Final Report

Your Final Report is essentially a thorough but concise writeup of your entire investigation, noting its successess, shortcomings and what you would suggest be pursued next.

The Final Report is meant to be a standalone report, which means you'll be including your Analysis Plan's literature review (though it might have been improved/expanded upon given feedback). You may have changed your investigative methods from what you proposed in your analysis plan. The big thing to remember: everything a reader needs to know to understand the Report should be found in the report.

Format

• Your Final Report must be a PDF: what you use to write the report leading up to exporting to PDF is a group decision.
• The Final Report (excluding the References and Appendix) should be 10-20 pages. Paper length will not affect grading in either direction: concise but thorough is your objective, and what that means depends on the project and your team.
• Write the report as though your intended audience is an academic or a boss at work who really enjoys academic research.
• One group member submits for the entire group via Canvas.

Sections

1. Summary

   Concise description of the entire report, including goals and major findings of your study

2. Introduction

   Description of the reason you chose your analysis topic. In this section, you should provide some background research on the topic (this is the literature review), and a statement of your prior expectations for how your study would turn out.

   1. The literature review should include no fewer than 20 citations to different academic (and mostly peer-reviewed) sources (use Georgia Tech's online access to peer reviewed journals!).
   2. Your citations ought to be spread across references to the problem, attempts to address it, to different analytical methods you're using, or anything else that seems appropriate.
3. Analysis

   This is a summary of the statistical analysis (the methods and the data used). Structure this section based on the questions of interest.

   Methods

   Note each investigative path (e.g., analysis method) explored and why it was selected (this may largely be a retread of the Analysis Plan).

   Results

   Discuss the results of each analysis and include tables, graphs and other visuals as necessary. This is the most important part of this section. As long as you do what you say you are going to do in the Analysis Plan, this subsection encompasses almost all of the new work, and much of your grade will come from how well you do in explaining and visualizing your results.

   Graphics

   Any visuals and tables in your report should be neatly formatted, with any labels and captions that are necessary for them to be understood by your audience.

4. Explanation of Changes

   At the end of this section, explain any changes from the initial Analysis Plan.

5. Conclusions

   This is a statement of the subject matter implications of your study and discussion of further questions raised by your study.

   Success

   Note which method yielded the best results and explain its relative success in the context of addressing the problem.

   Limitations

   Explain the shortcomings of your findings and suggest what might be good next steps for further investigation.

6. References

   This is an enumerated list, in APA-style, of the works you referenced throughout your Report.

7. Appendix

   This section contains paragraph-length summaries of each individual member's analysis and other relative contributions.