Editing Structure of a quantitative empirical research paper (section)

=== Introduction ===

Your introduction should be short: not more than 2-3 pages and 5-6 paragraphs. Your introduction should only seek to do three things (with an optional fourth):

# Introduce and motivate your work. What is the topic of this research? Why is this research worth pursuing?
# Establish the importance, relevance, and impact of your work (what is the research question? why is the question important? what data/methods does the paper use to answer the question?) providing a clear answer to the question, "Why should a reader care?"
# Foreshadow the key findings and contributions of the study. What do we know now that we did not know before?
# (Optional) In the final paragraph, lay out the organization of the rest of the paper.