Results, Discussion Conclusion chapters

hello everyone uh welcome to this video presentation on um how to write the the end chapters to your thesis so the findings or the results the discussion and the conclusion chapters now not all dissertations or theses will follow the same format it will depend on the discipline you're in and it might also depend on the topic that you're researching so the actual research might shape how these chapters look in your thesis so what i'm going to show you here are really just some ideas and some components that most readers will expect to find in these chapters but you will need to think quite carefully and i i suppose talk to your supervisor about exactly what will go into these chapters okay so um aside from what goes you know what the genre of these chapters is i want to just discuss conclusions in a thesis generally and to show you how they relate to higher order thinking skills so um your last couple of chapters tend to have a pyramid shape um you begin with the very close findings from your data collection so you're taking your data you're analyzing them and in the analysis you're pulling things apart so if you were collecting interview transcripts then what you would be doing is taking those interview transcripts pulling them apart regrouping and reorganizing them in order to come up with some kind of result so you're taking the close findings and this is the analysis the next type of conclusion you have is the synthesis and this is usually the discussion and what this means is you take those findings that you've extracted from your source data and you now try to make sense of them so you you're trying to put them back into a context and you would do that by going back to the literature referring to practice looking at policies if if that's your particular area but you're synthesizing your findings with something else the third set of conclusions is evaluation and that's where you take a step back and you say okay now that we've been through this process what can we say and at the end of the day you might say well the study would have been stronger if i'd done this this and this or that this data was exceptionally rich but perhaps it needed a longer time period so so there you are showing your reader your critical assessment of your results okay let's move on to the first set of conclusions which is presenting your findings or results in some way i guess one of the key things to understand about this chapter is that you're not putting all your results in well you're not putting all your data in in this particular chapter what you're trying to do is to organize it in some way and then present it to the reader so those are two different steps organizing and presenting and in the organizing and presenting you then can work out what the key results will be that you want to present in this chapter for most uh dissertations you will collect probably way more results than you'll actually show so the the organization and and the analysis takes place away from the thesis and what you need to show in this chapter is what you've done because your reader can't see that so in this chapter you report on the analysis process and then what you found which will be the key key findings um so the way to do this would be to perhaps go back to your research questions and to work out your results according to the research questions if that's a useful framework there might be other ways of organizing the data perhaps if you did a survey you would present the data according to the questions that you asked yeah just think about how you would organize this data so that your reader can get it in digestible chunks you might want to arrange it chronologically as the results emerge so for example if you did a small survey and then an interview you might present the survey results first and then the interview results however if you're looking at your results thematically then you might present the themes and use the source data from both the survey and the interview results under the themes your particular research field may have some other ways of organizing the research perhaps a context is important on land in water something like that so just think about the most logical way to present your results um and then there are lots of ways of actually presenting the data you know how how what interesting ways can you think of to actually present this data so that your reader can see it visually as well as you know read the explanation or the mediation that you're giving in the text so can you put in you know boxes with narratives profiles of your participants tables with kind of themes with descriptions diagrams graphs images think quite creatively about how you can present this data and if you do present your data visually then the text needs to explain that visual so although the visual should be able to you know the reader should be able to read it and it should stand alone the text should still explain what's in the visual and why that's important so in your findings section really what you're doing is you're describing the results and you're showing what those results show you want to make it as readable as possible and really what you're showing is the story of these results not all dissertations separate the results from the discussion so you might have a thesis where you present the results and then under each section you provide a discussion as well that's a decision you'll have to make some dissertations have more than one results chapter so for example if you had survey data as well as interview data you might have different chapters showing the results from those different sources um yeah there are many different ways to present data in very creative ways so have a look at other examples if you can read other dissertations do that but look at published papers i mean people present their results in very interesting ways you know diagrams or organograms or relationship diagrams you know which is really you know that's an interesting way to present your results so in terms of how you write this you really are describing the results at this point it's only in this in the discussion that you begin to synthesize and analyze those results or interpret them at this point you're just showing the results of your analysis so that requires description you're using very precise language in this chapter i mean this is what gives your thesis reader confidence in your results is is how much attention you pay to precision and accuracy so if you use a term in your results you know at the beginning so say perhaps you use teacher and then um towards the end you're using you're using lecturer right there's an inconsistency there and your reader's going to say are we talking about the same people is it the same concept is there a different approach attached to lecturer so make sure that your terms that you're using are accurate throughout this this particular stage and throughout the thesis generally yeah so this chapter presents the results of your analysis in the next chapter the discussion chapter this is where you begin to interpret and pull together and synthesize um the results so what you're doing is you're taking your close results and you're now saying okay what does this mean again here you might want to work out how you want to present the discussion so you might go back to your research questions and actually present the discussion uh as you know you you probably