introduction and conclusion

A good introduction asks a question that is answered throughout the paper and answered at the end.

For example, if I did my paper on

gender x rap

race x rap

political party x rap

marital status x rap

age x rap

Then, I might have a question in the introduction like this,

 How does gender, race, political party, marital status and age shape people's opinions and talk about rap music?

And in the conclusion I would incorporate my key findings from both qualitative and quantitative portions of the paper.

So I would want to restate the question and provide my answer; something like this,

This paper sought to understand how gender, race, political party, marital status and age shaped people's opinions and speech about rap music.  Through analysis of quantitative and qualitative data I found that African Americans and Hispanics like rap more than Whites, because they grew up with it, and had friends and family that listened to rap while they were growing up, while Whites were less likely to connect rap to their history, family, or friends.  I found that women do not appreciate rap music as much as men because they find the lyrics sexist. I found that republicans dislike the violent lyrics and thus are less likely to enjoy rap compared to democrats and independents.  I found that married people are less likely than unmarried people to enjoy rap; married folks complain they can't understand the lyrics.  Lastly, I found that young people like rap more than older people, because young people tend to ignore the lyrics and enjoy the beats.

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I also have another suggestion --I did not request the following so it is not a required part of the paper, but another thing a good conclusion does is talk about limitations and future research.  Limitations are things that could impact the quality of the findings, such as a biased sample.  Future research are things you learned from this research that should be studied in similar research in the future.

Here's an example:

There were limitations to this research. The research was not conducted by professional researchers; it was conducted by students, many of whom were practicing this research for the first time. Because we used a convenience sample of each student's family and friends, we definitely did not have a random sample, and that means we should not generalize our findings to other people, time or places.  These findings can still prove useful as comparisons to future research.  This project has uncovered some interesting questions that might be answered in the future.  Regarding rap, future researchers should probe further if young people truly ignore the lyrics or if they just say they ignore the lyrics to defend any stigma of listening to music that is disliked by so many other people.  Also, future research should explore further how democrats -- who typically espouse attitudes of egalitarianism -- can align their political views with rap lyrics.  It would be interesting to probe democrats further about reconciling rap with their political beliefs. In a more general sense, this project has uncovered other questions, such as why social class was not only not significantly related to rap music, but also did not show a significant relationship with any of the twenty one questions we asked about music preferences. Why are so many demographic characteristics related to music, but social class is never one of them?  Similarly, future research should explore why race was significant with almost every question about music -- it was the variable that had a significant relationship with the most questions on music -- 18 of the 21 questions on music showed a statistically significant relationship with race.