conclusion and recommendation in qualitative research

• Results & Discussion

Q: How is the conclusion drawn in qualitative research?

Asked by Bill Sheehan on 09 Jul, 2020

Hello Bill – Welcome to the forum!

Straight away, when you say ‘how is the conclusion drawn,’ we trust it means ‘how you reach the conclusion’ rather than ‘how you write the conclusion.’

The first would depend on the findings of the study and how astutely you analyze them. This in turn would depend on how well you have designed the study, carefully inspected the results, and avoided bias to as much extent as possible. For insights into these aspects, you may refer to these resources:

• What are the possible problems that may be encountered in Qualitative Research?
• How can I evaluate qualitative data from different sources consistently and stringently without becoming too subjective and making too many assumptions?
• 7 Biases to avoid in qualitative research

The second meaning – that of ‘writing’ – is simpler, but of course, needs to come from the conclusion(s) you have drawn.

Having said that, the conclusion of a qualitative study can at times be quite detailed. This would depend on the complexity of the study. A questionnaire about likes and dislikes is simpler to score, interpret, and infer than a focus group, interview, or case study. In the case of a simpler study, you may reiterate the key findings of the study in the conclusion. In the case of a more complex study, which involves deeper analysis and may have some (if not significant) margin of error, you will also need to talk about the limitations and implications of the study.

The limitations may be in the area of methodology, participant response, or data collection. While you may have employed a methodology that seemed robust before starting the study, after the study, you may see opportunities for improvement, which you could include in the conclusion.

In quali research, it becomes especially important to talk about implications as you may not be able to draw some/any conclusions with a significant amount of surety. In these cases, you could talk about what the findings seem to suggest and what further studies they could lead to. Quali studies often tend to build on the previous one. [To see just how detailed the conclusion can get, you may refer to this part-documentation of a study .]

Finally, note that the conclusions are usually written in the Discussion section, but at times, can be a separate section (after the Discussion).

For more insights and information on writing the conclusion, you may refer to these resources:

• Is it okay not to have conclusion but only implication in qualitative research?
• What is meant by relevance to clinical practice?
• How to write the most effective results and discussion sections [Course]

Hope that helps. All the best for wrapping up – and then submitting – your paper!

Answered by Irfan Syed on 10 Jul, 2020

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Chapter 21. Conclusion: The Value of Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is engaging research, in the best sense of the word.

A few of the meanings of engage = to attract or hold by influence or power; to hold the attention of; to induce to participate; to enter into contest with; to bring together or interlock; to deal with at length; to pledge oneself; to begin and carry on an enterprise; to take part or participate; to come together; engaged = to be actively involved in or committed; to greatly interest; to be embedded with. ( Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary )

There really is no “cookbook” for conducting qualitative research. Each study is unique because the social world is rich and full of wonders, and those of us who are curious about it have our own position in that world and our own understandings and experiences we bring with us when we seek to explore it. And yet even though our reports may be subjective, we can do what we can to make them honest and intelligible to everyone else. Learning how to do that is learning how to be a qualitative researcher rather than simply an amateur observer. Helping you understand that and getting you ready for doing so have been the goal of this book.

According to Lareau ( 2021:36 ), excellent qualitative work must include all the following elements: a clear contribution to new knowledge, a succinct assessment of previous literature that shows the holes in the literature, a research question that can be answered with the data in hand, a breadth and depth in the data collection, a clear exposition of the results, a deep analysis that links the evidence to the interpretation, an acknowledgment of disconfirming evidence, a discussion that uses the case as a springboard to reflect on more general concerns, and a full discussion of implications for ideas and practices. The emphasis on rigor, the clear contribution to new knowledge, and the reflection on more general concerns place qualitative research within the “scientific” camp vis-à-vis the “humanistic inquiry” camp of pure description or ideographic approaches. The attention to previous literature and filling the holes in what we know about a phenomenon or case or situation set qualitative research apart from otherwise excellent journalism, which makes no pretensions of writing to or for a larger body of knowledge.

In the magnificently engaging untextbook Rocking Qualitative Social Science , Ashley Rubin ( 2021 ) notes, “Rigorous research does not have to be rigid” ( 3 ). I agree with her claim that there are many ways to get to the top of the mountain, and you can have fun doing so. An ardent rock climber, Rubin calls her approach the Dirtbagger approach, a way of climbing the mountain that is creative, flexible, and definitely outside proscribed methods. Here are eleven lessons offered by Rubin in paraphrase form with commentary and direct quotes noted:

• There is no right way to do qualitative social science, “and people should choose the approach that works for them, for the particular project at hand, given whatever constraints and opportunities are happening in their life at the time. ( 252 )”
• Disagreements about what is proper qualitative research are distracting and misleading.
• Even though research questions are very important, they can and most likely will change during data collection or even data analysis—don’t worry about this.
• Your findings will have a bigger impact if you’ve connected them to previous literature; this shows that you are part of the larger conversation. This “anchor” can be a policy issue or a theoretical debate in the literature, but it need not be either. Sometimes what we do is really novel (but rarely—so always poke around and check before proceeding as if you are inventing the wheel).
• Although there are some rules you really must follow when designing your study (e.g., how to obtain informed consent, defining a sample), unexpected things often happen in the course of data collection that make a mockery of your original plans. Be flexible.
• Sometimes you have chosen a topic for some reason you can’t yet articulate to yourself—the subject or site just calls to you in some way. That’s fine. But you will still need to justify your choice in some way (hint: see number 4 above).
• Pay close attention to your sample: “Think about what you are leaving out, what your data allow you to observe, and what you can do to fill in some of those blanks” (252).  And when you can’t fill them in, be honest about this when writing about the limitations of your study.
• Even if you are doing interviews, archival research, focus groups, or any other method of data collection that does not actually require “going into the field,” you can still approach your work as fieldwork. This means taking fieldnotes or memos about what you are observing and how you are reacting and processing those observations or interviews or interactions or documents. Remember that you yourself are the instrument of data collection, so keep a reflective eye on yourself throughout.
• Memo, memo, memo. There is no magic about how data become findings. It takes a lot of work, a lot of reflection, a lot of writing. Analytic memos are the helpful bridge between all that raw data and the presented findings.
• Rubin strongly rejects the idea that qualitative research cannot make causal claims. I would agree, but only to a point. We don’t make the kinds of predictive causal claims you see in quantitative research, and it can confuse you and lead you down some unpromising paths if you think you can. That said, qualitative research can help demonstrate the causal mechanisms by which something happens. Qualitative research is also helpful in exploring alternative explanations and counterfactuals. If you want to know more about qualitative research and causality, I encourage you to read chapter 10 of Rubin’s text.
• Some people are still skeptical about the value of qualitative research because they don’t understand the rigor required of it and confuse it with journalism or even fiction writing. You are just going to have to deal with this—maybe even people sitting on your committee are going to question your research. So be prepared to defend qualitative research by knowing the common misconceptions and criticisms and how to respond to them. We’ve talked a bit about these in chapter 20, and I also encourage you to read chapter 10 of Rubin’s text for more.

Hopefully, by the time you have reached the end of this book, you will have done a bit of your own qualitative research—maybe you’ve conducted an interview or practiced taking fieldnotes. You may have read some examples of excellent qualitative research and have (hopefully!) come to appreciate the value of this approach. This is a good time, then, to take a step back and think about the ways that qualitative research is valuable, distinct and different from both quantitative methods and humanistic (nonscientific) inquiry.

Researcher Note

Why do you employ qualitative research methods in your area of study?

Across all Western countries, we can observe a strong statistical relationship between young people’s educational attainment and their parent’s level of education. If you have at least one parent who went to university, your own chances of going to and graduating from university are much higher compared to not having university-educated parents. Why this happens is much less clear… This is where qualitative research becomes important: to help us get a clearer understanding of the dynamics that lead to this observed statistical relationship.

In my own research, I go a step further and look at young men and women who have crossed this barrier: they have become the first in their family to go to university. I am interested in finding out why and how first-in-family university students made it to university and how being at university is experienced. In-depth interviews allow me to learn about hopes, aspirations, fears, struggles, resilience and success. Interviews give participants an opportunity to tell their stories in their own words while also validating their experiences.

I often ask the young people I interview what being in my studies means to them. As one of my participants told me, it is good to know that “people like me are worth studying.” I cannot think of a better way to explain why qualitative research is important.

-Wolfgang Lehman, author of Education and Society: Canadian Perspectives

For me personally, the real value of the qualitative approach is that it helps me address the concerns I have about the social world—how people make sense of their lives, how they create strategies to deal with unfair circumstances or systems of oppression, and why they are motivated to act in some situations but not others. Surveys and other forms of large impersonal data collection simply do not allow me to get at these concerns. I appreciate other forms of research for other kinds of questions. This ecumenical approach has served me well in my own career as a sociologist—I’ve used surveys of students to help me describe classed pathways through college and into the workforce, supplemented by interviews and focus groups that help me explain and understand the patterns uncovered by quantitative methods ( Hurst 2019 ). My goal for this book has not been to convince you to become a qualitative researcher exclusively but rather to understand and appreciate its value under the right circumstances (e.g., with the right questions and concerns).

In the same way that we would not use a screwdriver to hammer a nail into the wall, we don’t want to misuse the tools we have at hand. Nor should we critique the screwdriver for its failure to do the hammer’s job. Qualitative research is not about generating predictions or demonstrating causality. We can never statistically generalize our findings from a small sample of people in a particular context to the world at large. But that doesn’t mean we can’t generate better understandings of how the world works, despite “small” samples. Excellent qualitative research does a great job describing (whether through “thick description” or illustrative quotes) a phenomenon, case, or setting and generates deeper insight into the social world through the development of new concepts or identification of patterns and relationships that were previously unknown to us. The two components—accurate description and theoretical insight—are generated together through the iterative process of data analysis, which itself is based on a solid foundation of data collection. And along the way, we can have some fun and meet some interesting people!

