Structuring Your Research Thesis

Susan Carter, Frances Kelly, Ian Brailsford

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781350315297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Written in a lively and engaging style, this concise text helps students of all disciplines to structure their thesis in a clear, coherent and persuasive manner. It focuses on three core aspects of thesis structure and gives readers helpful guidance on ordering their ideas, making effective use of emphasis and achieving coherence in their writing. Enriched with insights from students and examiners, it shows students how to structure their thesis in a way that foregrounds the significance of their research. Packed with ideas for structuring theses effectively, this practical guide will be invaluable to thesis writers of all disciplines.

1 Ordering the Thesis

Deciding on the order in which you will present the entire research project is perhaps the foremost decision you will make about the written thesis. Often at the proposal stage and before much writing or research has been done, a contingent contents page will be drawn up as a way of making the project more concrete and tangible. Thomas and Brubaker (2000) suggest that you consider what you would ask if you ‘knew nothing about this topic and … wanted to know about this research’ and then think about the order in which you would like to have your questions answered (p. 245). At the early stages, the structure of the written thesis may blurrily overlap with the expected progression of the research project. To some extent this is entirely appropriate because the end goal of the research project is, for most candidates, the finished thesis. Research design necessarily responds to the requirements of the thesis genre, discipline epistemology (which affects methods) and the candidate’s deepening understanding of their material.

We do not intend to downplay the complexity of structuring decision-making, but suggest here that what is generally accepted as the basic model of the thesis gives a useful foundational understanding of the expectations of every thesis. Although the diagrammatic use of mind-maps and models can be helpful for getting your head around all the components of your thesis – and we discuss these below (p. 20) – a basic function of structure is to enable clear demonstration that the academic requirements of every thesis have been fulfilled in yours. First, then, a very basic thesis model operates like a simple recipe, showing the essentials that your thesis is likely to have somewhere. Just as you could adapt the general principles of a recipe by adding or omitting some ingredients, use the basic structure as a pattern that you can adapt in different ways while following the underpinning principles.

A basic model

The following model is often called ‘the basic science structure’. Some arts, humanities and social science theses use this model as well. We suspect that by doing so they are claiming the prestige of scientific research, and making it easy for an examiner to see the ‘thesisliness’ of the work. They are also following a tried-and-tested formula. If this structure works for you, then you might consider reading no further. However, you may already have been introduced to the science-based structure and found it difficult to apply to your topic, which is why you are now reading this book. The basic model is as follows:

• Introduction: Why am I doing this research? What is the problem? What is the research question? What are the hypotheses?
• Literature review: What is already known? Where is the gap I will fill? Which issues, contentions, discourses from the literature are relevant to my research?
• Aims: What do I hope to find out?
• Methodology: How will I proceed? What theory will I use? What is my epistemology? What are my methods?
• Results: What have I found?
• Discussion: What does it mean?
• Conclusion: What is my contribution to knowledge?
• Recommendations

Different advice manuals elaborate this basic model. Glatthorn (1998) points out that ‘there are many variations to this basic pattern’ and considers that, for example, ‘in some dissertations the methodology is so implicit in the nature of the inquiry that … no separate treatment is needed’ (p. 124). Murray (2011, p. 144) suggests using the basic or ‘generic’ model as the starting point in designing a thesis. Swetnam (2003, p. 44) adds that the introduction will additionally answer: ‘Who is likely to be interested in it? What is the possible use of the research? What is the locus and focus?’ The basic model will work for some students, but the nature of the particular research project and its significance should always take precedence over the formula: that is the mark of a doctoral thesis.

Thomas and Brubaker (2000, p. 245) suggest a slightly different basic outline that suits a theoretically-based thesis:

Chapter 1	The Nature of the Problem and its Significance
Chapter 2	Theory for Interpreting the Phenomenon that is Studied
Chapter 3	The Research Design for Testing the Theory
Chapter 4	Data Collection
Chapter 5	A Report of the Results
Chapter 6	An Analysis of the Results
Chapter 7	Implications of the Study’s Outcomes

What Thomas and Brubaker label ‘Chapter 1’ might usually be called ‘Introduction’ or ‘Background’; their logical flow forward maps onto the basic model when this change is made. You can see from these variations that there is a standard forward movement from the background, which might include the work already done in the area, the theories used in the context of the discipline’s possibilities, through the methods, to what was found (new knowledge or understanding) and what it means, including ideas for future research. The evident, predictable drive forward gives rise to the truism that each doctoral thesis tells a story.

Readers feel more confident when the thesis obligingly follows their narrative expectations. Although many disciplines prefer more individually-designed structures in journal articles and books, it is possible to find theses within these disciplines that adapt the hard sciences’ formulaic language around a set structure: introduction, literature review, methodology, results and discussion. Such adaptation is a defence mechanism, given that some of the so-called ‘softer disciplines’ experienced years of self-justification before being fully accepted as legitimate scholarly disciplines. Are you an innovator who enjoys risky work, blazing out trails, or someone who prefers the safety of staying on the well-trodden path? If you are anxious about your work being accepted, you could consider using some hard science terms, perhaps even as a contingency plan, at the outset, with the intention of replacing these terms with something cognitively more sophisticated during the process of writing the thesis.

