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Once the material has been gathered together for analysis, the researcher’s troubles are not over. Working out the implications of the data and relating these back to the research problem are rarely easy. While it may be possible to reach a clear answer to the initial questions, many investigations are, in the end, less than fully conclusive. The research findings, usually published in a report, journal article or book, provide an account of the nature of the research and seek to justify whatever conclusions are drawn. This is a final stage only in terms of the individual project. Most reports also indicate questions that remain unanswered and suggest further research that might profitably be done in the future. All individual investigations are part of the continuing process of research which takes place within the international sociological community.

The preceding sequence of steps is a simplified version of what happens in actual research projects (see figure 2.1). In real-world research, these stages rarely succeed each other so neatly and there is almost always a certain amount of ‘muddling through’. The difference is a bit like that between following a recipe in a cookbook and the actual process of cooking a meal. People who are experienced cooks often do not work from recipes at all, yet their food may be better than that cooked by those who do. As Feyerabend saw, following a rigid set of stages can be unduly restrictive, and many outstanding pieces of sociological research have not followed this strict sequence. Still, most of the steps discussed above would be in there somewhere.