Supplement: Twenty Great (engaging, insightful) Books Based on Qualitative Research

Armstrong, Elizabeth A. and Laura T. Hamilton. 2015. Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bourgois, Phillipe and Jeffrey Schonberg. 2009. Righteous Dopefiend . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

DiTomaso, Nancy. 2013. The American Non-dilemma: Racial Inequality without Racism . Thousand Oaks, CA; SAGE.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2010. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America . New York: Metropolitan Books.

Fine, Gary Alan. 2018. Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ghodsee, Kristen Rogheh. 2011. Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism . Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Gowan, Teresa. 2010. Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Graeber, David. 2013. The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement . New York: Spiegel & Grau.

Grazian, David. 2015. American Zoo: A Sociological Safari . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hartigan, John. 1999. Racial Situations: Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Ho, Karen Zouwen. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2018. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right . New York: New Press.

Lamont, Michèle. 1994. Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lareau, Annette. 2011. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. 2nd ed with an Update a Decade Later. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Leondar-Wright, Betsy. 2014. Missing Class: Strengthening Social Movement Groups by Seeing Class Cultures . Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.

Macleod, Jay. 2008. Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood . 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.

Newman, Katherine T. 2000. No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City . 3rd ed. New York: Vintage Press.

Sherman, Rachel. 2006. Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Streib, Jessi. 2015. The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stuber, Jenny M. 2011. Inside the College Gates: How Class and Culture Matter in Higher Education . Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books.

Introduction to Qualitative Research Methods Copyright © 2023 by Allison Hurst is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Careers in Qual

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• Dissertation

How to Write a Thesis or Dissertation Conclusion

Published on September 6, 2022 by Tegan George and Shona McCombes. Revised on November 20, 2023.

The conclusion is the very last part of your thesis or dissertation . It should be concise and engaging, leaving your reader with a clear understanding of your main findings, as well as the answer to your research question .

In it, you should:

• Clearly state the answer to your main research question
• Summarize and reflect on your research process
• Make recommendations for future work on your thesis or dissertation topic
• Show what new knowledge you have contributed to your field
• Wrap up your thesis or dissertation

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Table of contents

Discussion vs. conclusion, how long should your conclusion be, step 1: answer your research question, step 2: summarize and reflect on your research, step 3: make future recommendations, step 4: emphasize your contributions to your field, step 5: wrap up your thesis or dissertation, full conclusion example, conclusion checklist, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about conclusion sections.

While your conclusion contains similar elements to your discussion section , they are not the same thing.

Your conclusion should be shorter and more general than your discussion. Instead of repeating literature from your literature review , discussing specific research results , or interpreting your data in detail, concentrate on making broad statements that sum up the most important insights of your research.

As a rule of thumb, your conclusion should not introduce new data, interpretations, or arguments.

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Depending on whether you are writing a thesis or dissertation, your length will vary. Generally, a conclusion should make up around 5–7% of your overall word count.

An empirical scientific study will often have a short conclusion, concisely stating the main findings and recommendations for future research. A humanities dissertation topic or systematic review , on the other hand, might require more space to conclude its analysis, tying all the previous sections together in an overall argument.

Your conclusion should begin with the main question that your thesis or dissertation aimed to address. This is your final chance to show that you’ve done what you set out to do, so make sure to formulate a clear, concise answer.

• Don’t repeat a list of all the results that you already discussed
• Do synthesize them into a final takeaway that the reader will remember.

An empirical thesis or dissertation conclusion may begin like this:

A case study –based thesis or dissertation conclusion may begin like this:

In the second example, the research aim is not directly restated, but rather added implicitly to the statement. To avoid repeating yourself, it is helpful to reformulate your aims and questions into an overall statement of what you did and how you did it.

Your conclusion is an opportunity to remind your reader why you took the approach you did, what you expected to find, and how well the results matched your expectations.

To avoid repetition , consider writing more reflectively here, rather than just writing a summary of each preceding section. Consider mentioning the effectiveness of your methodology , or perhaps any new questions or unexpected insights that arose in the process.

You can also mention any limitations of your research, but only if you haven’t already included these in the discussion. Don’t dwell on them at length, though—focus on the positives of your work.

• While x limits the generalizability of the results, this approach provides new insight into y .
• This research clearly illustrates x , but it also raises the question of y .

You may already have made a few recommendations for future research in your discussion section, but the conclusion is a good place to elaborate and look ahead, considering the implications of your findings in both theoretical and practical terms.

• Based on these conclusions, practitioners should consider …
• To better understand the implications of these results, future studies could address …
• Further research is needed to determine the causes of/effects of/relationship between …

When making recommendations for further research, be sure not to undermine your own work. Relatedly, while future studies might confirm, build on, or enrich your conclusions, they shouldn’t be required for your argument to feel complete. Your work should stand alone on its own merits.

Just as you should avoid too much self-criticism, you should also avoid exaggerating the applicability of your research. If you’re making recommendations for policy, business, or other practical implementations, it’s generally best to frame them as “shoulds” rather than “musts.” All in all, the purpose of academic research is to inform, explain, and explore—not to demand.

Make sure your reader is left with a strong impression of what your research has contributed to the state of your field.

Some strategies to achieve this include:

• Returning to your problem statement to explain how your research helps solve the problem
• Referring back to the literature review and showing how you have addressed a gap in knowledge
• Discussing how your findings confirm or challenge an existing theory or assumption

Again, avoid simply repeating what you’ve already covered in the discussion in your conclusion. Instead, pick out the most important points and sum them up succinctly, situating your project in a broader context.

The end is near! Once you’ve finished writing your conclusion, it’s time to wrap up your thesis or dissertation with a few final steps:

• It’s a good idea to write your abstract next, while the research is still fresh in your mind.
• Next, make sure your reference list is complete and correctly formatted. To speed up the process, you can use our free APA citation generator .
• Once you’ve added any appendices , you can create a table of contents and title page .
• Finally, read through the whole document again to make sure your thesis is clearly written and free from language errors. You can proofread it yourself , ask a friend, or consider Scribbr’s proofreading and editing service .

Here is an example of how you can write your conclusion section. Notice how it includes everything mentioned above:

V. Conclusion

The current research aimed to identify acoustic speech characteristics which mark the beginning of an exacerbation in COPD patients.

The central questions for this research were as follows: 1. Which acoustic measures extracted from read speech differ between COPD speakers in stable condition and healthy speakers? 2. In what ways does the speech of COPD patients during an exacerbation differ from speech of COPD patients during stable periods?

All recordings were aligned using a script. Subsequently, they were manually annotated to indicate respiratory actions such as inhaling and exhaling. The recordings of 9 stable COPD patients reading aloud were then compared with the recordings of 5 healthy control subjects reading aloud. The results showed a significant effect of condition on the number of in- and exhalations per syllable, the number of non-linguistic in- and exhalations per syllable, and the ratio of voiced and silence intervals. The number of in- and exhalations per syllable and the number of non-linguistic in- and exhalations per syllable were higher for COPD patients than for healthy controls, which confirmed both hypotheses.

However, the higher ratio of voiced and silence intervals for COPD patients compared to healthy controls was not in line with the hypotheses. This unpredicted result might have been caused by the different reading materials or recording procedures for both groups, or by a difference in reading skills. Moreover, there was a trend regarding the effect of condition on the number of syllables per breath group. The number of syllables per breath group was higher for healthy controls than for COPD patients, which was in line with the hypothesis. There was no effect of condition on pitch, intensity, center of gravity, pitch variability, speaking rate, or articulation rate.

This research has shown that the speech of COPD patients in exacerbation differs from the speech of COPD patients in stable condition. This might have potential for the detection of exacerbations. However, sustained vowels rarely occur in spontaneous speech. Therefore, the last two outcome measures might have greater potential for the detection of beginning exacerbations, but further research on the different outcome measures and their potential for the detection of exacerbations is needed due to the limitations of the current study.

Checklist: Conclusion

I have clearly and concisely answered the main research question .

I have summarized my overall argument or key takeaways.

I have mentioned any important limitations of the research.

I have given relevant recommendations .

I have clearly explained what my research has contributed to my field.

I have  not introduced any new data or arguments.

You've written a great conclusion! Use the other checklists to further improve your dissertation.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or research bias, make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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In a thesis or dissertation, the discussion is an in-depth exploration of the results, going into detail about the meaning of your findings and citing relevant sources to put them in context.

The conclusion is more shorter and more general: it concisely answers your main research question and makes recommendations based on your overall findings.

While it may be tempting to present new arguments or evidence in your thesis or disseration conclusion , especially if you have a particularly striking argument you’d like to finish your analysis with, you shouldn’t. Theses and dissertations follow a more formal structure than this.

All your findings and arguments should be presented in the body of the text (more specifically in the discussion section and results section .) The conclusion is meant to summarize and reflect on the evidence and arguments you have already presented, not introduce new ones.

For a stronger dissertation conclusion , avoid including:

• Important evidence or analysis that wasn’t mentioned in the discussion section and results section
• Generic concluding phrases (e.g. “In conclusion …”)
• Weak statements that undermine your argument (e.g., “There are good points on both sides of this issue.”)

Your conclusion should leave the reader with a strong, decisive impression of your work.

The conclusion of your thesis or dissertation shouldn’t take up more than 5–7% of your overall word count.

The conclusion of your thesis or dissertation should include the following:

• A restatement of your research question
• A summary of your key arguments and/or results
• A short discussion of the implications of your research

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Writing Conclusions and Recommendations for a Qualitative Research

Having the data analyzed and interpreted, it is time to write the research report. A research report or write-up is prepared after a study was completed. It provides a scientific narration of the research problem and its literature, the procedures undertaken, the presentation, analysis, and interpretation of data, and the conclusions and recommendations drawn out from the findings. The research write-up must be communicated to interested research stakeholders so that the results can be shared and recommendations can be implemented.

