"Should I just summarize in words what I did in my study, or should I include statistics or tables or graphs? If so, what sorts of statistics or graphs, where, and why?"

As noted in the introduction to Stage III-B, the purpose of summarizing data is to simplify an otherwise incomprehensibly complex mass of information so the substance of the information can be readily grasped. This chapter describes three popular forms of summaries--verbal descriptions, statistical reports, and graphic displays. Under each of these forms, we illustrate typical alternatives along with some of their advantages and limitations.

NARRATIVE SUMMARIES

Narrative summaries are statements about one or more qualities that the author of a study suggests are shared by a collection of phenomena, such phenomena as objects, places, people, organizations, institutions, events, social movements, ideas, periods in history, and more. As will be noted in Chapter 12, summarizing merges into interpreting. Thus, summaries are often indistinguishable from interpretations.

The placement of summaries can vary from one research project to another and even within the same study. For instance, a summary is usually offered at the beginning of a thesis or dissertation in the form of an abstract of the project's overall aims, methods of investigation, and outcomes. Such an introduction is then followed by the main body of the document which details the evidence in support of the opening summary. In other cases, the data collected for answering a research question are laid out first, followed by a summary of the conclusions that seem warranted by those data. Mini-summaries are often located throughout a document, representing conclusions drawn about individual sections of the presentation. Then a macro-summary is usually placed at the close of the thesis or dissertation as a final chapter that pulls together the principal generalizations extracted from the entire work.

Summaries can differ from each other in a number of ways, in (a) length, (b) the type of phenomena addressed, (c) the quantity of phenomena encompassed, (d) the amount of detail and number of examples included, (e) the presence or absence of value judgments, (f) estimates of what caused the phenomena, and more. The following four summaries from studies in the social sciences and humanities illustrate how such variables may appear in different kinds of studies.

In the first example from the realm of philosophy, the type of phenomenon addressed is writers' opinions of the postmodern movement, with the range of opinions embraced by the summary extending from the very positive to the very negative.

Philosophy: Postmodernism has been the leading fashion in academia for the last two decades. It has been variously described as the greatest intellectual advance since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and as the death knell of the Enlightenment's age of reason. It has been credited with opening academia to a greater diversity of values and truths, and accused of paving the way for nihilism and even fascism. ( Cherry, 1998, p. 20)

The field of interest in the second example is sex typing. The phenomena included in the summary are a culture's stereotypical gender characteristics that boys and girls acquire during the first half decade of their development. The author includes one illustrative example to help clarify the nature of the topic being discussed.

Developmental Psychology: Male and female children become "masculine" and "feminine," respectively, at a very early age. By the time they are four or five, for example, girls and boys have typically come to prefer activities defined by their culture as appropriate for their sex and also to prefer same-sex peers. The acquisition of sex-appropriate preferences, skills, personality attributes, behaviors, and self-concepts is typically referred to within psychology as the process of sex typing. ( Bem, 1987, p. 226)

The focal topic in the third example is the original Aztec culture as affected by Spanish colonialism. The quantity of phenomena encompassed by the summary is very large, including (a) thousands of Aztec/Spanish cultural encounters across several centuries and (b) multiple aspects of culture. The summary also includes value judgments in the form of appraisals of cultural events from a perspective that favors the Aztecs and faults the Spanish.

History/Anthropology: Much of what we know about the Aztecs and their religion comes filtered through Spanish [priests' and conquistadors'] minds that could not help but seize on the practices most shocking to, and least understood by, them. Across an enormous gulf of language, culture, religion, and ways of organizing the world, the Spaniards tried to reconstruct a coherent system of Aztec beliefs and rituals. Inevitably this attempt led to misinterpretation, oversimplification, distortion, and exaggeration. ( Gardner, 1986, p. 289)

In the fourth example, the topic of concern is human migration and its causes. A world-wide collection of migration activities falls within the purview of the synopsis. This kind of summary typically serves as an introduction to a detailed analysis of the phenomena to which the summary alludes.

Human Geography/Sociology: A simple explanation for migration is that one place pulls on a person--with good wages, freedom, land, or peace--while the place in which the person lives pushes because of low incomes, repression, overcrowding, or war. . . . [But migration] is not a matter of each individual deciding rationally and simply where the best hope for freedom or success lies. It is much more complicated and involves each person's history, beliefs, and family; his country's prior relationships with other nations; and the whole interlocking international web of existing migration routes and patterns. ( Parfit, 1998, p. 16)