Worksheet: Findings

Here’s a worksheet that explains how your findings can be displayed. You can use this example as inspiration for your future findings.

Findings

Your findings are the concepts from your qualitative analysis (themes about impact, causes/catalysts, new or surprising insights, or meta-level insights) that you have identified to bring forward to help you prove and improve your program. Your findings are also what will form the basis of your evaluation report. In each of the following Project Impact sessions, we will add new components to your findings and build your full evaluation report.

Each finding should include the following components:

1. Title – Create an interesting title that grabs people 

2. Key Insight – One sentence that summarizes the main idea of your finding. Think of this as your thesis statement for your finding. If people read nothing else, they should have a good sense of what you discovered after reading this.

3. Discussion – Take each of your findings and write a detailed description that explains what you learned from your interviews. Remember Elliot Eisner’s words when you’re doing this: you want your description to be “thick” enough to convey the qualities and energy of what you heard in your interviews and to make what you discovered from your interviews “palpable through prose.” Be sure to interpret the data to explain the meaning and put what you discovered in context for the reader. 

• Be sure to include a few quotes from your interviews to illustrate the key ideas you discuss in your findings. This helps to make the finding real and bring it to life.

4. Significance – This is where you tell us why your finding is important to your program, the people you serve, and others. Connect the dots for the readers and help them understand why your finding matters.

• Why is this important to know? Why does this matter…to our participants, to our program, to our sector, to our society?
• What was encouraging about this finding?
• What was the freshest insight or biggest a-ha?
• What about this finding stretched or challenged our assumptions?

Tips for writing great findings:

• Explain the evidence – Tell us about your finding and what you heard in your interviews that led you to that finding. That will help readers better understand what you discovered.
• Focus on one idea per finding – Your findings should be distinct and should not overlap too much. There will undoubtedly be connections between your findings, but try to stay focused and clearly communicate one central concept per finding. 
• Connect to the data – Use phrases like “The data reveal…,” “The data show…,” and “Throughout our interviews we heard…” throughout your description to show that your findings are rooted in data.
• Use quotes to illustrate your finding – Add one or two good quotes to each finding to provide examples of what you are describing. This brings the data to life! Be sure to integrate your quotes into the narrative and start each one off with a phrase like, “One interviewee said,…”
• Include at least 2-3 “improve” findings – Showing readers that you are identifying areas for improvement as well as positive aspects of your impact makes your findings more credible.