Don't Ruin Your Entire Dissertation in Chapter 5

Hi everyone, I'm Dr. Courtney Watson, and today we are going to talk about Chapter 5. So Chapter 5 of your dissertation, or the discussion chapter of your dissertation, is a very exciting place to be. It's a really exciting part of your journey because you made it, you're a real researcher now. And Chapter 5 is your chance not just to discuss your research, though of course there's, there's plenty of room for that, but also to talk in depth about the implications of your research and why your study matters and to whom your study matters. So the landscape of your topical area of your discipline is forever changed just a little bit because of your work. Because you saw a gap in the literature and realized that something was missing from the body of knowledge in your little corner of academe, and you set out to fix that. So because you saw that gap and you decided that you were going to do something about it, that's a big accomplishment. Many people have tried and failed in the attempt, so please see your accomplishment for what it is and, and for the success it is. However, there will be time to celebrate later, but right now you've still got a lot of work to do, a rather substantial amount of work to do. The good news is though the discussion chapter is pretty fun to write because you know, you know, you know everything, you know where it's headed. So it makes it much easier than the other chapters that preceded it. So today we're going to talk about how to approach Chapter 5, what to do, and then also what to avoid, and how to feel really good about wrapping up your dissertation and being satisfied with the work that you're putting out into the world and with your contribution. To the body of knowledge. So Chapter 5 always comes with a lot of apprehension, both for my own grad students and also for my editing coaching and clients. You simultaneously feel really close to the finish line but also far away because there's so much territory that gets covered in Chapter 5. And really, it's, it's your last chance, at least in writing, to explain and defend your research and make a case for its value and why it matters. So we'll go through it today. There's some things I'd like you to keep in mind as you're planning to write Chapter 5, or as you're planning to outline it or approach it, or if you're doing some rewrites on Chapter 5, this will be a good refresher for you. So the first thing, as with every chapter of your dissertation, you want to be really clear about the expectations of your department and your university. So have your department or university's template for the dissertation and make sure that you're using it. Make sure that you're, you're sticking to it to the letter. I also recommend that my, my clients make sure that they're reviewing copies of recent dissertations that have successfully passed in their program just to note the length and depth of Chapter 5 in those projects that you know were successful. So this will help you know that you're in line with expectations of your program and your department and that you're adhering to the conventions. Because today we'll be talking about Chapter 5 conventions for like a typical generic qualitative study. So there might be some variation in what your Chapter 5 is expected to look like. If you adhere to your template, you'll be fine. If you didn't get a template or you aren't working from a template, it would be really good to ask your chair exactly what sections you need include in Chapter 5, what you'll need to prepare, just because there's no standard one-size-fits-all for something like this. There's a lot of, a lot of things that typically happen in the Chapter 5, like in the discussion chapter, but there might be, you know, some unusual variations to that in your program. So you just want to make sure that you're doing everything that you're being expected to do within your program. Some advice that I have for approaching Chapter 5 is to pace yourself and to really take your time with this chapter. One of the mistakes I see people make when fairly often is to get ahead of themselves, to try to rush. And I understand that because I know how excited you are to be done with your dissertation. Believe me, I, I've been there and I get it. But it's also a really critical moment in the life of your researcher. And this is a time where you really want to stick the landing. You want to make sure that you are finishing your project very strongly so that you're submitting work that you're really proud of and that you feel confident about. So just keep in mind Don't rush Chapter 5 because there's so much happening in it and you'll get lost if you try to get ahead of yourself. And the stakes are really very high here. In fact, the stakes have never been higher for this particular project because Chapter 5 is the last piece of work that your chair and your committee will read. So it's the last impression that they'll have of you as a student. The next step after your dissertation is successfully defended, you're no longer a student, you're a peer at that point. And this is always one of my favorite moments for my graduate students and for my clients as well, because they, they walk into the defense as students and they leave as doctors, and nothing's ever quite the same after that. So keep in mind you have something great to look forward to, but you just need to get through Chapter 5 first. So another recommendation I have for writing Chapter 5 is to just be as, as organized as possible. If you are working from an outline already, that's excellent. I highly