Match your report to reflect whether you are working with quantitative or qualitative data. Quantitative data result in hard numbers in defined categories. With this type of data, you will have to do more writing to establish your purpose and methods before you explain how you came to your results. Qualitative data can be put into non-numeric categories such as color or social phenomena. Research reports that deal with qualitative data will have more descriptive language, and you will have to show how your observations led you to identify variables and patterns in the data. Sometimes you will deal with a mix of quantitative and qualitative data.
Write an introduction that includes your reason for writing the report and that establishes a hypothesis. Your reasons will depend on your interests. Perhaps your reason for writing the report is to examine side effects of a medication by examining dosage and another factor such as hair loss. By extension, your hypothesis will be your expectation of the relationship between dosage and hair loss, and your reasons for that expectation.
Review past reports done on subjects similar to yours. Good research is always built on past work by other scientists, so a section of your research report should briefly acknowledge and describe work that provided the background understanding for your report. Always use scholarly articles, never news or magazine articles.
Discuss your methods in analyzing your statistics and what you found. This section is devoted to writing the details of your procedure, its methods and the reasoning behind your choice of procedure. The more quantitative your research, the more tables and graphs you will include. Copy and paste these from your SPSS statistical analysis software. Number each table or graph. Every time you refer to a table or graph in your writing, include the graph or table number in parentheses.
Discuss your findings. Where the methods section showed the hard data of what you found, the discussion section is the place where you write what you think about that data. Use your analytical skills and imagination to draw conclusions, and examine your own methods for coming to those conclusions. Begin with a brief restatement of your purpose and then determine whether your results support your hypothesis.
Write a conclusion linking your own research to the current state of research. Suggest other studies that can be done to expand knowledge on your subject. The conclusion can be short---about one paragraph---but it is necessary to provide closure.
Write an abstract summarizing your entire report. The abstract will be at the beginning of your report, but it contains a shortened version of your entire report, so you should write it last. The abstract allows readers to determine whether the report is relevant to their own research.