Even the most risk-comfortable researcher, however, should also use the basic model as a checklist for the work which needs to be demonstrated in their written thesis. One very obvious consideration is where the literature will be reviewed. Other approaches to the basic model give different understandings of the components of the topic – how they might fit together and what shifts with the various possibilities – and thus help to establish perimeters to the thesis. The order of the moves that the thesis makes should ensure the strongest possible presentation of the research work.

In some disciplines, the basic thesis formulae would look simplistic. However, the work done by these sections of a science thesis will also be done in one way or another by the exegetical thesis. Wisker, giving consideration to arts and humanities theses, proposes that a typical thesis plan is:

title; abstract; preface/acknowledgements; introduction; literature review/theoretical perspectives chapter; methodology and methods explored and explained, including the design of the study; presentation of findings and results (a separate chapter for scientists only): for social scientists, arts and humanities students, the results, or data, are seen as evidence for the argument, findings and claims based on the research, and they appear in a dialogue with such claims, that is, presentation and discussion of results, analysis, arguments, development of ideas based on results— interpretation of findings; conclusions: both factual (what was found) and conceptual (what does it mean? what does it add to meaning and understanding about the area/field/issues?) appendices/statistical tables and illustrations; bibliography. (Wisker, 2008, pp. 281–2)

Even if you use the basic outline as one to resist and work against, we expect that knowing what it declares to be appropriate will help you to produce a more elaborate artifice.

If the science model looks like a workable one for you, perhaps with some adaptation, then the outline of your thesis structure is in place and you can move to the next level of structuring. Rountree endorses taking the path most usually taken, expanding on the metaphor ‘thesis as journey’ with a vivid inset story:

As we snaked up Ruapehu [a tall snow-covered New Zealand mountain] the guides gave us nifty tips, one of which was to plant your boot in someone else’s bootprint to avoid slipping on the glassy virgin snow. It worked. With a thesis too, if you want to cut down on the risk of slipping off track and losing your way, perhaps permanently, it is safer to take the well-trod path – to examine other theses, choose a methodology, structure and style you admire and think will work, adapting it to suit you and your particular project. This sounds like dull advice, but doing a thesis at all is adventurous enough. (Rountree and Laing, 1996, pp. vi–vii)

If following a basic generic thesis structure will work for you, follow the path most commonly taken. Your research topic should provide some adventure even as you follow the well-trod path.

Mind-mapping and modelling the thesis

Some doctoral candidates find visually-conveyed information especially accessible. You may be familiar with mind-mapping as a way of getting an overview of all of the potential components of your thesis. To mind-map, one begins with a central idea which then spreads out with more ideas that emerge from the central one. More is better. A page covered in radiating nouns can show the topic’s most promising connections. The strength of mind-mapping is that it side-steps structuring decisions, freeing up the potential issues, themes, topics and backgrounds to speak of their own accord without your authorial structuring. Mind-mapping allows you to trace through your material from different directions, opening up some of those possible parallel universes mentioned in the Preface. It should also allow you to select which one you will inhabit, and to move on from the chaotic mind-map to a diagrammatic model. The mind-map can be activated as a concept map (Novak, 1998), which adds the verb connections between the nouns of the mind-map. The verbs establish which of the terms generate others, which restrict or compromise others, and so on: the verbs begin to make sense of the geography of the map.

The next stage of the process is to start imposing structure onto the mind-map’s insights by making a working diagram of the terms that seem most promising. The diagram pattern may begin with nouns that form the topic of the thesis, but the verbs of the concept map should suggest ways of fitting the ideas together. What geometric shape best accommodates your ideas? Dunleavy (2003) recommends graphic devices such as boxes, lines and arrows to help structure the ideas. These may be developed further to give a geometric shape to your work. Often a grid, like the example that we discuss next, works well.

The grid with two options

Once you have a diagram, play with it a little for improvements. Davis and McKay (1996) provide a diagrammatic example that involves reorientation from the model of a grid system. Discussing comparison and contrast, they further observe what they perceive to be the two main options of structure: the topic-by-topic approach and the point-by-point method.

In the topic-by-topic approach, sometimes called the divided approach, each topic is discussed separately. This can be represented as follows:

Topic-by-topic structure:

Topic 1

Point a

Point b

Point c

Topic 2

Point a

Point b

Point c

The second approach is the point-by-point method, sometimes called the alternating method. Here the first point is developed for each topic, then the second point for each topic and so on.

Point-by-point structure:

Point A

Topic 1

Topic 2

Point B

Topic 1

Topic 2

Point C

Topic 1

Topic 2

Davis and McKay (1996, p. 60) point out that neither method is inherently stronger than the other. It is simply a matter of which design works best for your material.

This resonates with us, from our own experience and our work with students, because frequently in the arts, humanities and social sciences there is something of a grid between the material discussed and the themes that emerge from it. For historians, the material may be events, or social groups; for literature students, it may be texts; and works of art or schools for art historians. Susan had the experience of making a change half way through her thesis when she recognized that shifting her design 180 degrees would enable her ideas to come through more clearly.

I began my doctorate assuming that the structure would be the same as my Master’s thesis structure. There I had a lengthy introduction in which I laid out the social issues I was investigating, ...