recommend working from outlines. If not, I really recommend both for my students and my clients creating an outline specifically for Chapter 5 just to help you stay on track, just to help you know what you've covered, what you need to cover, and really just to stay right on target, to know what each writing session you have will entail, and just to make sure that, that you're hitting all of those points that you need to hit to successfully complete the chapter and therefore successfully complete the dissertation. So Chapter 5 is also the place where it's really important to, you know, find your voice as a writer because you want this chapter more than any other to feel distinctively you. You want the voice to feel distinctively you, to have that authority and that, that confidence that's distinctive to you as a writer. So this is a place where, you know, you really have a chance to exercise that more than, than you did in other chapters. So chapter 1, you really want to feel like it's, like it's yours, or chapter 5, I'm sorry, you really want to feel like it's yours. Chapter 1 as well, for that matter. So find your voice as a writer and make sure that you say everything that you wanna because this is really your, your last chance to do it. So if there is something burning inside you that you really want to recommend, if you have recommendations for future research, if you have ideas for how the study could have been better, how it could have been, you know, more effective, or how it could have been structured differently, this is your opportunity to say so. Some other considerations before writing Chapter 5. Chapter 5 has quite a few components to it, more so than some of your other chapters. You have a lot to do, and you typically have about 20 to 25 pages to do it So a little more or a little less depending on your discipline. This is a place where it's really good to look at the work of your predecessors and see how long their Chapter 5 was. But in my experience, both with my students and my clients, and this is across many, many different disciplines, Chapter 5 to be successful needs to be about 20 to 25 pages. If it's fewer than 20 pages, there's a chance that your discussion is short or you're overlooking something. And then if it's longer than 25-30 pages, there's a chance that you're just going to be, be too embroiled in it, and there won't be a clear path out of your dissertation. So just, you know, keep that in mind, have that in your head as you're writing, as you're trying to pace out your writing and deciding how many paragraphs you need here and how many pages you need there. For some disciplines, they tend to— chapter 5 tends to fall on the shorter side. So if you're writing in like math, for instance, that's one tends to be a bit shorter on Chapter 5. Some of the humanities can go considerably longer, so if you're doing a literature dissertation or if you're doing a history dissertation, some of the social sciences like psychology and anthropology, they can tend to be longer as well. So in a discipline like that, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that your discussion is, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60 pages, but generally they'll— they tend to be much shorter than that. So if you aim for 20 to 25, you should be in pretty good shape unless otherwise noted, unless there's something else that you're aware of from your department. So as with every other part of your dissertation, you want to be really mindful of the narrative through line. That's going to be the, the internal source of energy and momentum that will propel the reader through the dissertation. So you really do want to think about the reader's perspective as well and how, like, how is this a continuation and the end of the story that you're telling. So, uh, said more plainly, what is the story that your dissertation tells? Is it clearly stated in each chapter? Is each chapter aligned in the way that it's clearly telling the same story from the problem to the purpose to the gap to the research questions to the methodology and so on? Is every piece of that contributing to the same story and contributing to the narrative arc of what you're doing? One comment that I see a whole lot from my editing clients that they get from their chairs and their committees is related to alignment or how there's a lack of connection linking the problem to the purpose to the gap, to the questions, the research questions, and beyond that. And a good way to address that is to think of, you know, the narrative or the story as the phantom thread that you're looking for. And so it needs to be extremely clearly expressed, well expressed in Chapter 5. So just, you know, pay attention to that. Make sure that each chapter is telling the same story and Chapter 5 is a continuation of that, and there's not really anything— I mean, you might have some unexpected results that you're discussing, but but tonally it shouldn't be that much different or unexpected in that sense. So now we'll get into talking about some of the components. I'll just briefly mention some of the components of Chapter 5. So there are 4 primary components to Chapter 5 in a classic dissertation, and this is whether it's qualitative or quantitative. Either way, there are 5 components to it, or there are 4 components to it. The first is the introduction. So the introduction is just a basic overview of what the reader is going to see in Chapter 5. It does not need to be exhaustive, but it does need to be there. You want something that, you know, helps the, helps the reader acclimate to Chapter 5 and just become