Conclusions and Recommendations

What are the guidelines in making conclusions and recommendations? Most research studies end with conclusions and recommendations. Conclusions are abstractions generated from the findings that answer the specific questions. Recommendations, on the other hand, are suggestive statements that put the research findings into practical utility of the stakeholders. They may also be suggestions for further investigation to improve the use of the present research findings by all interested parties.

Guidelines in Writing the Conclusions

In writing the conclusions, the following ideas may be considered:

• Conclusions are inferences, implications, interpretations, general statements, and/or generalizations based upon the results or findings of the study.
• Conclusions should properly answer the specific questions presented at the start of the investigation.
• Conclusions should be expressed in a concise statement that conveys all the important information.
• Conclusions should be stated in a strong, clear, and definite manner.
• Conclusions should pertain only to the subject or topic of the study.
• Conclusions should not include repetitions of the statements in the study.

Guidelines in Writing the Recommendations

In writing recommendations, the following pointers may be taken into account:

• Recommendations should aim to solve problems discovered in the study.
• Recommendations should be based only within the context of the research problem. If it is not within the scope of the study, it is irrelevant.
• Recommendations can be statements signifying continuance of a good practice and for its improvement.
• Recommendations should be doable, attainable, and practical. It must also be logical, rational, and valid.
• Recommendations can be addressed to individuals, agencies, institutions, or offices to whom or which in a proper position to implement them.
• Recommendations should be for further research on the same topic. It can cover other places to confirm and validate the study.

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How to Write a Conclusion for Research Papers (with Examples)

The conclusion of a research paper is a crucial section that plays a significant role in the overall impact and effectiveness of your research paper. However, this is also the section that typically receives less attention compared to the introduction and the body of the paper. The conclusion serves to provide a concise summary of the key findings, their significance, their implications, and a sense of closure to the study. Discussing how can the findings be applied in real-world scenarios or inform policy, practice, or decision-making is especially valuable to practitioners and policymakers. The research paper conclusion also provides researchers with clear insights and valuable information for their own work, which they can then build on and contribute to the advancement of knowledge in the field.

The research paper conclusion should explain the significance of your findings within the broader context of your field. It restates how your results contribute to the existing body of knowledge and whether they confirm or challenge existing theories or hypotheses. Also, by identifying unanswered questions or areas requiring further investigation, your awareness of the broader research landscape can be demonstrated.

Remember to tailor the research paper conclusion to the specific needs and interests of your intended audience, which may include researchers, practitioners, policymakers, or a combination of these.

Table of Contents

What is a conclusion in a research paper, summarizing conclusion, editorial conclusion, externalizing conclusion, importance of a good research paper conclusion, how to write a conclusion for your research paper, research paper conclusion examples, frequently asked questions.

A conclusion in a research paper is the final section where you summarize and wrap up your research, presenting the key findings and insights derived from your study. The research paper conclusion is not the place to introduce new information or data that was not discussed in the main body of the paper. When working on how to conclude a research paper, remember to stick to summarizing and interpreting existing content. The research paper conclusion serves the following purposes: 1

• Warn readers of the possible consequences of not attending to the problem.
• Recommend specific course(s) of action.
• Restate key ideas to drive home the ultimate point of your research paper.
• Provide a “take-home” message that you want the readers to remember about your study.

Types of conclusions for research papers

In research papers, the conclusion provides closure to the reader. The type of research paper conclusion you choose depends on the nature of your study, your goals, and your target audience. I provide you with three common types of conclusions:

A summarizing conclusion is the most common type of conclusion in research papers. It involves summarizing the main points, reiterating the research question, and restating the significance of the findings. This common type of research paper conclusion is used across different disciplines.

An editorial conclusion is less common but can be used in research papers that are focused on proposing or advocating for a particular viewpoint or policy. It involves presenting a strong editorial or opinion based on the research findings and offering recommendations or calls to action.

An externalizing conclusion is a type of conclusion that extends the research beyond the scope of the paper by suggesting potential future research directions or discussing the broader implications of the findings. This type of conclusion is often used in more theoretical or exploratory research papers.

The conclusion in a research paper serves several important purposes:

• Offers Implications and Recommendations : Your research paper conclusion is an excellent place to discuss the broader implications of your research and suggest potential areas for further study. It’s also an opportunity to offer practical recommendations based on your findings.
• Provides Closure : A good research paper conclusion provides a sense of closure to your paper. It should leave the reader with a feeling that they have reached the end of a well-structured and thought-provoking research project.
• Leaves a Lasting Impression : Writing a well-crafted research paper conclusion leaves a lasting impression on your readers. It’s your final opportunity to leave them with a new idea, a call to action, or a memorable quote.

Writing a strong conclusion for your research paper is essential to leave a lasting impression on your readers. Here’s a step-by-step process to help you create and know what to put in the conclusion of a research paper: 2

• Research Statement : Begin your research paper conclusion by restating your research statement. This reminds the reader of the main point you’ve been trying to prove throughout your paper. Keep it concise and clear.
• Key Points : Summarize the main arguments and key points you’ve made in your paper. Avoid introducing new information in the research paper conclusion. Instead, provide a concise overview of what you’ve discussed in the body of your paper.
• Address the Research Questions : If your research paper is based on specific research questions or hypotheses, briefly address whether you’ve answered them or achieved your research goals. Discuss the significance of your findings in this context.
• Significance : Highlight the importance of your research and its relevance in the broader context. Explain why your findings matter and how they contribute to the existing knowledge in your field.
• Implications : Explore the practical or theoretical implications of your research. How might your findings impact future research, policy, or real-world applications? Consider the “so what?” question.
• Future Research : Offer suggestions for future research in your area. What questions or aspects remain unanswered or warrant further investigation? This shows that your work opens the door for future exploration.
• Closing Thought : Conclude your research paper conclusion with a thought-provoking or memorable statement. This can leave a lasting impression on your readers and wrap up your paper effectively. Avoid introducing new information or arguments here.
• Proofread and Revise : Carefully proofread your conclusion for grammar, spelling, and clarity. Ensure that your ideas flow smoothly and that your conclusion is coherent and well-structured.

Remember that a well-crafted research paper conclusion is a reflection of the strength of your research and your ability to communicate its significance effectively. It should leave a lasting impression on your readers and tie together all the threads of your paper. Now you know how to start the conclusion of a research paper and what elements to include to make it impactful, let’s look at a research paper conclusion sample.

The research paper conclusion is a crucial part of your paper as it provides the final opportunity to leave a strong impression on your readers. In the research paper conclusion, summarize the main points of your research paper by restating your research statement, highlighting the most important findings, addressing the research questions or objectives, explaining the broader context of the study, discussing the significance of your findings, providing recommendations if applicable, and emphasizing the takeaway message. The main purpose of the conclusion is to remind the reader of the main point or argument of your paper and to provide a clear and concise summary of the key findings and their implications. All these elements should feature on your list of what to put in the conclusion of a research paper to create a strong final statement for your work.

A strong conclusion is a critical component of a research paper, as it provides an opportunity to wrap up your arguments, reiterate your main points, and leave a lasting impression on your readers. Here are the key elements of a strong research paper conclusion: 1. Conciseness : A research paper conclusion should be concise and to the point. It should not introduce new information or ideas that were not discussed in the body of the paper. 2. Summarization : The research paper conclusion should be comprehensive enough to give the reader a clear understanding of the research’s main contributions. 3 . Relevance : Ensure that the information included in the research paper conclusion is directly relevant to the research paper’s main topic and objectives; avoid unnecessary details. 4 . Connection to the Introduction : A well-structured research paper conclusion often revisits the key points made in the introduction and shows how the research has addressed the initial questions or objectives. 5. Emphasis : Highlight the significance and implications of your research. Why is your study important? What are the broader implications or applications of your findings? 6 . Call to Action : Include a call to action or a recommendation for future research or action based on your findings.

The length of a research paper conclusion can vary depending on several factors, including the overall length of the paper, the complexity of the research, and the specific journal requirements. While there is no strict rule for the length of a conclusion, but it’s generally advisable to keep it relatively short. A typical research paper conclusion might be around 5-10% of the paper’s total length. For example, if your paper is 10 pages long, the conclusion might be roughly half a page to one page in length.

In general, you do not need to include citations in the research paper conclusion. Citations are typically reserved for the body of the paper to support your arguments and provide evidence for your claims. However, there may be some exceptions to this rule: 1. If you are drawing a direct quote or paraphrasing a specific source in your research paper conclusion, you should include a citation to give proper credit to the original author. 2. If your conclusion refers to or discusses specific research, data, or sources that are crucial to the overall argument, citations can be included to reinforce your conclusion’s validity.

The conclusion of a research paper serves several important purposes: 1. Summarize the Key Points 2. Reinforce the Main Argument 3. Provide Closure 4. Offer Insights or Implications 5. Engage the Reader. 6. Reflect on Limitations

Remember that the primary purpose of the research paper conclusion is to leave a lasting impression on the reader, reinforcing the key points and providing closure to your research. It’s often the last part of the paper that the reader will see, so it should be strong and well-crafted.

• Makar, G., Foltz, C., Lendner, M., & Vaccaro, A. R. (2018). How to write effective discussion and conclusion sections. Clinical spine surgery, 31(8), 345-346.
• Bunton, D. (2005). The structure of PhD conclusion chapters.  Journal of English for academic purposes ,  4 (3), 207-224.

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Research Recommendations – Examples and Writing Guide

Table of Contents

Research Recommendations

Definition:

Research recommendations refer to suggestions or advice given to someone who is looking to conduct research on a specific topic or area. These recommendations may include suggestions for research methods, data collection techniques, sources of information, and other factors that can help to ensure that the research is conducted in a rigorous and effective manner. Research recommendations may be provided by experts in the field, such as professors, researchers, or consultants, and are intended to help guide the researcher towards the most appropriate and effective approach to their research project.

