A.2. Presenting Your Research

Presenting your work not only allows you to disseminate your research findings, but it also is a tried-and-true method to improve your study-in-progress. Before submitting their research for publication, professional sociologists usually make presentations to peers about their study (or at least a portion of their work) so that they can test their ideas and get helpful feedback. If you are serious about research, you should get in the habit of presenting your work to audiences early on—well before publication—so that your work can benefit from other people’s guidance. Just going through the process of summarizing your study for an audience unfamiliar with it is sure to sharpen the way you think about it.

You can start by presenting your work to a small group—say, a fellow student or trusted colleagues—but eventually you want to move to an audience of less partial observers. Sociologists are sometimes invited to give research talks (presentations about their work) by academic departments, think tanks, or other interested organizations. The most common way that sociologists present their research, however, is by doing talks at professional conferences. Professional conferences can range from small-scale events involving a dozen researchers who convene for an afternoon, to large-scale events involving thousands of researchers who meet for several days. Professional associations (described in Chapter 2: Using Sociology in Everyday Life) typically put on these conferences on an annual basis.

There is a formal process for securing speaking spots at conferences. Usually, the organizers require you to submit an abstract of your research paper months in advance; some conferences may ask for extended abstracts (several pages) or even full papers, though this is rare in sociology. (Note that scholars use the term paper when talking about a write-up of a study that a researcher has conducted. A paper may be either published or unpublished—when it is an unpublished draft, we call it a manuscript.). The organizers review these submissions and decide which to accept. The peer-review process here is typically not as rigorous as it is for manuscripts submitted to an academic journal, and smaller conferences accept the vast majority of submissions. That said, your paper or proposal may get rejected, and you should bear in mind that a conference rejection isn’t always a reflection of the quality of your work; it may be because your topic doesn’t fit with what the conference organizers are looking for. Talks are often grouped together into panels of three to four (sometime five) presentations that share an overarching theme. A professional association’s annual meeting may also be devoted to a particular theme, meaning that any papers on that topic will be prioritized.

When preparing a formal talk, it is important to know well in advance how long your presentation is expected to last and whether any visual aids such as slides are expected. For conference panels, the typical talk lasts between 12 and 20 minutes. This may sound long, but you’ll be amazed by how quickly the time flies. Once researchers get into the groove of talking about something as near and dear to them as their research, they often become so engrossed—and enamored with the sound of their own voice—they forget the clock. Many an unfortunate researcher has looked up to see their allotted time has expired before they have even gotten to their study’s methodology. To avoid this, repeatedly practice your presentation in advance—and time yourself. A good rule of thumb is that every slide in your presentation will take one minute to get through (assuming you don’t cram too much information into each slide!).

Another common mistake in research talks is taking too long to set up the study. Audience members will usually be more interested in your study’s original findings than in hearing you recite a long list of previous studies it builds upon. While in a paper you need to discuss the literature at length (see Chapter 5: Research Design), in a presentation you should highlight your work.

When you are giving a research talk, never read your paper verbatim. In some fields, this is acceptable, but not in most traditions of sociology. Nothing will bore an audience to tears more quickly than a sociologist reading their literature review aloud word for word. In your talk, highlight only the key points of your study. As we describe in the next section, these details will generally include your research question, your methodological approach, your major findings, and a few final takeaways (generally, the theoretical implications of your work).

At academic conferences, panels almost always include time for audience members to raise questions or make comments, usually after all the session’s talks have been given. These Q&As can be the highlight (or lowlight) of a given conference. In fact, some disciplines are notorious for the vicious questions and comments that audience members will lob at conference presenters—particularly if the scholars in question come from an opposing school of thought on a particular topic. Fortunately, sociologists tend to be more decorous during presentations, and unlike economists (renowned as the most dismal of social scientists), they tend not to repeatedly interrupt speakers during their talks. That said, expect audience members to comment on any issues with your research design, data, or logic—and be prepared with good answers (see the sidebar Deeper Dive: Tips for Presentation Slides).