familiar with, like, the different ideas that are going to be anchoring Chapter 5. After you have your introduction, the next section will be the results and their implications. So in this section, you talk about what your results are. These are the results that you delivered in Chapter 4, but you talk about them very specifically in Chapter 5. And the way that you do that is talking about their implications. So for this section, your results and implications section, you'll start off by talking about what did the study find? What were the findings of the study? Why does it matter? Why do these findings matter? How are these findings, you know, situated in the context of the study? For whom do these, these findings matter? And then another question that you can think about that can really drive your writing is, why now? Why was now a good time to do this study? Why was there particular urgency for doing the study right now? And for this, you can talk about, you know, anything, anything as far as like, oh, there's been a lot of recent research, or all of the research has overlooked this particular area, so it's urgent to get these findings about this particular area of this topic. Or when you have the, the for whom talking about this particular population for this study. The next section of Chapter 5 is the recommendations, and this is always one of my favorite sections because at this point you're an expert on this topic, and it's really interesting to read the perspective of a new expert on the topic, people who are the freshest voices on the topic, who have done the most recent research, the most recent work in the field on the topic. And based on that recent knowledge, they're gonna, they're gonna tell you what they think think and tell you what their recommendations are and tell you how to move forward with research in this area. So that's always, that's always very exciting. So in the recommendation section, you'll talk about what should happen next, what are the logical steps to making that happen, and why. And so when you're talking about that with logical steps to making something happen, you could say, well, additional research needs to be done, or we need, we need another grant for this, or the demographics weren't quite wide enough, so we need to, to look at additional demographics in our sample size, or legislative legislation needs to be proposed to affect change, or we need to make changes in how a particular population is trained based on the results of this essay, or the work that educators are doing, we need to make sure that they include this in their, in their pedagogy. So whatever it is, you just want to make sure that you're talking about, you know, what your recommendations are, to whom, for whom, and how to get it done. And then the final section of Chapter 5 is the conclusion. So in the conclusion, it's pretty standard, it's pretty much what you would expect. It's a summary of what you did, and then it's also an assertion of why it matters, why the research matters, why it needed to be done now. And then my favorite recommendation to make for the conclusion is looking ahead. So looking ahead 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, what needs to happen in order to affect meaningful change in this area that you've done research on. So based on the study that you've done, what needs to change, what could change, and how do you get there? So those are the— those are a basic overview of what you'll be— what sections you'll be covering in Chapter 5, but what I'd like to do now is just go in depth in talking about each of these sections. So to go back to the introduction, what you'll do to start your introduction, one option that you have is to talk about the genesis of the study, how the study came into being, how, how you came to propose this particular study. This will probably feel redundant to you, and it is redundant, but in a different way. Like, yes, you're covering a lot of the same territory that you covered in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, but now you're telling the story with the benefit of hindsight, and that really makes all the difference. Like when you flip the switch from, you know, having a proposal to having defended that proposal, and you can change everything from future tense to past tense. It's kind of the, the same principle because now you have hindsight. Now you know, you know what happened. So you can be a little reflective here, not too much, but a little bit of reflection never hurts in this section, just as you're talking about how the study came into being. And then in the next part of your introduction, You want to talk about the problem, so this is a good time to revisit your problem statement, but also talk about any— anything that has changed since you came up with your problem statement. Do you look at your problem statement differently now that you've actually done the study? Is there anything you would change about your problem statement? Maybe you found that the demographic you were looking at was a little bit too narrow, or maybe now you think the sample size was a bit too small. Maybe the sample is a bit too large and you got an overwhelming amount of data. So whatever it is, you can talk about the problem in that context. In the next section of the introduction, once you've talked about the problem, of course you want to talk about the purpose. And again, you can do this with the benefit of hindsight and the benefit of having perspective from having done the study. So you'll talk about your purpose in the context of your purpose statement and then reflect a bit on