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Discussion chapter

What did you include?? So far I have

Summary of aims and each study
Implications of findings for research
Limitations
REflections on the research process.
Future research

A

I have all of that in a conclusion chapter :-(

My discussion chapter is the chapter before the conclusion where I discuss my findings in relation to the literature I reviewed earlier and then a general discussion. It's my least convincing chapter I feel.

Oh dear, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing (as usual).

I have

Intro
Lit review
Method
Study 1
Study 2
Study 3
Discussion.

Am I supposed to have something else?

A

I'm sure yours is fine, it's just a different way of doing things.

I have intro/lit rev/meth/prelude to analysis/findings1/findings2/discussion/conclusion - 8 chapters in all.

Are you going to have a conclusion chapter at all, or is your discussion your conclusion chapter as well? If separate, what are you going to put in your conclusion?

Are your implications of findings for research your 'contribution to knowledge'? I would make sure that you spell it out for the reader and don't make them look for how you have contributed.

D

My thesis was science based so slightly different but I had:
1. Intro/lit review with final page setting out the aims
2. Data handling and Statistics
3. System development and validation experiments
4. study 1
5. study 2
6. study 3
7. Discussion
8. Conclusion
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 had specific discussions of what I found. Chapter 7 was an overriding discussion bringing all of the individual studies together and relating to the literature review. I set the discussion out as; aim/what I concluded, 3 subsections on the individual aspects related to literature, limitations and future work. The conclusion section for my thesis was about 4 pointers of the findings, a brief list really.

I don't really know what a conclusion bit is? what do you put in it?

Like Dunni - each of my 3 studies are set out like scientific journals, so have their own intro, method, results and discussion sections. So I discuss the implications of what I have found in terms of the literature within each chapter.

I guess I should re-iterate that in the main discussion as well?

B

My thesis structure was introduction, 5 thematic chapters exploring different aspects of my question, and a final conclusions/discussion chapter. I was a humanities (history) student.

In the final chapter I reminded the reader what I'd done, and then pulled together the big questions. I always thought in terms of "so what" which my supervisors hammered into me. So I would think of the overarching questions, and see how each chapter contributed to them. So my final chapter was really about pulling together the different threads. I also addressed a bigger question which I hadn't thought of earlier, but really came naturally out of my research, and this was where I did it. And I had a brief reflection on future research that could follow on.

B

Quote From sneaks:

Like Dunni - each of my 3 studies are set out like scientific journals, so have their own intro, method, results and discussion sections. So I discuss the implications of what I have found in terms of the literature within each chapter.


Each of my 5 main chapters was like that too. But there was still scope for recapping and pulling together the disparate threads in the final conclusions chapter.

======= Date Modified 23 Jul 2011 13:56:57 =======
ah yes, I do have this whole 'thing' that my research highlights and that past research has ignored - so I think I will be using that as an overall discussion. So for my discussion/conclusion chapter I now have....(titles will change)

Original Aim of the thesis.
OVerviews of study1, study 2, study 3
Contribution - what these studies have added
Implications for Research (this is where I talk about my big idea and why other research is rubbish and mine's AMAZING :p )
Implications for Practice (practical initiatives to address the problem I'm looking at)
Reflections on the REserach process and Methdology (why it was useful to use mixed methods)
Limitations
Future Research
Conclusions (not sure what to put here apart from "Ta Da!"

R

Hi Sneaks,

I am in the medical field, so things may be different. I think normally one does a research project, for example do apples taste better than pears? Field study, results blah, blah, blah. Conclusion: 80% percent of people think that apples do taste better (based on what you have found in your project only). Discussion: Potential explanations, potential study implications (often speculation regarding what things may mean, so not all based on identified facts, so beyond the conclusion).

In practice one often sees a combination title, for example conclusion and discussion.

I think your scheme contains all the important elements. In my opinion your findings of the study is your "conclusion", the rest are elements of the "discussion".

Again in practice these parts are often intertwined and one could then use "Conclusion and discussion".
:-)

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