?

What’s the difference between results and discussion?

The results chapter or section simply and objectively reports what you found, without speculating on why you found these results. The discussion interprets the meaning of the results, puts them in context, and explains why they matter.

In qualitative research, results and discussion are sometimes combined. But in quantitative research, it’s considered important to separate the objective results from your interpretation of them.

What’s the difference between the discussion and the conclusion?

In a thesis or dissertation, the discussion is an in-depth exploration of the results, going into detail about the meaning of your findings and citing relevant sources to put them in context.

The conclusion is more shorter and more general: it concisely answers your main research question and makes recommendations based on your overall findings.