Parts of Research Recommendations

Research recommendations can vary depending on the specific project or area of research, but typically they will include some or all of the following parts:

• Research question or objective : This is the overarching goal or purpose of the research project.
• Research methods : This includes the specific techniques and strategies that will be used to collect and analyze data. The methods will depend on the research question and the type of data being collected.
• Data collection: This refers to the process of gathering information or data that will be used to answer the research question. This can involve a range of different methods, including surveys, interviews, observations, or experiments.
• Data analysis : This involves the process of examining and interpreting the data that has been collected. This can involve statistical analysis, qualitative analysis, or a combination of both.
• Results and conclusions: This section summarizes the findings of the research and presents any conclusions or recommendations based on those findings.
• Limitations and future research: This section discusses any limitations of the study and suggests areas for future research that could build on the findings of the current project.

How to Write Research Recommendations

Writing research recommendations involves providing specific suggestions or advice to a researcher on how to conduct their study. Here are some steps to consider when writing research recommendations:

• Understand the research question: Before writing research recommendations, it is important to have a clear understanding of the research question and the objectives of the study. This will help to ensure that the recommendations are relevant and appropriate.
• Consider the research methods: Consider the most appropriate research methods that could be used to collect and analyze data that will address the research question. Identify the strengths and weaknesses of the different methods and how they might apply to the specific research question.
• Provide specific recommendations: Provide specific and actionable recommendations that the researcher can implement in their study. This can include recommendations related to sample size, data collection techniques, research instruments, data analysis methods, or other relevant factors.
• Justify recommendations : Justify why each recommendation is being made and how it will help to address the research question or objective. It is important to provide a clear rationale for each recommendation to help the researcher understand why it is important.
• Consider limitations and ethical considerations : Consider any limitations or potential ethical considerations that may arise in conducting the research. Provide recommendations for addressing these issues or mitigating their impact.
• Summarize recommendations: Provide a summary of the recommendations at the end of the report or document, highlighting the most important points and emphasizing how the recommendations will contribute to the overall success of the research project.

Example of Research Recommendations

Example of Research Recommendations sample for students:

• Further investigate the effects of X on Y by conducting a larger-scale randomized controlled trial with a diverse population.
• Explore the relationship between A and B by conducting qualitative interviews with individuals who have experience with both.
• Investigate the long-term effects of intervention C by conducting a follow-up study with participants one year after completion.
• Examine the effectiveness of intervention D in a real-world setting by conducting a field study in a naturalistic environment.
• Compare and contrast the results of this study with those of previous research on the same topic to identify any discrepancies or inconsistencies in the findings.
• Expand upon the limitations of this study by addressing potential confounding variables and conducting further analyses to control for them.
• Investigate the relationship between E and F by conducting a meta-analysis of existing literature on the topic.
• Explore the potential moderating effects of variable G on the relationship between H and I by conducting subgroup analyses.
• Identify potential areas for future research based on the gaps in current literature and the findings of this study.
• Conduct a replication study to validate the results of this study and further establish the generalizability of the findings.

Applications of Research Recommendations

Research recommendations are important as they provide guidance on how to improve or solve a problem. The applications of research recommendations are numerous and can be used in various fields. Some of the applications of research recommendations include:

• Policy-making: Research recommendations can be used to develop policies that address specific issues. For example, recommendations from research on climate change can be used to develop policies that reduce carbon emissions and promote sustainability.
• Program development: Research recommendations can guide the development of programs that address specific issues. For example, recommendations from research on education can be used to develop programs that improve student achievement.
• Product development : Research recommendations can guide the development of products that meet specific needs. For example, recommendations from research on consumer behavior can be used to develop products that appeal to consumers.
• Marketing strategies: Research recommendations can be used to develop effective marketing strategies. For example, recommendations from research on target audiences can be used to develop marketing strategies that effectively reach specific demographic groups.
• Medical practice : Research recommendations can guide medical practitioners in providing the best possible care to patients. For example, recommendations from research on treatments for specific conditions can be used to improve patient outcomes.
• Scientific research: Research recommendations can guide future research in a specific field. For example, recommendations from research on a specific disease can be used to guide future research on treatments and cures for that disease.

Purpose of Research Recommendations

The purpose of research recommendations is to provide guidance on how to improve or solve a problem based on the findings of research. Research recommendations are typically made at the end of a research study and are based on the conclusions drawn from the research data. The purpose of research recommendations is to provide actionable advice to individuals or organizations that can help them make informed decisions, develop effective strategies, or implement changes that address the issues identified in the research.

The main purpose of research recommendations is to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from researchers to practitioners, policymakers, or other stakeholders who can benefit from the research findings. Recommendations can help bridge the gap between research and practice by providing specific actions that can be taken based on the research results. By providing clear and actionable recommendations, researchers can help ensure that their findings are put into practice, leading to improvements in various fields, such as healthcare, education, business, and public policy.

Characteristics of Research Recommendations

Research recommendations are a key component of research studies and are intended to provide practical guidance on how to apply research findings to real-world problems. The following are some of the key characteristics of research recommendations:

• Actionable : Research recommendations should be specific and actionable, providing clear guidance on what actions should be taken to address the problem identified in the research.
• Evidence-based: Research recommendations should be based on the findings of the research study, supported by the data collected and analyzed.
• Contextual: Research recommendations should be tailored to the specific context in which they will be implemented, taking into account the unique circumstances and constraints of the situation.
• Feasible : Research recommendations should be realistic and feasible, taking into account the available resources, time constraints, and other factors that may impact their implementation.
• Prioritized: Research recommendations should be prioritized based on their potential impact and feasibility, with the most important recommendations given the highest priority.
• Communicated effectively: Research recommendations should be communicated clearly and effectively, using language that is understandable to the target audience.
• Evaluated : Research recommendations should be evaluated to determine their effectiveness in addressing the problem identified in the research, and to identify opportunities for improvement.

Advantages of Research Recommendations

Research recommendations have several advantages, including:

• Providing practical guidance: Research recommendations provide practical guidance on how to apply research findings to real-world problems, helping to bridge the gap between research and practice.
• Improving decision-making: Research recommendations help decision-makers make informed decisions based on the findings of research, leading to better outcomes and improved performance.
• Enhancing accountability : Research recommendations can help enhance accountability by providing clear guidance on what actions should be taken, and by providing a basis for evaluating progress and outcomes.
• Informing policy development : Research recommendations can inform the development of policies that are evidence-based and tailored to the specific needs of a given situation.
• Enhancing knowledge transfer: Research recommendations help facilitate the transfer of knowledge from researchers to practitioners, policymakers, or other stakeholders who can benefit from the research findings.
• Encouraging further research : Research recommendations can help identify gaps in knowledge and areas for further research, encouraging continued exploration and discovery.
• Promoting innovation: Research recommendations can help identify innovative solutions to complex problems, leading to new ideas and approaches.

Limitations of Research Recommendations

While research recommendations have several advantages, there are also some limitations to consider. These limitations include:

• Context-specific: Research recommendations may be context-specific and may not be applicable in all situations. Recommendations developed in one context may not be suitable for another context, requiring adaptation or modification.
• I mplementation challenges: Implementation of research recommendations may face challenges, such as lack of resources, resistance to change, or lack of buy-in from stakeholders.
• Limited scope: Research recommendations may be limited in scope, focusing only on a specific issue or aspect of a problem, while other important factors may be overlooked.
• Uncertainty : Research recommendations may be uncertain, particularly when the research findings are inconclusive or when the recommendations are based on limited data.
• Bias : Research recommendations may be influenced by researcher bias or conflicts of interest, leading to recommendations that are not in the best interests of stakeholders.
• Timing : Research recommendations may be time-sensitive, requiring timely action to be effective. Delayed action may result in missed opportunities or reduced effectiveness.
• Lack of evaluation: Research recommendations may not be evaluated to determine their effectiveness or impact, making it difficult to assess whether they are successful or not.

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Burt J, Campbell J, Abel G, et al. Improving patient experience in primary care: a multimethod programme of research on the measurement and improvement of patient experience. Southampton (UK): NIHR Journals Library; 2017 Apr. (Programme Grants for Applied Research, No. 5.9.)

Improving patient experience in primary care: a multimethod programme of research on the measurement and improvement of patient experience.

Chapter 12 conclusions, implications for practice and recommendations for future research.

• Conclusions

In Chapter 1 we outlined how, following the introduction of a wide range of quality improvement strategies as part of an overarching ‘clinical governance’ strategy in the late 1990s, there had been step changes in the management of major chronic diseases in the NHS. However, the ways in which patients experienced health care had not been given such a priority and the need for a rebalancing was seen by increasing attention to patient experience in policy documents, the routine publication of patient experience data, benchmarking of hospitals in relation to patient experience and even an (ill-fated) attempt to attach payments to patients’ assessments of their GP ’s care.

There has therefore been widespread acceptance that good patient experience is an important outcome of care in its own right and our work 304 and that of others 305 has shown that patient experience is a domain of quality that is distinct from, but complementary to, the quality of clinical care. Although an increasing number of surveys have been developed to measure patient experience, there has been equally widespread acceptance that these measures have not been very effective at actually improving care. 45 This is the background to our programme of work. Entitled IMPROVE , we aimed to find better ways of both measuring and using information on patient experience that would lead to improvements in patient care in both in-hours and out-of-hours primary care settings.

In the introduction, we described a range of ways of obtaining patient feedback on their care, including surveys, focus groups and analysis of complaints. In this programme, we have focused on the use of patient surveys as they are the dominant method currently used in the UK. However, in Chapter 10 we describe an exploratory trial of RTF , which moves away from the paper-based questionnaires that still dominate the measurement of patient experience in the NHS.

