Survey Research

Related Resources
Print-Friendly Page
Authors & Contributors

The final stage of the survey is to report your results. There is not an established format for reporting a survey's results. The report may follow a pattern similar to formal experimental write-ups, or the analysis may show up in pitches to advertising agencies--as with Arbitron data--or the analysis may be presented in departmental meetings to aid curriculum arguments. A formal report might contain contextual information, a literature review, a presentation of the research question under investigation, information on survey participants, a section explaining how the survey was conducted, the survey instrument itself, a presentation of the quantified results, and a discussion of the results.

You can choose to graphically represent your data for easier interpretation by others outside your research project. You can use, for example, bar graphs, histograms, frequency polygrams, pie charts and consistency tables.

To learn more about how research is presented within the field of English and composition studies, see the unit on Rhetoric and the Presentation of Research.