it and talk about if there's anything that you would change about the purpose or the purpose statement, if there's anything that you see now that you didn't see before, just from the benefit of having done the study and having done the research and and knowing, having a better idea now of what that landscape actually looks like and your study's place in, in the larger ecosystem. So you'll talk about the problem, you'll talk about the purpose, you'll revisit your research questions. And this, you can just reiterate your research questions, but if you want to offer some analysis of your research questions, that's great too. Again, with the benefit of hindsight, is there anything that you would change about your research questions? Is there anything that you did change about your research questions? Like, did they evolve as your your topic progressed. Like, did you have them when you were writing the introduction? Did the questions look one way, and then did they evolve after that out of, out of necessity or out of additional knowledge? So just give an overview of that, give an idea of what's going on with your research questions. Then in the next section of the introduction, you'll give a brief overview of your methods. And again, it feels like you, you've just done this in Chapter 3 and probably again in Chapter 4, but you have the benefit of hindsight now. So you'll talk about your basic theory theoretical framework of the study, how it was carried out, and you'll offer a quick summary of Chapter 3 just as far as talking about your methodology for the study. Once you wrap up your introduction to Chapter 5, you will move on to the next section, which will be your results and your implications of results, otherwise known as the good part, the fun part, the part that's great to talk about now being on the other side of it. So with the results and their implications, the first thing you want to do is pull from Chapter 4 to give an overview of your results. So flat-out state what happened. I did this and this happened. I wrote these questions, I did this survey, here's, here's what happened, here's how they reported back, here's how it was coded, here were the major themes that I found. So give an overview, overview of your results in that way, and then put them in context to comparable studies. So studies that either also happened recently, studies that perhaps yours was like modeled after. Just put them in context, show kind of where they live within that ecosystem or within that landscape of, of your topic, so of research that's happening in your topical area. The next section that you want to have when you're talking about your results and implications would be your implications section. So with implications, what you're getting at is why do the results matter? Like, I did study X, I found out Y, Z, then is like, well, so what? It's answering that so what question. So be really specific here. This is the most important part of your dissertation, so give the people what they want. You have 100+ pages leading up to this, so make sure that you don't skimp on this section or gloss over anything. A common failure that I see with talking about the implications is people are just go way too short with this section. So dig in, take your time, and really think through what are the implications of this study, you know, having been done, what we learned from this study, maybe what we didn't learn from this study that we know we're gonna need to investigate in the future. And just really like dig in here, be specific, go into details, get in the weeds. If you're having trouble structuring this section, I recommend using just a basic journalistic technique. It comes in very handy for academic work. So when you're thinking about the implications go into who, what, when, where, why, and how. That is the easiest way— that's the easiest trick I can offer for simplifying your approach to talking about your implications. So who is being affected by the implications of these results? When? What? And then where, why, and how. So if you're talking about the who, talk about the specific population that you're dealing with. If you're talking about what, talk about like what are the stakes of this study. When— you can talk about two things. You can talk about when the study was done and, you know, when these results can practically be used. So if you're doing something with, say, a school district, you could say like, well, you know, it's, it's March, so I would want to make a proposal for some changes to be enacted for the next school year, or for our next round of hiring, or for our next round of training, or whatever. But try to be specific about when your results could be enacted or when your recommendations could be enacted. Talking about where— where was the study done? Where else might benefit from a study like yours. Like, if your study was concentrated in the Northeast, is this something that could possibly be useful for similar populations in the South? Why? Why was the study done? What was the kind of heart and purpose of the study? That's something else you can talk about in your implications. And then how— like, how was the study accomplished? How could it be, you know, done in a similar way in the future? I just think about— think about the how in the context of your implications. Implications. And then the next section of talking about your implications would be conclusions. Like, what conclusions can you reach from the study? So based, you know, solely on your results, not on other sources, but you've done the study, you know, what do you conclude from your results? In