When you are writing up the results of a study, the first part of your Results section is always a description of your sample (never just launch into findings without telling your reader about your sample).

Let's say you have just completed a study of different treatments (let's just call them treatments 1 and 2) of burned veterans at a local VA hospital. You've already completed the Intro and Methods section of your manuscript and you are beginning to write up the Results. Using the Burned Soldiers Baseline Data dataset, write up the first paragraph of your Results section. Include appropriate tables and short, descriptive narrative (remember, you are writing for publication...journal editors hate wordy descriptions!).

How do you do this?

First, I'm attaching an example of the first paragraph of a results section of a manuscript written by one of my former students. Notice thatthe narrative does not duplicate the tables--the narrative should be informative but just highlight what is in the tables (what do you want to draw your readers' attention to?). If you want to see another example of how an author formats information (in this case, on two treatment groups separately including p values of group differences at baseline...which you don't need to report for this assignment), seeAssociations between Intake of Folate, Methionine, and Vitamins B-12, B-6 and ProstateCancerRisk in AmericanVeterans.Vidal AC, Grant DJ, Williams CD, Masko E, Allott EH, Shuler K, McPhail M, Gaines A, Calloway E, Gerber L, Chi JT, Freedland SJ, Hoyo C.JCancerEpidemiol. 2012;2012:957467. Epub 2012 Aug 9.PMID:22927849[PubMed]

Second, how do you get the information from the SPSS output into the Word document? Well, you can just type it all in, but if you are like me (and are terrible at transcribing information from one source to another accurately), you can save your SPSS output as an Excel file and then copy and paste from Excel into Word. There is a short How To video to show you how to do this.

For categorical variables, report n and percent for the entire sample for each variable. For the continuous variables, report the n, mean, standard deviation, median and min/max values (see the student example). It's best to put summaries of categorical and continuous variables in different tables since the table structures are somewhat different.

I am not sure which data should be my variables: age, race, military rank, inhalation injury, absi score, days of injury to admission or percent of total body burn