Publication: How the data becomes a study

Now, you need to get all this into a representable and comprehensible form. This is at least as important as the whole process of data collection: A good data collection will fail to have any impact if it is represented in an insufficient way.

You will find a good example here.

In detail, you need:

• A front page with the (self explaining!) title/subtitle of the survey, your name/your group, contact address, date, place of publishing.

• Optional for the next page/before the introduction might be an impressive quotation of a participant.

• Introduction: Explain why you did this survey, why it is important, what you aimed to find out (e.g. prevalence of FGM in x community/city in relation to background).

• Methodology: You explain shortly what kind of survey this is, how it was done, with how many participants, when exactly. What was your target group, where did you find it? You can also include problems finding your target group, why you chose this target group and other thoughts and discussions you had before you decided how to conduct the survey. If you changed your method of conducting the interviews in between because something didn’t work out, you should also mention this here. This short chapter will show to professional readers how serious you are, how considered and organized and how reliable your results are.

• Background FGM: This part is to tell readers who are no experts of FGM how it is defined and to make clear what you refer to; you will for example refer to the WHO definition of FGM and the condemnation of FGM by the UN-Assembly in 2012. This is more or less the same in every study about FGM, so you can simply copy paste it from others (and cut out the parts which don’t fit your context in case there are any).

You should also mention what is already known about FGM in your country/community: anecdotal evidence, media report, studies.

• Results: Now the main part starts. Here you present your findings. All your results are interesting (unless your questions didn’t work and many checked “not applicable”). It is interesting if there is a relation between social background and FGM, but it is also interesting if there is NO relation.

So they can all be mentioned. However, some will be more meaningful or more comprehensible, easier to grasp than other. Choose those to present in graphics or tables. For Example: Educational background, education of parents and job of father are all indicators to show if social background has an influence on FGM. Choose the result which shows the connection most clearly and present it in a diagram or a simple table.

Below the table or diagram you describe briefly what can be seen in it. Then you can state that your other results for social and educational background back these results and you list them briefly.

If you have a main result, you should present it first; this would usually be the prevalence of FGM. In general, start with the more general results and progress to the more specific. However, if you found something unusual (e.g. city dwellers practice FGM more than villagers) this could also be presented at the start.

• Analysis or Discussion of your main findings: This part is optional. If your results speak for themselves you don’t need it. You can write here about your thoughts on what you found, if the results surprised you, if something didn’t work or if a result shows that more research needs to be done. If you are not using your results for an academic paper you are pretty free in what form you want to write otherwise please refer to your professor at this point, because expectations differ depending on field of study, country etc.

You can also add additional interesting information you obtained during the survey. Use interesting quotations and interim headlines to catch and focus the attention of the reader. Don’t feel obliged to write a lot here.

• Summary of Results: Here you list all main results briefly.

• Recommendations: Here you have space for any demands to the government or other bodies to take measures. These can be general recommendations or specific ones based on your results, e.g. if you find that a large number of cuttings were performed by a doctor you can take this results to stress the demand to prohibit doctors from practicing FGM.

• Appendix (Optional): You can add the questionnaire as appendix and opinions and comments by participants if you collected them.

You remember everything? The to-do-list.

Or continue with section extension I.