wouldn't really be answering the research questions but you'd be addressing them so that might be one way to shape the discussion uh another way might be to return to the literature and to perhaps pick up on themes in the literature and then show how your results can be interpreted in the light of the literature so think about how you want to present this discussion chapter what's the story you're going to tell at some point in the discussions chapter you want to find closure on your research questions so your your reader must be able to see that you have somehow answered those research questions and somewhere in the discussion chapter you also want to go back to the literature so you want to show how your findings fit the literature the theory theory and possibly even practice so if you already have a chapter on findings then in the discussion chapter you might want to summarize those findings at the beginning and what you're trying to show is how does your research differ confirm add to the literature how does it contribute and where does it differ you might want to do this around particular themes as i've said you might want to use the research questions and really what you're doing is you're describing the broader patterns principles relationships so these this is really where your findings fit into these broader principles patterns and relationships okay so in the discussion chapter this is where you make knowledge claims so this is where you're showing the contribution of your thesis uh you're saying after doing this research this is what i can now claim um and this is where this study contributes to knowledge uh and the other well the third thing that you're doing in in this particular chapter is to show the originality of your work so as you're comparing it to the literature you're emphasizing where your work is different and where it fills a gap in an existing gap in the literature so the discussion chapter discusses and evaluates conflicting results so perhaps in your findings some things fitted quite neatly but some things didn't this is where you might discuss that you might also discuss unexpected findings that you have you know difficulty explaining that might be a place to to discuss it you could also identify weaknesses and limitations and you explain the implications of your findings why are they important how they affect our understanding of the research problem you've identified and at some point you'll revisit the conceptual framework and discuss how useful it was in terms of understanding this research problem or perhaps you know limitations if that's important so the discussion chapter is extremely important in the thesis because honestly this is where the meat is and this is where your reader really wants to find out what you know and if if someone is going to cite your dissertation this is the chapter they would cite so it's quite an important one so let's have a look at an outline in the column on the right you could this is just a suggestion but this is what you could do is summarize the findings interpret the findings and by this i mean make sense of it for your reader in terms of answering your your research questions so here you would explain the results you'd interpret them you might deal with issues that you hadn't expected then compare those findings to the literature and this is where you are synthesizing and and maybe even then make sense of it even further the implications of these findings you know do they improve add or change the field then the evaluation of the study so this is the critical overview of the study and then finally you may want to put in a section on recommendations or future research and the recommendations could be recommendations for practice recommendations for policy recommendations for future research the recommendations is not something that is always found in in these chapters it depends on your particular field if you're in a discipline that is much more professionally oriented you're more likely to find a recommendation section so just some tips to help you on the way is once you've written your chapter then go through the chapter with a different color pen and play the dissenting voice so wherever you make an argument then make a counter argument and this is just to see whether or not your results will stand up to that counter argument at this stage you may be very tired of your thesis so you want to try and see your results with new eyes if you can get someone else to help you they will be able to see how important your research is whereas your view might be a bit more jaded and you might think well there's nothing new here and then think of creative ways of presenting the discussion chapter put in visuals diagrams of your entire thesis if you can to show visually how everything fits together in some dissertations there will be a conclusion chapter as well in other dissertations the conclusion is a section of the discussion chapter so this is something you would need to decide but generally in the discussion and the conclusion chapter you're not introducing any new material what you're doing is you're making sense of of the material that you have already presented in the thesis so if at some point you find a text a source that's absolutely brilliant and helps you to interpret your your results then you would need to go back and build that source into your literature review so that it wouldn't be new in this chapter so the conclusion really pulls everything together for your reader so this is where you summarize your entire project but rather than just a descriptive summary what you're trying to show in in summarizing is how everything fits together that there's an alignment with what you set out to do how you went about doing it and then what you found and that what you found really justifies the the rationale that you claimed at the beginning for doing this research and that what you found is really significant and important and that's the evidence accumulated throughout the whole thesis and the arguments made throughout the whole thesis really come down to this point here where you show why it all makes sense you might also include the critical evaluation of the research project in this section rather than in the discussion the same thing with future research you might pose new questions that came out of this research as a way of ending off the thesis and you might put the recommendations in the conclusion rather than in the discussion but the main point of a conclusion chapter or a conclusion section is to get across a key message and the key message is really what is the the main message that you want to get across in this thesis so if somebody had to cite your thesis what is the message you would like them to be able to cite okay so that's the the last three chapters generally in the thesis sometimes it's only two and that is the analysis chapter where you present the results and findings the discussion chapter and then the conclusion and sometimes the discussion and the conclusion are collapsed into one and sometimes the results chapters are expanded into two and sometimes even three chapters okay good luck with your analysis and results chapters thanks bye

Channel: cecile badenhorst

Views: 190,824

Keywords: Research writing, dissertation writing, thesis writing, PhD writing, graduate writing, Cecile Badenhorst

Id: NK3VDvQOeuI

Length: 17min 55sec (1075 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2015