Regardless of how friendly or unfriendly your audience’s questions are, learn to respond to them graciously. It’s polite not just to answer, but to note when you’ve been asked a good question, or to thank the questioner for raising a noteworthy issue. At the same time, be genuine and honest, and don’t be afraid to say when you don’t know something (you might even say you’ll look into it and get back to the inquirer by email). At the end of any response you give, check in with the person who asked the question to make sure you truly answered their question.

If you are in the audience for a research talk, you shouldn’t hesitate to ask a question or make a comment during the Q&A. Presenters want feedback. Speaking up gets easier with practice, and it is a good way to connect with presenters or audience members, who you can then approach after the talk. Of course, always be respectful. Given that you are not a curmudgeonly economist, don’t interrupt the presenter during their talk unless you want to clarify something quickly. Learn to be diplomatic and constructive in your criticism or probing questions. Sociologists pride themselves on having rigorous but cordial debates at academic meetings, and hopefully you’ll be able to find and cultivate a thoughtful intellectual community of fellow scholars at the events you attend.

Larger conferences may offer other options for presenting your work in addition to panels. In less formal roundtable presentations, the aim is usually to help stimulate a conversation about a topic. The time you are given to present may be slightly shorter than in a formal presentation, and you’ll also be expected to participate in the conversation that follows all presenters’ talks. Because fewer people typically are in attendance, a roundtable is an excellent place to workshop your research when it’s in its earlier stages—for instance, after you’ve conducted some pilot interviews for a longer qualitative study. You’ll be able to talk through your initial findings and get some ideas about where to take the study next. In that more intimate setting, you’ll probably receive more substantial feedback while also getting a preview of the objections reviewers may raise about your conclusions or your approach to the study.

In a poster presentation, you visually represent your work, putting together a printed-out summary of the study—much like a science fair board—that concisely describes its essential parts. During the scheduled poster session at a conference, other scholars will browse the displays, listen to you give your spiel about your research, and ask questions. Poster sessions, like roundtables, can be quite helpful at the early stages of a research project because they are designed to encourage the audience—here, people walking by—to engage you in conversation about your research. Just as you wouldn’t read a paper verbatim in a talk, avoid just pasting sentences from your written report onto your poster. Instead, think about how to tell the “story” of your work in charts, tables, and images. Bullet points are fine so long as the poster isn’t so wordy that it would be difficult for someone leisurely walking by to grasp your major argument and findings. Don’t try to include every detail about your work on your poster. The point is to share highlights and then converse with your audience to get their feedback, hear their questions, and provide additional context.

The Parts of a Research Talk

In sociology, a research talk typically follows this sequence. If you’re using slides, the headings of your slides will use these or similar terms:

1. Introduction: The introduction provides general background, perhaps mentioning some relevant trends or statistics and otherwise making the case for the overall importance of the topic being studied. For shorter presentations, you may just skip to the next section. For longer presentations, it’s often a good idea to start off with an outline of the sections of your presentation and then refer back to that outline as you move through each section (the signposting we talk about in the sidebar Deeper Dive: Tips for Presentation Slides). If you have time, it’s a good idea to briefly identify the research question and research problem upfront, which you will return to repeatedly in your presentation.
2. Literature Review or Background: As noted earlier, the literature review is very brief in a typical research talk. That said, you will want to mention the key studies that your work is responding to and building upon. Don’t just list the studies; instead, your bullet points should refer to the specific arguments made in those past studies that are directly relevant to your own study. At the end of your bullet points, use in-text parenthetical ASA cites (see the section Citing Your Sources) to refer to any relevant studies—especially if you have several you want to mention at once—but don’t bog down the slides with full citations. You also don’t want to spend too much time on a single study unless the explicit purpose of your own research is to critique or build on that work. Instead, summarize the literature’s overall argument in that area and include multiple cites as examples.
3. Research Problem or Statement of the Problem or Puzzle: If you’ve done your literature review slide correctly, you should have set yourself up well for this slide, which discusses the research problem—the gap in the literature that your study is addressing, or the puzzle in that literature it is resolving. (See Chapter 5: Research Design to learn how to identify and present your research problem or puzzle.) You should also state or restate the research question that arises from this research problem, perhaps on its own slide.
4. Methods: This should be a highly condensed version of the methods section you have in your written scholarly report. Start off by stating what the key methods or sources of data were—for example, in-depth interviews, participant observations, survey data, and experimental data. Make sure to mention the exact number of people interviewed or surveyed, the exact number of events attended, the exact date range during which the fieldwork or surveys were conducted, and so on—academics always want specifics. You may want a separate slide describing the sample (usually for quantitative studies) or case selection (usually for qualitative studies). In this slide, you should provide details like how representative the sample was (whether it was a probability or purposive sample, for example), how you decided on the populations or sites to focus on, and what your process for recruiting respondents was. For secondary data, be sure to mention the name of the dataset and any particular modules you used. Later in this section, describe the procedures you used for data analysis. For qualitative studies, you might talk about the theoretical approach that informed your data collection strategy (e.g., grounded theory, extended case method) and the coding process you engaged in (e.g., whether you used software packages like NVivo or Atlas.ti, how you generated codes from the data, whether you had multiple people code your data, and how you resolved any discrepancies in coding). For quantitative studies, you can talk about your choices of statistical procedures (e.g., logistical regression, hierarchical modeling) and statistical software packages (e.g., SPSS, SAS). Quantitative studies in particular will also have a set of slides devoted to measures or variables that break down the dependent variables (which usually go first), the independent variables of interest, control variables, and so on. Here, you will want to state explicitly how each relevant concept was measured. Include the verbatim question text for interview or survey questions that are especially important to your study, so that your audience knows exactly how you operationalized the underlying concept. Mention the scales or units for each measure.
   

   

5. Findings: The key results of your study can be listed on one slide and then broken down across subsequent slides, with each slide covering a specific point or subpoint in your overall argument. Include slide titles that sum up each part of your argument. Collectively, the findings slides should answer the research question you posed earlier (and you may want to restate that question throughout this section). Perhaps the most important thing to remember in the findings section of a presentation—however long or short—is to show the data. Don’t just have a list of bullet points that sum up your findings; scholars in the audience won’t be convinced unless they see how you came up with those results. For quantitative studies, you will want to show relevant tables and charts that reflect the trends or patterns you discovered. Make sure the tables and charts are large enough to be easily read and digested when they appear on the screen. If you have a complex table with a slew of statistical results, for example, you should create a simplified version of that table, spread the results out across several slides, or show the full table but then break it down piece by piece across separate slides. For qualitative studies, give your audience a taste of your actual data—interesting quotes from respondents or descriptions of key episodes you ethnographically observed, captioned with some background context about each respondent or site. You will have to be judicious in picking illustrative examples, but providing this level of detail is important, as qualitative work relies heavily on this thick description to make it compelling and persuasive. If you have lengthy quotes, you generally don’t want to read them word for word during your talk. You may want to put up the full quote on a slide but just focus in your comments on critical phrases or sentences, perhaps highlighting or boldfacing them on the slides.
6. Theoretical Implications: In scholarly presentations, you generally want to prioritize your study’s theoretical contributions—that is, how your findings change our overall understanding of a given topic. Just like your study’s findings should answer your research question, your list of theoretical implications should respond to your research problem. Say how your findings build upon or overturn past studies. If appropriate, you can also include a policy implications slide that goes over the practical significance of your findings—for instance, what sorts of policies or programs we might institute to address the issues raised by your study.
7. Limitations: This might go before the theoretical implications slide, or even be integrated into the methods slides, but at some point, you want to discuss any shortcomings of your study’s approach. Was the study’s data truly representative of the population of interest? If not, how might that have influenced your results? Could your data collection or analytical procedures be improved? Could we think of alternative approaches to studying this topic that could also be fruitful? Be forthright and thorough in talking through any of your study’s limitations, which will inevitably prompt thinking about future research projects that you and others can take up—thereby advancing the science.
8. Thank You or Questions? Always end your presentation with a slide that thanks the audience and opens up the room to possible questions. On this slide, you should put your contact information: name, title/institution, email address, maybe even your social media information. (Remember, presentations are a great way to network with other scholars interested in the same topic.)

