How-to-Write-a-Better-Thesis

Chapter 8
Outcomes and Results
In a typical thesis (or research paper), data and argument are used to build a case.
That is, a logical narrative is used to persuade the reader that the claims of the thesis
are reasonable and are supported by evidence. From this perspective, maybe half of
a thesis can be viewed as a sequence of three components: first, how the data was
gathered and what it is intended to represent; second, what the gathered data looks
like; third, how it should be interpreted. How to present ‘what the gathered data
looks like’ is the subject of this chapter. 1
If you have been undertaking quantitative work—bench experiments, surveys,
measurements, and so on—clearly you will need to report the outcomes of your
investigations. What should you include in the ‘results’ chapters, and what should
you leave out? At this stage of the research, you will have analyzed and interpreted
your results, and now you need to use them to present an argument to the reader. If
your work is more qualitative—case studies or reviews, for example—you probably
still need to present an objective review of what you have found, and it may well
be in the form of a ‘results’ chapter. In either quantitative or qualitative work, such
a chapter provides a basis for the analysis or discussion that completes the body of
your thesis.
It is true that some theses don’t have a results chapter; my (Zobel’s) thesis, for
example, primarily consisted of a series of linked mathematical results, in which
1
A note on terminology. Discussion of how to present results is clouded by the inconsistencies in
the way experiments and their outcomes are described. In many fields of research, for example,
data is the outcome of the recording of measurements. The data could have been recorded by you
as the researcher using the instruments you devised to test your hypotheses, or recorded by some
other researcher and then made available. Or they could have been recorded for some other purpose,
such as the temperatures recorded at a meteorological station, or the share prices recorded at
a stock exchange. But data can also be the subject of an experiment. A researcher investigating a
weather model could use temperature measurements as an input, and the recorded values—‘data’
in the above definition—could be the input to the model, which also produces ‘data’ as output.
Here I use data to describe experimental results, or measurements, and outcomes or results to
describe what the researcher found by interpreting these measurements.
D. Evans et al., How to Write a Better Thesis, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-04286-2_8,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
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