Writing Strategies for Provide Background

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Provide Background can be used in much the same way as Provide Background in the Introduction. You may utilize this Strategy to provide background information relevant to the research territory or to simply overview the section to help the reader navigate the study methods. This Strategy is also used to give theoretical, empirical, or informational background with or without references depending on how general the information might be. To understand this Strategy, let us look at several examples:

a. The methodological design is based on previous research (Author, YEAR).

b. The following section provides information on the statistical analyses used in this study.

Example a was a sentence found at the beginning of a Methods section to illustrate the broader lens from which the research was derived. Example b was found just before the final section of a Methods section as a segue into the data analysis.

Referencing past research is particularly important in the Methods section because previous research can support your methodological choices (we will see this again in an upcoming Strategy). You can also provide references to prior work to frame or situate your study within the wider body of knowledge, which is especially important if your research has methodological contributions. You can use references via citations or even footnotes and endnotes, whichever is a common style in your target journal. Some journals prefer that researchers limit the number of additional notes by integrating the content directly into the text.

Take a look at a few Language Use examples for this Strategy and note the similarity to what we see in the blue sky of the Introduction section.