ABSTRACT
As a final step, a consumer of research should make an overall judgment on the quality of a research report by considering the report as a whole. The evaluation question being considered is somewhat different from the previous one because this question asks whether the evaluator judges the problem to be important – even if the researcher has failed to make a strong case for its importance. Researchers should reflect on their methodological decisions and share these reflections with their readers. Researchers also should reflect on their interpretations of the data. Such reflections can appear throughout research reports and often are repeated in the Discussion section at the end. By introducing new variables or improved methods, researchers are often able to expand understanding of a problem. When researchers believe their data clearly extend the boundaries of what is known about a research problem, they should state their reasons for this belief.