This programme had seven aims, each of which was tied closely to one work package of research. These aims were to:

• understand how general practices respond to low patient survey scores, testing a range of approaches that could be used to improve patients’ experience of care
• estimate the extent to which aggregation of scores to practice level in the national study masks differences between individual doctors
• investigate how patients’ ratings on questions in the GP Patient Survey relate to actual behaviour by GPs in consultations
• understand better patients’ responses to questions on communication and seeing a doctor of their choice
• understand the reasons why minority ethnic groups, especially South Asian populations, give lower scores on patient surveys than the white British population
• carry out an exploratory RCT of an intervention to improve patient experience, using tools developed in earlier parts of the programme
• investigate how the results of the GP Patient Survey can be used to improve patients’ experience of out-of-hours care.

The aims of the programme did not change during the 5 years of our research, although some details of the research were modified as the work progressed (we have summarised any changes in each individual chapter). We presented the results of our research under three broad headings and also use these headings in this conclusions chapter, namely:

• understanding patient experience data (aims 3 and 4)
• understanding patient experience in minority ethnic groups (aim 5)
• using data on patient experience for quality improvement (aims 1, 2, 6 and 7).

Understanding patient experience data

Patient surveys are now widely used in many countries, yet still comparatively little is known about what experiences lead patients to respond in particular ways in these surveys. What drives them to tick particular boxes and how do those responses relate to the care that they have actually received? We approached this in two main studies, one in which we asked patients directly about how they chose certain items on the questionnaire while showing them a video of their consultation (see Chapter 2 ) and one in which we compared their responses with those of expert raters using two standard instruments for assessing videos of consultations (see Chapter 3 ). The results of these studies have important implications for the interpretation of survey data, particularly data focused on patient evaluations of specific encounters with health-care professionals.

The first study (see Chapter 2 ) showed that, although patients readily criticised their care when reviewing GP consultations on video, they had been reluctant to be critical when completing a questionnaire after the consultation. Reasons for this included the need to maintain a relationship with the GP (including uncertainty about how confidential survey results would be) and their gratitude for the care that they had received from the NHS in the past. In addition, perceived power asymmetries made people reluctant to criticise their doctor. Patients were also disinclined to be critical when completing a questionnaire if they had actually received the treatment that they wanted. Overall, we concluded that patients find that questionnaires administered at the point of care may be limited tools for being able to feed back concerns about primary care consultations.

The second study (see Chapter 3 ) reinforced our conclusion from Chapter 2 that patient evaluations of consultations in surveys may present an uncritical view of the actual consultations. In this study videotapes of GP –patient consultations were assessed by four independent clinical raters. The results were striking. When trained raters rated communication within a consultation to be of a high standard, patients did the same (with one single exception). However, when trained raters judged the communication during a consultation to be of a poor standard, patients’ assessments varied from poor to very good. This finding again points to the reluctance of patients to criticise their doctor in questionnaire surveys. In the previous study the ‘gold standard’ was the patient’s own account of the consultation and in this study the standard was that of a trained external GP rater.

We do not think that these results mean that patient surveys cannot be used to assess the quality of general practice care. However, they do point to clear limitations. One of the concerns that GPs have about surveys (see Chapters 7 and 8 ) is that they are selectively completed by critical or grumpy patients and that survey results will therefore give a negative and biased view of their care. The results of the two studies described here suggest that the opposite is the case. Patients’ reluctance to criticise their doctor means that survey responses using evaluative type of questions are likely to give an overly positive view of their doctor’s care. This is one reason why there has been a move towards using report items in some survey instruments (though we do not know whether or not these suffer from similar problems). Because of this tendency for patients to choose the most positive response options, we suggest that absolute scores should be treated with some caution, as they may present an overly optimistic view of their care. However, this does not mean that surveys cannot be used to look at relative scores: scores from a GP that are lower than those of his or her colleagues and from GPs in other practices are likely to indicate a problem, even though high scores from other doctors or practices may conceal deficiencies in care in those practices too.

We also looked at how GPs rated their own consultations. GPs completed a form immediately after each consultation, using the same scale as the patients. GPs were certainly more inclined to criticise themselves than the patients were to criticise the care that they had received. This is entirely consistent with the findings from our subsequent interviews with patients. However, we found absolutely no correlation between patient scores and GP scores. Neither did we find any correlation between GPs’ own scores and those of expert raters who reviewed the consultations on video. GPs are clearly using different parameters when assessing their own performance, but we were not able to investigate this in more detail in this study.

When we spoke to GPs about their survey results (see Chapters 7 and 8 ), through both focus groups and face-to-face interviews, they reported how, although positive about the concept of patient feedback, they struggled to engage with and make changes under the current approaches to measurement. They also commonly expressed concern that patients would be critical of their care if they did not get what they wanted (e.g. an antibiotic prescription). This concern was borne out to some extent by our results. In our analysis of the assessment of nurses (see Chapter 4 ), a strong predictor of survey scores was whether or not patients wanted to see a nurse when they first contacted the practice. If they had wanted to see a GP but saw a nurse, the scores given to those nurses were much lower. We have no reason to think that the nurses’ communication was worse in those consultations and the low scores may therefore indicate a more general dissatisfaction of patients because of not having their original expectations met.

It is important to understand that, in line with the overall aims of the programme, the work in these two chapters focused on the assessment of communication in the primary care consultation (such as giving the patient enough time and explaining tests and treatments). Our conclusion that survey scores have more value in assessing relative performance than absolute performance of doctors may or may not hold true for other aspects of practice performance commonly assessed in surveys, such as difficulty in getting appointments, getting through on the telephone and waiting times. Patients’ reasons for not wanting to criticise their doctor may be less important when they assess what they regard as management aspects of the practice.

A second aspect of care that we identified as part of our programme of work relates to patients’ ability to see a GP of their choice. Although most of our research focused on communication, the results that we report in Chapter 4 have some important findings in relation to patient choice. 142 The results show that most patients have a particular GP who they prefer to see. It is sometimes suggested that this matters only for some population groups (e.g. not young people) but we found that this is not the case. Even among those aged 18–24 years, > 50% of respondents to the GP Patient Survey have a particular doctor who they prefer to see, rising to > 80% in those aged > 75 years. Disturbingly, a large percentage of people who have such a preference are unable to see the doctor of their choice. This percentage has risen from 30% to 40% from 2010 to 2015. One possible impact of this change comes from our analysis of data from patients who saw a nurse when they had originally wanted to see a doctor; they expressed considerable dissatisfaction with their subsequent consultation with the nurse. However, these data do not reflect what would have happened if patients had seen another doctor, just not the one of their choice.

Overall, patients express more negative opinions about choice of doctor than in any other part of the GP Patient Survey, something that may in part have got worse as a result of government policies to improve access. There is a clear tension between the ability of practices to provide rapid access and the ability of practices to provide continuity of care and data from our studies suggest that patients’ inability to see a doctor of their choice is a significant quality issue for the NHS.

Understanding patient experience in minority ethnic groups

In this part of our research, we focused our main work on survey responses from minority ethnic groups and on South Asian groups in particular. The general interest in minority ethnic groups is because they tend to report worse experiences using surveys in most countries studied, including in the UK. Our research on out-of-hours care in this programme ( see Chapter 11 ) replicated this result, with Asian and mixed ethnic groups reporting worse experiences than the white majority.

Our specific focus in the major strand of this research was on South Asian respondents because of the size of this group in England and the consistently low scores generated by this group in English surveys across both primary and secondary care settings. We focused on questionnaires competed in English; although the GP Patient Survey is available in 15 languages, a tiny minority of surveys are completed in languages other than English (typically < 0.2% of returns).

A number of potential explanations have been suggested for the lower ratings given by South Asian and other minority ethnic groups. Broadly, these relate to whether these groups of patients (1) receive lower-quality care or (2) receive the same care but rate this more negatively. 75 For example, such respondents might rate the same care more negatively if they have higher expectations or because they interpret the survey items and response options in different ways (such as being culturally less likely to check extreme options).

The last of these options was potentially the simplest to explore. Taking advantage of the large numbers of respondents available in the GP Patient Survey to examine the responses of South Asian groups using item response theory and allowing for a wide range of other sociodemographic characteristics (see Chapter 5 , Workstream 3 ), we found no evidence that South Asian respondents used the scales in a different way from white British respondents. Although these results do not provide conclusive evidence of equivalence in the way in which different respondents use the survey scales, they increase the likelihood that the worse experience reported by South Asian respondents reflects either differences in expectations or genuinely worse care. Our previous work 75 suggested that, for one aspect of care (waiting times), South Asian respondents might have higher expectations of care, implying that their lower scores on surveys might not be associated with worse care. We were able to advance our understanding of this complex issue considerably as a result of the research in this programme.

First, we showed that South Asian respondents to the GP Patient Survey tend to be registered in practices with generally low scores. This explained about half of the difference in reported experience between South Asian and white British patients (see Chapter 5 , Workstream 1 ) and identified that some practice effects were related to the ethnicity of the doctor (with minority ethnic doctors receiving lower scores for doctor–patient communication; see Chapter 5 , Workstream 4 ). However, these practice effects did not account for the low scores among South Asian patients, even though the differences were reduced when practices offered consultations in a South Asian language 172 (PhD project allied to our programme). Next, we showed that, far from being uniform across all population groups, the lower scores from South Asian patients were much more marked among older female respondents. It was therefore important in our subsequent work to ensure that these patients were represented in our research (see Chapter 5 , Workstream 2 ).

In video elicitation interviews with South Asian patients (see Chapter 2 ), we identified the same issues driving evaluations of communication in South Asian as in white British patients: their relationship with their GP (and others within the practice), their expectations of the consultation and a reluctance to criticise their doctor’s performance. The finding that South Asian patients are assessing broadly similar issues when completing questionnaires therefore still leaves unanswered the question of why scores from South Asian patients are low.

