The discussion should begin with a brief summary of your study's key findings. Systematically explain the meaning of your findings and describe why you believe your findings are important. Describe why readers should care about your findings.
Highlight any unexpected or surprising findings and link them to the research question.
An unexpected finding is that EXPAND leadership may represent an opportunity for transformational professional growth for nurses. Nurses’ discomfort and uncertainty associated with stepping up to lead suggest that the gap between following and leading is not a trivial transition.
Describe how your findings are consistent or in contrast to previous findings associated with the problems you introduced.
Taken together, our findings are consistent with narratives of individuals experiencing liminality (Baird, 2012; Broski & Dunn, 2018; Turner, 2017). Liminality is a concept derived from anthropology and refers to the ambiguity or discomfort associated with important transitions (van Gennep, 2006; Turner, 2017). Traditionally, liminality has been used to describe experiences in which an individual is on the threshold of one identity to another, for example, being finished with nursing or medical school but not yet being a professional nurse or doctor (Broski & Dunn, 2018, van Gennep, 2006; Hawkins & Edwards, 2015; Turner, 2017).
Previous studies have reported benefits associated with implicit communication, such as being faster and more efficient (Rico et al., 2020). However, participants’ comments which contrasted DL with the status quo were consistent with studies that show implicit communication and implicit leadership during a critical event is not effective (Riley et al., 2016). (Broski et al., 2023)
You may also want to describe alternative explanations of your findings.
An alternative explanation is that all surgeons actually become less emotionally involved the longer they spend in the specialty. Orri et al report a paradox of surgery leading to a unique, chronically stressful situation. Perhaps this psychological burden of working as a surgeon leads to a degree of emotional blunting throughout one’s career, which is transferred from clinical roles to teaching. (Polson, 2020)
In the middle section of the discussion, point out the practical and theoretical implications associated with your findings.
Our findings have practical implications for researchers, clinicians, and patients. Given our findings that mentioning multiple posts is an indicator of decision-making, we can use text processing tools to automatically detect who mentioned multiple surgeries. (Marmor, et al., 2017)
Here are examples discussing the theoretical implications of a research study.
The theoretical implications of our study are that we contribute to newer, clinically realistic conceptualizations of leadership and followership as role-dependent sets of specific functional behaviors to be enacted dynamically and often times shared within a changing CPR task setting. (Fernandez, 2015)
The theoretical implications of our study are twofold. First, the present study developed and validated a research model of mobile learning continuance by considering the impacts of both cognitive and affective elements. The results of our study demonstrated that both cognitive and affective learning involvement should be taken into account to explain mobile learning continuance...Second, previous studies tend to apply the leading technology acceptance model and its expanded models to explain learner behaviors, the underlying process of learners’ motivation and behavior development has rarely been explored. (Yang, et al., 2019)
Future research should involve data collection from all global health electives (GHE) trainee participants both before and after their experiences, including participants from several different medical schools who travel to a wide range of GHE locations. We also suggest that future studies investigating the ethical and safety dilemmas of GHEs should collect detailed information about the GHE location to support thematic cross referencing. These details would include delineating experiences in rural versus urban areas; private versus public clinics; and in-country GHE participant support structures. We suggest these details could help inform location-specific PDT curricula. (Dell et. al, 2014)
Future studies should explore if participants who describe a desire to help or having self-efficacy to perform leadership tasks would be more willing to engage with the discomfort associated with transitioning from a follower to a leader. Additional insights related to nurses’ affect would be helpful because attributes such as hope, optimism, and resilience can be developed through continuing education (Luthans et al., 2007). Therefore, embedding principles of positive psychology within the CRM and non-technical skills training coursework may facilitate nurses transitioning from followers to leaders (da Costa et al., 2016; Rattray, 2016). (Broski et al., 2023)
Azar, B. (2006) Discussing Your Findings. American Psychological Association gradPSYCH Magazine.
Dell, E. M., Varpio, L., Petrosoniak, A., Gajaria, A., & McCarthy, A. E. (2014). The ethics and safety of medical student global health electives. International Journal of Medical Education, 5, 63.
Fernandez Castelao, E., Boos, M., Ringer, C. et al. (2015) Effect of CRM team leader training on team performance and leadership behavior in simulated cardiac arrest scenarios: a prospective, randomized, controlled study. BMC Med Educ 15, 116.
Marmor, R., Dai, W., Jiang, X., Wang, S., Blair, S., Huh, J.,(2017) Increase in contralateral prophylactic mastectomy conversation online unrelated to decision-making, Journal of Surgical Research, 218, 253-260.
Polson, P. J. (2020). Emotions in teaching surgery to medical students. The Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 102(2), e007.
Yang, S., Zhou, S., & Cheng, X. (2019). Why do college students continue to use mobile learning? Learning involvement and self‐determination theory. British Journal of Educational Technology, 50(2), 626-637.