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Report Structure

A Beginner-Friendly Structure

Use this structure for A9 and M3 unless your project clearly needs a small adaptation:

  1. Question
  2. Data source
  3. Methods
  4. Results
  5. Limitations
  6. Reproducibility and AI-use note

The structure is simple on purpose. It gives readers enough information to understand, check, and reuse the work.

Question

A good report question is specific:

How does mean BMI vary by income group among adults age 20-80 in the prepared NHANES classroom dataset?

Avoid broad questions such as:

What affects health?

Data Source

Name:

  • the original data source;
  • the version or snapshot used;
  • the access route;
  • restrictions or stewardship cautions.

Use your A6 provenance/stewardship note as the starting point.

Methods

State choices before showing results:

  • cohort or inclusion criteria;
  • variables used;
  • missingness handling;
  • whether the summary is descriptive, unweighted, weighted, predictive, or causal.

For this course, most reports should be descriptive unless the instructor explicitly approved another approach.

Results

Include at least:

  • one code-generated table;
  • one code-generated figure;
  • a short paragraph that states the pattern without overstating it.

Do not paste screenshots when code can generate the output.

Limitations

Limitations belong in the report, not only in an appendix. Include limitations that affect interpretation, such as unweighted summaries, missing data, prepared classroom data, small cells, or restricted public sharing.

Reproducibility and AI Use

End with enough information for a reviewer:

  • how the report was rendered;
  • where data came from;
  • where package/dependency notes live;
  • what AI helped with;
  • how AI-assisted content was checked.