The final and most original part of this work provides insight into this (see Chapter 6 ). Here, we filmed 16 simulated consultations based on transcripts of real consultations using various combinations of white and Asian doctors and patients, with half scripted to be ‘good’ and half scripted to be ‘poor’. We showed three randomly sampled videos to each of 1120 people (half of whom were white British and half of whom were Pakistani, equally split between those aged < 55 years and those aged ≥ 55 years) and asked them to score the consultations using the communication items from the GP Patient Survey.

If the low scores reported by South Asian patients in real-life settings were the result of higher expectations on their part, then we would expect them to give lower scores in the experimental vignette situation. However, quite the reverse happened. When viewing the same consultations, South Asian respondents gave scores that were higher, indeed much higher when adjusted for sociodemographic characteristics, than those of the white British respondents. This suggests that the low scores given by South Asian patients in surveys such as the GP Patient Survey reflect care that is genuinely worse, and possibly much worse, than that experienced by their white British counterparts. This is consistent with the only previous study of this type in which predominantly written consultations were shown to people from different ethnic groups in the USA, with the conclusion being that differences in ratings were more likely to represent differences in care than differences in expectations or scale use. 81

There is a clear practice implication of this result: low scores from South Asian patients should be investigated as possible indicators of poor care. This is relevant to all settings, not just primary care.

Using data on patient experience for quality improvement

The results that we have discussed so far indicate that the results of patient experience surveys such as the GP Patient Survey can identify areas where there are important gaps in care that the NHS provides, such as patients being able to see a doctor of their choice. However, although patients tend to give very high scores for doctor–patient communication, these conceal significant negative experiences that patients describe when shown, and which independent observers can see in, recorded primary care consultations. These issues extend to minority ethnic patients and our research suggests that the negative scores that South Asian patients record (compared with those of white British patients) do represent genuine problems with care. This therefore brings us to the important issue of how data from patient surveys can be used to improve care.

Current national approaches to measuring patient experience, including communication, rely on practice-level assessments of care. In Chapter 9 , we outline the results of a patient experience survey that we conducted across 25 general practices, asking patients specifically about their experience of a particular consultation with a named GP . We found that practice-level scores for communication mask considerable variation between GPs within each practice, notably for those practices receiving poorer communication scores overall. Such ‘poorly performing’ practices, which may be identified as such through the national GP Patient Survey, may in fact contain GPs with communication skills ranging from very poor to very good. This has important implications for the use of national survey data to identify primary care practices and practitioners in need of improvement.

In Chapters 7 and 8 we describe the two studies in which we sought the views of GPs and practice staff on survey results, seeking to understand how they could better be used as quality improvement tools. Chapter 7 describes focus groups with practice staff following feedback of practice-level scores for patient experience and Chapter 8 describes interviews with GPs after we had conducted a survey in which they received individual feedback from surveys returned by patients whom they had seen in the surgery. In Chapter 11 , we describe how out-of-hours providers use data from patient surveys.

Broadly, staff in different primary care settings neither believed nor trusted patient surveys. Concerns were expressed about the validity and reliability of surveys (some practices have very low rates of response) and about the likely representativeness of those who responded. Some practice groups mentioned recent negative experiences with pay linked to survey scores as part of the QOF (a technicality of the payment schedule meant that payments could be reduced even though practice performance had improved). There was also a view expressed that some patients had unreasonable expectations: staff worked as hard as they could and could not be expected to respond to all patients’ ‘wants’. Some practices did describe improvements that they had made as a result of survey results. Those that were easiest to engage with related to practices’ office functions such as appointment systems and telephone answering systems. Addressing an individual doctor’s performance (e.g. communication skills) was much more difficult. Out-of-hours service staff were also concerned that service users did not understand the complex care pathways within urgent care settings and that this might lead to unrealistic expectations of what individual services were expected to deliver. Staff viewed surveys as necessary, but not sufficient. Clear preferences for more qualitative feedback to supplement survey scores were expressed as this provided more actionable data on which to mount quality improvement initiatives.

The doctors who we interviewed expressed markedly ambivalent views in discussing feedback from surveys. Although they had a number of concerns about individual doctor surveys (credibility, reliability, concerns about patient motivation), they also expressed positive views about the importance of patient feedback in monitoring and improving services.

These results led us to consider how patient feedback might be obtained in a way that would engage doctors more actively with patient survey results to stimulate quality improvement. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of RTF , using touch screens that patients could use to leave feedback following a primary care consultation. RTF was selected to address some of the problems identified by our research, such as providing practice feedback on a much more regular basis (e.g. fortnightly) and allowing practices the opportunity to add questions of their own to the RTF survey to increase the relevance of the results to their service.

As RTF has not been widely used, an exploratory RCT and qualitative study were conducted to answer questions about the feasibility of using RTF in real-world general practice, estimate likely response rates, obtain patient and staff views on providing feedback in this way and estimate the costs to a practice of introducing RTF. We also included facilitated feedback in one arm of the exploratory trial.

In the exploratory trial, only 2.5% of consulting patients left any RFT without prompting; however, if encouraged to leave RTF by staff, as many as 60% of patients did so. Encouragement was rare, with such encouragement provided in only 5% of > 1100 patient–staff interactions that we observed in reception areas. Of patients who used a touch screen to leave RTF, 86% found it easy to use and were positive about it as a feedback method. Lack of awareness of the screens and lack of time were the most common reasons given for not providing feedback.

Staff were broadly positive about using RTF and practices valued the ability to include their own questions in the survey. Practices that had open communication between staff members tended to be more positive about using patient feedback. Practice staff identified clear benefits from having a facilitated session for discussion of patient feedback and having protected time to discuss the results.

Had practices not been taking part in a research study, the cost of RTF to practices would have been substantial at > £1000 for the 12 weeks, with the bulk of the cost relating to provision of the equipment and analysis and feedback of the data collected from the touch screens.

Although the absolute number of patients providing RTF to each practice (> 100) was comparable to the number of respondents per practice in the national GP Patient Survey, we do now know how the considerably lower response rate in our RTF study (2.5%) would have affected the outcome of the patient experience surveys (it was not part of our study design to find this out). We do not know how representative or valuable the views of a small proportion of patients who respond are, just as we do not know how representative are the views of the very small numbers of patients providing the narrative feedback that is recorded on NHS Choices.

Considering these results together, we have been able to identify some clear learning to take forward into a future clinical trial examining the potential utility and effectiveness of RTF in informing service delivery in primary care.

• Implications for practice

The work that we have carried out over the 5 years of the programme grant has clear implications for practice. We summarise these here.

The importance of patient experience

Our research supports the continuing emphasis on obtaining patient experience feedback as an important means of informing NHS care. Although continuing effort should be invested in refining the most effective and meaningful mechanism to capture high-quality patient feedback, the key challenge is to provide primary care staff with the support and means to enable them to act on patient feedback.

The need for action on the quality of care for minority ethnic groups

There has been much speculation whether the lower scores reported by minority ethnic groups on numerous patient experience surveys are ‘real’, reflecting poorer quality of care, or are an artefact of the questionnaires used or higher expectations of care. We have now conducted a series of studies to progressively examine this issue to understand with greater certainty the major drivers of reported variations in care. Examinations of survey responses, interviews with patients and an innovative experimental vignette study combine to strongly suggest that it is the former: patients from South Asian backgrounds experience considerably poorer communication with GPs than their white British counterparts. It is of concern that survey results may be dismissed as artefactual when, in fact, they are likely to point to real areas of concern. Effort should be invested to ensure that lower scores from such groups on patient experience surveys in both primary care and secondary care are investigated as markers of poorer quality of care.

Patients give overly positive responses when rating their care

Our results show the difficulty that patients have in feeding back negative experiences in questionnaire surveys. This suggests that there is more work to be done in improving patient experience than might be suggested by the high scores that are commonly seen in patient surveys. However, patients’ reluctance to criticise a doctor or provider with whom they have to maintain an ongoing relationship will not be addressed simply by changing the survey method. Efforts should be made to ensure that providers and managers understand that absolute scores paint an optimistic picture of patients’ true views.

Surveys are not sufficient to fully capture patient feedback

Across primary and out-of-hours care settings, staff view patient surveys as necessary, but not sufficient. Alternative methods for gaining more qualitative feedback were commonly used to supplement survey scores, with free text often viewed as providing more actionable data than responses to standard survey questions. Taken alongside our findings on patients’ reluctance to criticise doctors through surveys and staff challenges to the credibility of surveys, we suggest that additional approaches are therefore needed to better capture aspects of patient experience that can be used to improve the quality of care.

The need for valid, reliable individual-level feedback for doctors

Despite the comments above, we have shown that there is substantial variation in performance within practices for aspects of care related to individual doctors (e.g. doctor–patient communication). Reporting patient experience at practice level masks this variation and makes it more difficult for doctors to relate to feedback. However, we have also shown that, if a practice has overall high scores for doctor–patient communication, it is very unlikely that such a practice contains a low-scoring doctor. In contrast, when a practice is low scoring, individual doctors may be high or low scoring. Therefore, if there are additional requirements for individual-level surveys, they could be focused on practices with low overall scores. Additionally, robust mechanisms are required to help practices, particularly lower-scoring practices, identify and support individual doctors whose patient feedback identifies areas of potential improvement.

We note that, at present, data are provided at practice level for the GP Patient Survey, scores are produced at practice level for the Friends and Family Test and GPs have to provide individual-level surveys to meet GMC requirements for revalidation. This results in considerable overlap and duplication and adds to the sense that these are ‘boxes to be ticked’ rather than sources of information that are valuable for improving care.

Patient surveys need to become more meaningful to staff

Our research shows that primary care staff in different settings are ambivalent about the value of patient surveys. Although believing in general about the importance of issues such as doctor–patient communication, they use every opportunity to challenge the credibility and reliability of scores produced by national surveys. This is not helped by their recent experiences, for example of a poorly conceived attempt to tie financial incentives to patient reports of waiting times to get an appointment 306 and the imposition of the Friends and Family Test, which is even regarded by NHS England as being of limited value for comparing health-care organisations. 60

On the whole, practices found it easier to engage with items on surveys that related to practice management (e.g. availability of appointments, ability to get through on the telephone) than to items that related to issues around communication between patients and clinical staff. Staff viewed surveys as necessary, but not sufficient, and expressed a clear preference for qualitative feedback to supplement survey scores as this provided more actionable data on which to mount quality improvement initiatives.

