9.5 Final Presentation

The final presentation should be approximately five to six minutes in length. It is important that you work hard not to go over that time limit given the number of students who will have to present during our finals week session! Please see the “Draft Presentation” instructions for some tips on getting started.

Final presentations should contain as a minimum:

  1. A title slide (presentation title, name, date, etc.),
  2. an agenda slide with the main topics you want to cover (see the “Final Presentation” instructions for a full list of what should be included),
  3. a literature slide
    • SOC 4015 students should include the two or three key citations identified as part of the memo exercise
    • SOC 5050 students should avoid the temptation to summarize each of their sources; instead, synthesize the main points of the literature succinctly
  4. a data and methods slide that describes the source of your data and the general techniques you used to produce your analyses,
  5. a descriptive statistics table as described in the “Initial Statistics”,
  6. well-designed plots, including your histogram, q-q plot, and bi-variate plot described in the “Exploratory Data Analysis” section above,
  7. a summary of your regression findings in a well-formatted table that is appropriate for your medium,
  8. a limitations slide that discusses what cautionary notes you have about your analyses or your findings,
  9. and discussion and conclusion slide that summarizes your findings, places them in the context of the literature you have identified, and offers some concluding remarks.

For the literature and data, do not just summarize each but rather make a case for your study: what is the gap in the literature you are addressing? Why is the study design best suited to address that gap? You do not necessarily have to be this explicit on the slide itself, but should be when you describe the slide on presentation day. When you conclude, go back to this gap and make a case for how you’ve addressed it. We call this the “so what” part of a presentation - make sure your audience does not leave wondering “so what”!1

This is, generally speaking, the way that professional conference presentations should be structured. There are only two major differences - we typically have a bit longer for conferences, which often offer presenters ten to fifteen minutes, and presenting data on the normality of your dependent variable is typically not a part of what you would present.

  1. These suggestions are adapted from Dr. Jessica Calarco.↩