Week 9: Discussion and Results

Hi everyone! In this blog, I will be going over my project progression during Week 9 and what I’m looking forward to next.

Week 9: Writing Results & Discussion

This week, I focused primarily on writing the results and discussion sections of my paper. After spending the past several weeks collecting and coding interview data, I began organizing my findings into broader themes and determining how to present them clearly within my research paper.

One of the most challenging parts of this process was deciding which statistics and personal stories to include. Because I conducted over a hundred 30-minute interviews, I gathered a large amount of both quantitative and qualitative data. While the statistics helped reveal broader patterns regarding healthcare affordability, insurance instability, and delayed treatment, many of the interviews also contained deeply emotional and personal experiences that added important human context to those numbers. Balancing these two elements—data and storytelling—was difficult, as I wanted my paper to remain analytical while still reflecting the real experiences behind the research.

As I worked through the discussion section, I also began making stronger connections between my findings and the healthcare policy themes from my literature review. In particular, I noticed how recurring issues such as skipped appointments, medication-sharing, and financial anxiety reflected larger systemic problems within the U.S. healthcare system. For example, a respondent skipped a necessary knee surgery last year which led to the development of a limp and consistent pain in the area. Writing this section helped me see how individual stories connect to broader policy failures and healthcare accessibility challenges.

Overall, Week 9 marked an important shift from gathering information to interpreting and communicating the significance of my findings.

Next Steps

Next week, I plan to continue refining my results and discussion sections while working on final edits and strengthening the overall organization of my paper, which should be finished by the end of next week. Already, I have fifteen pages of the paper, discounting the bibliography and graphs illustrating my results. I hope to yield about five to ten more pages discussing how to solve the national health crises for seniors, using both prior research and respondents recommendations based on their individual experiences.

Thank you for reading my Week 9 Blog!