Immediacy of feedback, regularity of feedback and having some control over the questions asked were all aspects of our experiment with RTF that were valued by practices and had the potential to make feedback more useful. However, a number of important questions remain before RTF could be recommended as a replacement for postal questionnaires. We outline these in the next section on research recommendations.

The value of surveys in monitoring national trends

Despite some reservations about the value of national surveys as vehicles for stimulating quality improvement in general practices and out-of-hours services, they can be important for monitoring national trends. For example, the GP Patient Survey is the only source of data which demonstrates that, year on year, from 2010 to 2015, patients report that they have had increasing difficulty in seeing a doctor of their choice. Indeed, for out-of-hours services the GP Patient Survey is the only way to monitor such trends as individual services use very different tools and approaches, precluding comparisons. Additionally, patient feedback – particularly in secondary care – is used for organisational risk assessment and regulatory monitoring. However, when national surveys are used to monitor trends in care it is important that the questions stay the same. In contrast to questions in the GP Patient Survey related to whether or not patients are able to see a doctor of their choice, questions in the survey on access have undergone major changes, making it difficult to follow long-term trends. However, it should be noted that much smaller sample sizes are required to monitor national trends and comparable national surveys often include tens of thousands of participants rather than millions. Our work on out-of-hours care suggests some ways in which the current questions in the GP Patient Survey could be improved.

Development of surveys in out-of-hours care

Our work on the use of patient experience surveys in out-of-hours care highlights a number of areas requiring consideration. National quality requirements (NQR5) state that all out-of-hours services must audit patient experience but provide no information on how to do this. 307 In the absence of clear guidance on tools and approaches, many services are taking different tacks to both collect and act on patient feedback. As well as being inefficient in approach, with little consistency or shared learning, this also precludes national comparisons being made between providers. We suggest that NQR5 should be reviewed and tightened to avoid the duplication of effort occurring in different services.

Second, out-of-hours items from the GP Patient Survey are now being used for the purposes of CQC and National Audit Office monitoring of out-of-hours care. Our research in this area commenced prior to the launch of the CQC and providers knew little about the GP Patient Survey and expressed concern about the relevance of the out-of-hours items. Our research suggests that, subject to minor amendments, the GP Patient Survey is suitable for this kind of national monitoring of out-of-hours care; indeed, it is the only current approach suitable for monitoring, given the variation in approaches to patient feedback currently taken by service providers. However, although the GP Patient Survey enables the use of benchmarking, it is not sufficiently detailed to support quality improvement and as such is unlikely to replace the in-house methods and tools being used by providers. We also note that current presentations of GP Patient Survey data for out-of-hours care are at ‘commissioner’ level; as providers often cover more than one commissioner level, such analyses may not highlight problems occurring at the larger organisational level. Finally, to look at the performance of different out-of-hours providers on key patient experience measures, it is important that NHS England maintains a list of such providers to ensure oversight, which it currently does not.

Overall, large-scale postal surveys are likely to remain the dominant approach for gathering patient feedback for the time being, although refinements to this approach as well as the development of other modes are required to address the weaknesses that we have identified. We are aware that providers are experimenting with a wide range of other approaches, one of which ( RTF ) has been part of our research. Other methods include interviews and focus groups, online feedback, analysis of complaints, practice participation groups and social media. In the following section, we outline recommendations for research and identify the criteria that any new methods will need to meet to become useful quality improvement tools.

• Recommendations for research

The world of patient feedback is becoming increasingly diverse and complex, with standard patient survey approaches being supplemented by the use of tablets, kiosks, online feedback, including that provided by the NHS and by commercial organisations, analysis of complaints, the use of interviews and focus groups and practice participation groups. In addition, social media may come to play an important part in how patients choose their doctor and how they feed back on their experiences. Some of these new approaches are being evaluated in terms of their ability to provide more detailed information on what is needed to improve services, for example using patient narratives 308 and through the analysis of internet-based feedback. 309 , 310 However, despite the plethora of approaches to gathering patient feedback, our research demonstrates that there is a major deficit in taking action as a result of such feedback. Enabling and supporting providers to engage with and plan changes may require complex whole-system approaches, and our knowledge of what is most effective in this area is currently sparse.

Research is therefore needed into how gathering and acting on patient feedback may be best supported, across five key areas:

• How patient experience can be captured so that it more effectively identifies areas of performance that could be improved – this should include investigation of diverse methods of obtaining patient feedback to support patients to highlight poor care when necessary. An additional important area of work is how some of the issues highlighted within this report, such as patients’ reluctance to criticise, apply to different approaches to assessing patient experience using either rating-type or report-type questionnaire items.
• The system, practitioner and patient factors that influence poorer reported experiences of care in South Asian patient groups and how these may be addressed – this should include a particular focus on the impact of cross-cultural consultations.
• How information from patients can be fed back to clinicians and services in a way that appears credible to them – this should include evaluations of approaches to increase the plausibility of patient surveys, such as greater use of benchmarking and innovative ways of presenting and interpreting findings, as well as assessment of varying, tailored ways of presenting feedback to the different health-care professionals who might receive feedback on their care. Of additional relevance here is how clinicians are encouraged to reflect on their own performance and others’ assessments of this, with the aim of understanding where and how gaps in evaluations may occur.
• How services can be organised and managed in such a way that patient feedback is seen as a positive opportunity for improving services.
• What interventions are most effective in improving care when deficiencies in care are identified – the area where there is the greatest gap here is in doctor–patient communication, with our results showing that clinicians have great difficulty in even discussing deficiencies among their colleagues and that few effective interventions exist.

Our finding in the research on out-of-hours care that commercial providers had lower ratings for patient experience than services provided by the NHS is consistent with previous work suggesting that practices working under Alternative Provider Medical Services contracts, which are sometimes provided by the private sector, may provide worse care. 311 However, the circumstances in which commercial providers gain contracts for primary care services may be very different from those in other areas. The way in which the primary care workforce is configured is changing rapidly, with an increase in the proportion of salaried GPs, the development of GP federations and super-practices and an increase in the number of large-scale provider groups (owned both by commercial companies and by GPs). It is important that these changes should be monitored so that we understand their impact on quality of care.

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African Philosophic Sagacity in Selected African Languages and Proverbs pp 235–239 Cite as

Conclusions and Recommendations

• Wilfred Lajul 2  
• First Online: 21 March 2024

In the concluding chapter, I can say, the sources of information used in this book were identified. In that area, documented sources were used; these are written sources. In the Acholi language, writings of Okot p’Bitek and Angelo Banya were used, while in Luganda language, the work of Ishiabwe, Atema was used, plus other relevant sources as detailed in the work. The wordings of a number of these proverbs were found to be different in the writings of these authors. The interesting part was the findings on the basic meanings of these proverbs, which were apparently the same. Differences in wordings could reflect different contexts, but it did not take away the basic meanings. The interpretation of the deeper meanings came from trainings at different levels. The central conclusion is that proverbs are indeed very rich sources of knowledge on African socio-philosophical worldviews of the Africans. And the most urgent recommendation is that more studies should be taken in the different languages of Africa to generate better understanding of the philosophical contents in these proverbs.

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• The Importance of Conclusions and Recommendations in the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Process
• Protected: Learning Center

Drawing conclusions and making recommendations are other important aspects of the monitoring and evaluation process . The conclusions and recommendations that are drawn from the evaluation findings can help to inform decision-making, improve program effectiveness, and promote learning and accountability.

Here are some key considerations when drawing conclusions and making recommendations in the monitoring and evaluation process.

Table of Contents

What are the conclusions?

Examples of conclusions in the monitoring and evaluation (m&e), what are the recommendations, examples of recommendations in the monitoring and evaluation (m&e), example of a conclusion and recommendation section from a monitoring and evaluation report, review the evaluation findings, consider the context, identify strengths and weaknesses, make actionable recommendations, communicate findings and recommendations.

Conclusions in the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) process refer to the key findings or results of the evaluation that provide insights into the effectiveness and efficiency of the program or intervention being evaluated. They are based on the analysis of data collected during the evaluation process and are used to determine the extent to which the program or intervention has achieved its intended objectives.

Conclusions in M&E typically include a summary of the evaluation results, highlighting what worked well and what did not work. They also provide an assessment of the program or intervention’s impact, sustainability, and scalability. Conclusions are an essential component of the M&E process as they provide decision-makers with evidence-based information that can be used to improve future programs or interventions.

Here are some examples of conclusions in the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) process:

• Program effectiveness: The evaluation may conclude that the program was effective in achieving its intended objectives, based on the analysis of data collected during the evaluation process. For example, if a health education program was intended to increase knowledge of healthy eating habits and the evaluation found that the program achieved this goal, the conclusion would be that the program was effective.
• Program efficiency: The evaluation may conclude that the program was efficient in achieving its objectives, based on the resources used to implement the program. For example, if a job training program was implemented at a lower cost than similar programs and achieved similar outcomes, the conclusion would be that the program was efficient.
• Program impact: The evaluation may conclude that the program had a positive impact on the target population, based on the analysis of data collected during the evaluation process. For example, if a youth development program was intended to reduce delinquency rates and the evaluation found a significant reduction in delinquency rates among program participants, the conclusion would be that the program had a positive impact.
• Program scalability: The evaluation may conclude that the program can be scaled up to reach a larger population, based on the program’s success in achieving its intended objectives. For example, if a literacy program was implemented in one community and was successful in improving reading levels, the conclusion would be that the program could be scaled up to reach other communities.
• Program sustainability: The evaluation may conclude that the program is sustainable, based on the program’s ability to continue achieving its intended objectives over time. For example, if a community-based environmental program has been successful in reducing pollution levels and has secured long-term funding, the conclusion would be that the program is sustainable.

