![]() ![]() For instance, at David Snowdon's first poster presentation on educational attainment and longevity using data from The Nun Study, another researcher returned several times to talk with Snowdon, eventually suggesting that he extend his research to focus on Alzheimer's disease, which led to an important new direction in his research ( Snowdon 2001). Beilenson (2004) describes the experience of giving a poster as a dialogue between you and your viewers.īy the end of an active poster session, you may have learned as much from your viewers as they have from you, especially if the topic, methods, or audience are new to you. Others will have ideas about how to apply or extend your work, raising new questions or suggesting different contrasts, ways of classifying data, or presenting results. Some might do policy work or research on a similar topic or with related data or methods. Different people will ask about different facets of your research. In a speech, you (the presenter) determine the focus of the presentation, but in a poster session, the viewers drive that focus. Posters are a hybrid form-more detailed than a speech but less than a paper, more interactive than either ( Appendix A). For example, the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association draws academics who conduct complex statistical analyses along with practitioners, program planners, policymakers, and journalists who typically do not. Each of these elements should be adapted to the audience, which may include people with different levels of familiarity with your topic and methods ( Nelson et al. Preparing a poster involves not only creating pages to be mounted in a conference hall, but also writing an associated narrative and handouts, and anticipating the questions you are likely to encounter during the session. Although the focus of this note is on presentation of quantitative research results, many of the guidelines about how to prepare and present posters apply equally well to qualitative studies. Because researchers often present the same results as published research papers, spoken conference presentations, and posters, Appendix A compares similarities and differences in the content, format, and audience interaction of these three modes of presenting research results. Later sections address how to prepare a narrative and handouts to accompany a research poster. The second shows how to describe statistical results to viewers with varied levels of statistical training, and the third provides guidelines on the contents and organization of the poster. The first section describes objectives of research posters. This methods note is intended to help researchers avoid such pitfalls as they create posters for professional conferences. Studies of policymakers ( DiFranza and the Staff of the Advocacy Institute 1996 Sorian and Baugh 2002) have demonstrated the importance of making it readily apparent how research findings apply to real-world issues rather than imposing on readers to translate statistical findings themselves. This step is essential for those presenting to nonresearchers but also pertains when addressing interdisciplinary research audiences. By failing to devise narrative descriptions of their poster, they overlook the chance to learn from conversations with their audience.Įven researchers who adapt their paper into a well-designed poster often forget to address the range of substantive and statistical training of their viewers. ![]() By simply posting pages from the paper, they risk having people merely skim their work while standing in the conference hall. By neglecting to adapt detailed paragraphs and statistical tables into text bullets and charts, they make it harder for their audience to quickly grasp the key points of the poster. Too often, however, researchers treat posters as poor cousins to oral presentations or published papers, failing to recognize the opportunity to convey their findings while interacting with individual viewers. An assortment of posters is a common way to present research results to viewers at a professional conference. ![]()
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