Imagine a research problem like: "Do purely online advocacy groups offer more in-depth engagement compared to purely offline ones?" To answer it, you decode what "engagement" and "in-depth" means by doing a series of interviews with reps from both types of advocacy groups. For "engagement", you itemize engagement occurences, matching online with offline counterparts (e.g., online/offline registrations). For "in-depth", you define a bunch of KPIs based on literature. In both cases, you create results. Itemized engagement occurences, coming from interviews, are primary data, while the KPIs are secondary, since they come from literature. But both are new results. Yet they are not answering your research questions, they are just steps in your methodology. Where do you write them in a paper? Methodology section, or results section? Disclaimer: yes, the example is flawed, but it is merely an illustration, where would you put new knowledge created, if it is merely procedural?
The methodology section should explain and justify how particular methods were developed and used and how the data were collected and analyzed. It should encompass procedure-germane information to establish credibility and to ease repeatability. On the other hand, the findings section should present the results in light of a study’s hypotheses, objectives, or questions. It should not contain results irrelevant to the research questions. Here are two helpful reads.
Bhatt, A. (2021). Advice to authors for avoiding flaws in preparation of original research manuscripts. Perspect Clin Res, 12(4), 229-233. https://doi.org/10.4103/picr.PICR_139_21
Torres-Valladares, D., Ballinas-García, E., Villarreal-Reyes, J., Morales-Álvarez, V., & Ortiz-del-Ánge, C. (2021). Research papers 101: The do’s and don'ts of scientific writing. Materials Today: Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2020.12.708
Good luck,
I would write the presently received Crohnbach's alphas for used scales in the method section, not in the result section.
Well, some times a quantitative analysis plays a vital role. Methodology is also important by the way.
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