How-to-Write-a-Better-Thesis

94 7 Establishing Your Contribution
from your supervisor—to establish how your thesis should be arranged. For some
topics it may be, for example, that this part is quite brief, with a focus on statement
of a hypothesis and an explanation of how data was collected in the process
of evaluating the hypothesis. For other topics, it may be that this part extends over
two or more extensive chapters, which will contain descriptions of an innovation, a
discussion of what is involved in practical deployment of the innovation, explanation
of criteria the innovation needs to meet, and a description of the experiments
that have been to used to evaluate the innovation. The practice of your discipline is
the best guide, and if you have followed my advice and sought out other theses you
will undoubtably have found good examples to use as models.
But while I cannot give you guidance that is specific to your discipline, I can
give you advice on the criteria that this part of the thesis needs to satisfy. The term
is overused, but let me again say ‘narrative’. In this part of the thesis more than any
other, you are leading the reader through your thinking, and need to do so in a way
that lets the reader feel that your hypotheses and methods are reasonable and appropriate.
You need to explain why your proposals are plausible, and at least intuitively
offer advantages compared to other perspectives or approaches.
• For an observation-based thesis, this may flow directly from the background material;
for an innovation-based thesis, this may involve, say, your building a case
that your new approach solves problems that previous approaches neglected.
• For a study, you need to persuade the reader that the subject is of sufficient interest;
for a case study, you need to persuade the reader that the subject is representative
of a broader population.
• A quantitative thesis may need sections, or a whole chapter, on experimental
design and data collection.
• If you have used triangulation, your narrative needs to introduce the need for
multiple methods, then describe them and explain how they support each other.
You may need to have multiple separate sequences of presentations of methods,
results, and analysis.
And so on. Each project will be different.
A common theme, though, is that you have told the reader what research method
you used and why you chose it. Before you describe the results obtained by using
this method, you must first describe in detail the way that you applied the method,
and why. Although projects may use quite different methods, the points to be dealt
with are similar: clear identification of hypotheses; explicit choice of method; design
of research instruments to test hypotheses. With these in place, you can proceed
to the presentation of your results.
Summary of Chapter 7: Establishing Your Contribution
Positioning your work:
• Draw on the conclusions of the background chapters to identify your research
hypotheses or research questions.