These are just a few examples of the types of conclusions that may be drawn from the M&E process. The specific conclusions will depend on the evaluation results and the program’s goals and objectives.

Recommendations in the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) process refer to suggestions or proposals for actions that should be taken based on the evaluation results. They are based on the analysis of data collected during the evaluation process and are used to improve the program or intervention being evaluated.

Recommendations in M&E typically include specific actions that should be taken to address the program’s weaknesses or to build on its strengths. They may also include suggestions for improving program design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. Recommendations may be directed towards program managers, stakeholders, funders, or policymakers, depending on the intended audience.

Recommendations are an essential component of the M&E process as they provide decision-makers with evidence-based information that can be used to improve the program’s effectiveness and efficiency. They help to ensure that future programs or interventions are designed and implemented in a way that maximizes their impact and achieves their intended objectives.

Related: Recommendations in Evaluation

Here are some examples of recommendations in the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) process:

• Improve program design: If the evaluation finds that the program design is not effective, the recommendation may be to redesign the program and its activities to ensure they are more relevant and appropriate to the target population’s needs.
• Enhance implementation: If the evaluation reveals implementation challenges, the recommendation may be to implement strategies to address these challenges, such as providing additional training to program staff, improving program management, or increasing community engagement.
• Strengthen monitoring and evaluation: If the evaluation finds that the monitoring and evaluation system is weak, the recommendation may be to improve the quality of data collected, increase the frequency of data collection, or develop a better system for data analysis and reporting.
• Expand program coverage: If the evaluation finds that the program has had a positive impact, the recommendation may be to expand the program’s coverage to reach more people in the target population.
• Increase program sustainability: If the evaluation reveals that the program’s sustainability is at risk, the recommendation may be to develop a sustainability plan that outlines strategies for long-term program funding and support.

These are just a few examples of the types of recommendations that may be made as a result of the M&E process. The specific recommendations will depend on the evaluation results and the program’s goals and objectives.

Related: Eval Rec’s – EVAL CAFE

Here is an example of a conclusion and recommendation section from a monitoring and evaluation report on a water supply project in rural Ethiopia:

The evaluation found that the water supply project has achieved its objectives of increasing access to safe and reliable water sources for 15,000 people in five rural communities in Ethiopia. The project has also contributed to improved health, hygiene, education, and livelihood outcomes for the beneficiaries, as well as enhanced social cohesion and gender equality. The project has demonstrated good practices in community participation, capacity building, sustainability, and innovation. However, the project also faced some challenges and limitations, such as delays in construction, technical issues with some water points, lack of adequate monitoring data, and insufficient coordination with other actors. The evaluation identified some areas for improvement and learning for future similar projects.

Recommendations

Based on the evaluation findings and conclusions, the following recommendations are proposed:

• To the project team: Conduct regular maintenance and repair of the water points to ensure their functionality and durability. Strengthen the monitoring system to collect more accurate and comprehensive data on the project outputs, outcomes, and impacts. Enhance the communication and collaboration with other stakeholders, such as local authorities, NGOs, and donors, to avoid duplication of efforts and to leverage synergies.
• To the community water committees: Continue to mobilize and educate the community members on the importance of water conservation, hygiene practices, and payment of water fees. Ensure that the water fees are collected transparently and used efficiently for the operation and maintenance of the water points. Promote the inclusion and empowerment of women and marginalized groups in the decision-making and management of water resources.
• To the donor: Provide continued financial and technical support to the project team and the community water committees to ensure the sustainability and scalability of the project. Share the evaluation findings and lessons learned with other relevant actors to disseminate good practices and to inform future policy and programming.

Related: How to write a good M&E report – guidelines & best practices – TolaData

Reviewing the evaluation findings is a crucial step in drawing conclusions and making recommendations in the monitoring and evaluation process. This involves a thorough examination and analys is of the data collected during the evaluation, including both quantitativ e and qualitative data.

Quantitative data may include numerical data such as statistics, percentages, and figures, while qualitative data may include non-numerical data such as narratives, descriptions, and observations. Both types of data need to be analyzed carefully to identify patterns, trends, and themes that can inform the evaluation conclusions and recommendations.

The analysis of the evaluation findings should also consider the limitations of the data, such as sample size, response rate, and potential biases, and how these limitations may affect the reliability and validity of the conclusions and recommendations.

In summary, reviewing the evaluation findings is a critical step in drawing conclusions and making recommendations, as it provides the evidence base for the evaluation and ensures that the conclusions and recommendations are grounded in the data.

Context refers to the broader circumstances or environment in which the program operates, and it plays a crucial role in shaping the program’s outcomes and effectiveness.

To draw accurate conclusions and make relevant recommendations, it is essential to consider various contextual factors, including political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions. Political factors such as government policies, regulations, and political stability can significantly impact the success of a program. Economic factors such as funding, market trends, and economic growth can also influence the program’s outcomes.

Similarly, social and cultural factors such as social norms, cultural beliefs, and community attitudes can shape how the program is perceived and implemented. Therefore, it is critical to consider these contextual factors while evaluating the program’s goals and objectives to determine whether they align with the local context and to make recommendations accordingly.

Overall, taking into account the program’s goals and objectives in light of its contextual factors will help in drawing accurate conclusions and making informed recommendations that are relevant and effective in achieving the program’s intended outcomes.

Strengths and weaknesses analysis is a crucial component of program evaluation, and the statement rightly highlights its importance in drawing conclusions and informing future program planning and implementation.

Strengths analysis allows program evaluators to identify the program’s positive aspects, including its achievements, successes, and benefits. These strengths can help inform future program planning by highlighting successful strategies and practices that can be replicated or expanded to improve program effectiveness. Moreover, identifying strengths can also help to build on the program’s positive aspects, improving its overall impact.

On the other hand, weaknesses analysis helps identify areas of the program that require improvement or restructuring. These weaknesses can include issues related to program design, implementation, or outcomes. Identifying weaknesses is essential to inform future program planning and improve program effectiveness. Moreover, weaknesses analysis can also provide opportunities to learn from past mistakes, and it can help to avoid repeating them in the future.

Overall, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of a program is essential to draw accurate conclusions and inform future program planning and implementation. By recognizing the program’s positive and negative aspects, program evaluators can develop evidence-based recommendations to improve program effectiveness, ensuring that the program achieves its intended goals and objectives.

Making actionable recommendations ensures that the recommendations are relevant, feasible, and likely to lead to improvements in program performance.

To make actionable recommendations, it is crucial to base them on the evidence generated through program evaluation. The recommendations should address specific issues or challenges identified during the evaluation, and they should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound ( SMART ).

• For example, a program evaluation may identify that the program’s target population is not adequately engaged, and this is affecting program outcomes. Based on this finding, the recommendation could be to enhance community outreach efforts to increase engagement among the target population. This recommendation is actionable, and specific, and provides a clear path forward for program managers to improve the program’s performance.

Moreover, recommendations may also include changes to program design or implementation, such as modifying the program’s goals or objectives, revising the program’s theory of change, or enhancing the program’s monitoring and evaluation framework. These recommendations should also be actionable, feasible, and backed by evidence to ensure that they are likely to result in program improvements.

Finally, recommendations may include suggestions for future research to address gaps in knowledge or evaluate the effectiveness of specific program components. These recommendations should also be actionable, specific, and feasible, providing a clear path forward for researchers to conduct further studies.

Overall, making actionable recommendations is essential to ensure that program evaluation leads to tangible improvements in program performance, and that the recommendations are feasible, relevant, and likely to lead to positive change.

Effective communication is essential to ensure that stakeholde rs understand the evaluation results, the rationale for the recommendations, and their implications for program planning and implementation.

• To communicate evaluation findings and recommendations effectively, it is essential to tailor the communication approach to the audience. For example, program managers may require a more detailed presentation of the evaluation results, including the methodology, data analysis, and limitations. In contrast, funders may require a concise summary of the evaluation results, including the key findings and recommendations.

In addition to tailoring the communication approach, it is also essential to use clear, concise, and jargon-free language to ensure that stakeholders understand the evaluation results and recommendations. Effective communication should also provide opportunities for stakeholders to ask questions, clarify doubts, and provide feedback on the evaluation results and recommendations.

Furthermore, effective communication should also highlight the benefits of the evaluation , such as identifying successful strategies, opportunities for program improvement, and lessons learned. This can help to build support for future evaluations and ensure that stakeholders understand the value of the monitoring and evaluation process .

Overall, effective communication of evaluation findings and recommendations is essential to ensure that stakeholders understand the evaluation results and can use them to inform future program planning and implementation. Effective communication can help build support for the evaluation process and ensure that stakeholders are engaged and invested in program improvement.

The importance of conclusions and recommendations in monitoring and evaluation practice cannot be overstated. Conclusions are the results of an evaluation study, which provide an analysis of the findings and an interpretation of their meaning. Recommendations, on the other hand, are suggestions for action that are based on the conclusions.

Effective monitoring and evaluation requires that conclusions and recommendations are well-thought-out and communicated clearly. It is important that the conclusions and recommendations are evidence-based, comprehensive, and practical. The conclusions and recommendations should be tailored to the needs of the stakeholders and communicated in a way that is easily understandable.

In addition, it is important to consider the limitations and constraints of the evaluation study when formulating conclusions and recommendations. The evaluation team should be transparent about the methods used, the data collected, and the conclusions drawn.

Overall, the conclusions and recommendations are critical components of any monitoring and evaluation exercise. They provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of programs, policies, and interventions and can guide decision-makers in making informed decisions about future actions.

Patrick Kapuot

Very informative, interesting and clearly said.

I suggest in future to include a sample report that have key traits in it that were applied in the report.

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