A Guide to Writing a Senior Thesis in Sociology - WJH Home Page ...

• Discussion and Conclusion: 5-15 pages (Some students separate these into two separate chapters,
but many combine them into one chapter).
Think of your senior thesis as if it had an hour glass shape. You expose your reader
to a broad idea of what your thesis is about through the title or an abstract. Use the
introduction to guide the reader to the narrower research question that you focus on.
The literature review further situates your specific research question in a larger body
of knowledge. The methods and results chapters are very narrow—they focus only on
what you did. The discussion is where you interpret your findings, rather than just
reporting on them. Here, you start to think more broadly about the literature that you
reviewed and you link your specific findings to a broader body of research. Finally,
the conclusion brings your reader back to broader themes. How can your work be extended?
What other questions does it raise? How does it relate to other issues?
Introduction
Generally the introduction is 5-10 pages. The goal of the introduction to your thesis is to:
1. Identify your research question(s)
2. Briefly outline the major theoretical debates or bodies of work with which you are engaging
3. Provide a brief overview of the methods you use to answer your question
4. Make the case that your research question is important or that answering it makes a contribution
5. State your key findings briefly. Tell your reader what you found, and then you will use the rest of
the thesis to explain how you discovered it and the details of the findings.
6. Provide a roadmap or overview of the entire thesis to your reader. Use clear and simple language:
“First, I will review the relevant literature. Then I will describe the methodology that I used to
investigate my research question,” etc.
Sitting down with a blank screen in front of you and writing that first sentence can
be the hardest thing to do! Begin by stating your puzzle: what question are you trying
to answer? Make the case that your question is important. This does not have to be (and
should not be) a grand statement about how you are single-handedly solving a great
social problem. But you should identify why learning more about your question may
be important for the group you study, for policy, for popular understanding, etc. Two
common approaches to start the thesis are to use particularly interesting or demonstrative
examples or quotes from your data collection or to use an anecdote to illustrate the
importance of your topic.
You should then identify the possible theoretical or empirical explanations for your
question. This is not the literature review; keep this discussion brief. You should state
the key possible theories that you will discuss in your literature review and identify the
problems or limitations with these explanations, or you should discuss the major empirical
evidence about your question and what is lacking about it.
Then you should briefly describe what you do. What methods do you use to answer
your question? You will write an entire methodology section so you should keep this
brief, but identify whether you are using surveys, interviews, ethnography, etc., and the
population you studied.
Don’t think of the
actual writing process as
something you do at the
end of the thesis project.
You should continually be
writing and revising your
thesis to ensure that all
of its parts are working
towards telling the same
story.
A Guide to Writing a Senior Thesis in Sociology | page 41