the next section of the results and implications, you would want to situate the study. So discuss your study within the landscape of your topic. Where does it fit? Fit? Why does it matter that you have these, these brand new results compared to other studies that have been done recently, or other kind of seminal cornerstone studies? So just situate your study. Talk about how it compares to similar studies. Conversely, how is it dissimilar from similar studies? Um, how was it successful? Talk about the successes of your study. What went really well? What do you know now that you didn't know before? Like, what additional information is being added to the body of Also, where did your study fall short? And keep in mind with this, people like to not say how the study fell short. Your study is not successful if you didn't, like, find anything out or if you didn't have what we would call meaningful results. That's what a lot of academic work is. It's finding out what doesn't work or what doesn't work well enough. It's still a successful study. It doesn't mean that you're not a worthy researcher. And really, the real purpose of a dissertation is to be able to demonstrate that you know all of the steps steps to properly, you know, conceive of and execute a large-scale study. So the results are, are almost beside the point, but you should still be talking about them. So talk about how the study was successful, talk about maybe how it fell short and what you learned from it, what you might change or recommend for somebody who wants to rerun the study to do it in a different way. And then think about how does it add to or change the ecosystem for this topic. So really really dig in and talk about what the implications are for the study and, you know, how the, the landscape for this topic looks a little bit different now because of this contribution that your research has made. Then you want to kind of delve into that a little bit further, um, with, well, what is the specific contribution to the literature that this study makes? What does your study contribute to the body of extant knowledge on this topic or on this problem? Because you're— I mean, your study was designed to make a contribution, so talk about that contribution. Talk about whether or not it solved the problem that you identified. And typically it's not like, yes, this solved the problem, or no, this didn't solve the problem. The answer is usually more of sort of, kind of. We learned this, and this will help us moving forward. So it doesn't have to be a yes or no, black and white answer. You're saying, this is, this is what we learned, this is what we know now that we didn't know before, and here's how it might make a difference. In the next section of Chapter 5, you want to talk about your recommendations. So this starts by talking about your academic recommendations. So really, this is other research that should be done, additional research that should be done. You could recommend looking at different demographics, different sample sizes, different samples, different populations. You would want to think about and discuss ways to kind of mitigate any of the limitations that you reported in your study. You could recommend different approaches. So if your study is qualitative, you might recommend doing a quantitative study to see, you know, if that can answer things, if that can answer different questions than the questions that your study answered. Or qualitative if yours was quantitative. So describe the approaches that would be complementary to your study that would help further advance the work that your study did and what your study found out. You could also talk about related research that you're already working on. So sometimes researchers are working on multiple complementary projects simultaneously. So you have an— if you have an idea of what the next few years of your scholarship looks like, if you're gonna stick with this topic and do more work on it and pursue publication for it, you can talk about that a little bit and kind of what your intentions are. Occasionally researchers will also include another related study that they're working on in their recommendation sections, and this just helps establish a clear path forward, a clear path of, of where the knowledge goes from here. Here. The next approach that you can take with talking about this would be practical, real-world suggestions. So here are some recommendations for how this research could be used in the real world. And this is if you're making recommendations for further grants to be done, if you're making recommendations for funding that is needed to implement a particular program, if you're making recommendations on like hiring techniques or protocols, policies, education, if you're making recommendations about legislation, uh, that should be proposed to, you know, make some changes at either the, you know, local level, the community level, municipal level, or even state, regional, federal. So think about, think about that as well when you're talking about your recommendations. And then finally, the next section, the final section of Chapter 5, is your conclusion. And your conclusion should just sum everything up and also look forward. So Give a brief overview of everything that you did in your study and then look forward to talk about like, well, what's next for this topic? What's next for this, you know, area of research? Or area of research, whether you're the researcher who enacts it or not. So, and this has just been a basic overview of Chapter 5. I hope your writing goes well. I wish you good luck, and I'll see you all later. Bye!