Deeper Dive: Tips for Presentation Slides

There is a ton of advice out there (sometimes conflicting) about how to design your slides for research talks. Here, we’ll mostly follow the sage guidance of the Population Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan research organization, in their concise handout, Connecting People to Useful Information (2003). These are the most important pointers:

1. Follow the rule of 6 x 6: You should not have more than six bullet points on any slide, and each bullet point should have no more than six words. If you have more things to say, create another slide—or, better yet, cut out the less important bullet points (you can always expand orally on what’s written on the slide). For each bullet point, avoid full sentences and instead use brief phrases that will jog your memory regarding what you want to talk about at that moment—but that won’t tempt the audience to spend time pouring over your slides and not paying attention to you.
2. Keep text concise and readable: The rule of 6 x 6 is the ideal, but frankly, most academics violate it routinely in their talks. The more important thing to remember is that you don’t want to clutter your slides with walls of text, and you don’t want to be reading your bullet points word for word, which will come across as robotic. To keep yourself in check, make sure the font size on your slides is not too small (say, 28 point or larger) and yet not too large (with the titles no larger than, say, 44 point).
3. Use images to break up text: Using images like photos, diagrams, and charts is generally a great idea. They make your visual presentation more engaging and ensure that you aren’t cramming too many words on each slide. In fact, you might want to swap some of your bullet points with images that convey the gist of those points, which you then comment on in your spoken remarks. You can also have slides with images alone, which is a nice way of breaking up long sections of your talk; you can move your bullet points to the slide notes that aren’t visible to the audience. You can overdo images in a presentation if such content doesn’t fit the serious tone of a particular setting or topic, but generally speaking, more in the way of visual aids will keep your audience from dozing off. Academics generally don’t have time in conference presentations to play videos, but you may find yourself including them to underscore a particular point or to show some of your data in visual form. Note that copyright laws apply to presentation content as well, so especially if you’re doing a public talk, you should try to use public domain or openly licensed images or have a good “fair use” case to incorporate that content without explicit permission. You can find relevant images on repositories dedicated to openly licensed content like Pexels and Wikimedia Commons or by searching specifically for Creative Commons-licensed material on larger photography platforms such as Flickr. (See this VCU Libraries list of sites for free-to-use images, including stock images of diverse populations.)
4. Reiterate your research question and/or research problem across your slides: Audience members frequently get lost in academic talks, forgetting what the research question is or why it actually matters as the presenter dives ever-deeper into their data. In oral presentations (more so than in written papers), it’s a good idea to repeat yourself in order to underscore a key point that people may have missed the first time around. For instance, restate your research question as you go over your findings, and restate your research problem as you go over your theoretical implications. One useful strategy is to signpost—create a slide (or a slide header or footer) with an outline of the sections of your presentation, and refer back to that outline continually during your talk, highlighting or boldfacing which part of your argument you are currently covering. That outline might briefly signal what your research question or research problem is, so that the audience members always have that in mind when mulling over your data and results.
5. Be prepared for the Q&A: Giving the talk is only half the battle—especially when you’re presenting on more controversial topics. You also have to be prepared to respond intelligently to any questions or comments that come up during the Q&A. One good strategy is to write a list of potential questions and think of possible answers beforehand. You can even place extra slides at the end of your slide deck that aren’t part of your presentation proper but that you can refer to during the Q&A. This is also a good way to condense the length of your talk; for instance, if you don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of your sample’s characteristics during the talk, you can skip that and tell people that you’re happy to provide more details during the Q&A. You can include a table summarizing that sample information at the end of your slide deck, trotting out that slide only if people actually ask you about it.

In general, treat your slides as helpful guides to keep you on message, but not as a replacement for the talk. In fact, for most presentations, you don’t want to have a prepared script of what you’re going to say. Instead, learn to speak off the cuff based on concise bullet points. This takes practice, but it will pay off in reducing the labor that goes into preparing each talk and making your presentations seem more natural and conversational.