If you are doing experimental work in the social sciences, the structure best suited to your research report is probably IMRaD (introduction, methods, results and discussion), which means that the main body of your paper will consist of the same three sections as papers in the natural sciences: Methods, Results (or Findings) and Discussion. The reason social and natural scientists use the same structure is that they are essentially engaged in the same sort of activity: generating and collecting data in order to answer a question. And for all investigations that collect data for subsequent analysis, IMRaD is the most logical and widely accepted report structure.

If your research is not experiment-driven and you are not collecting data for analysis, then IMRaD is probably not for you. Your report may start in the same way with the title, abstract and introduction, but your main body will be quite different. However, it is not easy to say exactly how it will be different, because the form of your report will largely be determined by content. One option often adopted in the humanities is to move straight from the introduction to the discussion. Another is to divide your report into sections that focus on a particular theme, as if they were chapters in a book. If you are a historian, these sections may focus on periods of time or historical events; if you are a sociologist they may focus on different theories; and if you are an ethnographer you may find yourself using storytelling techniques to create aesthetically pleasing non-fiction. If you are a non-experimental researcher, exactly how you organize your report is often up to you. This gives you a lot of freedom but also a great deal of responsibility.

If your research is experiment-driven and you are collecting data for analysis, then you will probably be obliged to use the IMRaD structure, which means you are less free to make your own decisions on structure. It is often said that the standard IMRaD research format has an hourglass or a figure-of-eight format. That is to say, the introduction starts with a very wide focus (importance of the field, subject generalizations and summary of previous research) and then gradually narrows until it focuses on a specific issue. The methods section picks up where the introduction left off and is the first of two sections (the other being the results) to focus exclusively on the research in hand. The discussion then widens the focus again. Although it often starts with the same narrow focus as the results, it finishes by addressing the more general issues you mentioned at the beginning of the introduction, thus showing how your specific research is relevant to society at large.

However, this structure is only a general guideline. As mentioned above, more theoretical studies may not require a methods or a results section; and although empirical research reports must contain information about the methods used and the results found, and discussion of how to interpret these results, you do have some freedom to diverge from this standard format. The information in the main body of your report is usually given in the three separate sections mentioned above, but sometimes the results and the discussion can be combined to form just one section (Results and discussion). The discussion often includes the information given in the conclusions section.

One common feature of a research report in the social sciences is that there is often a separate section, the literature review, after the introduction and before the methods. This section is an explicit acknowledgement of the importance of situating every piece of research within the existing literature. Likewise, other reports may contain a separate section entitled Theoretical framework, which explains the theoretical background to the study.

Another feature that distinguishes research work in the social sciences from similar work in the natural sciences is that each of the main IMRaD sections can be divided into subsections. For example, if you are studying data from a particular database or focusing on a particular group of participants, your methods section may have subsections entitled Data or Participants. Likewise, depending on what you wish to highlight and the nature of your research, your results section might also be subdivided.