Writing Dissertation Chapter 5

January 13th. And in honor of January 13th, I thought I would keep moving forward and do a brief discussion on chapter five of a dissertation. And just as the disclaimer chapter five is. Something just turned off on me. So chapter five is the end of the dissertation, chapter five. In the traditional, typical dissertation, chapter five is where you conclude everything. You bring everything together. Now, that's not to say it couldn't be chapter seven or chapter six or chapter four, but the typical dissertation has broken into five pieces. I've seen it go into seven, I've seen it go into four. But we're just referring to it as five here today. And we can think of it as the conclusion or the integration. One of the things that I have seen, and we've gotten questions on as well, limitations that people have or issues that have come up, is first and foremost, not tying your results into the previous literature. You do all this review of literature in chapter two. You provide all this justification for doing this study. You provide all kinds of support for what has been done. Then you do your study, you come up with your results. You, you report them in chapter four. And then many people get to chapter five and forget to say, oh, here's my work. How does it fit with what else has been done? How does it fit with the previous research? Do I agree? Do I disagree? Have I found new paths? Have I not found new paths? Have I found, wow, this approach didn't work at all. You want to take the time on this point in your dissertation to say, this is what I found and this is what it means. This is how it integrates with all the other work that has been done. That's incredibly helpful for future researchers. And since you're the one who spent all this time on this research and all this time becoming the expert on this, you are the most qualified person in the world to let others know how your results fit and what they mean. So you really want to take the time to integrate this with the previous research. And if you haven't done that, your committee is going to say, hey, where's the integration? Why haven't you tied this in with the previous research? That's what they're. They want. They want to see that you understand where your work fits with everything else that's been done. And I should have said this earlier, but if you're out there and have questions, please just jump in and ask them at any time. You know, the purpose of this is to get you information and help you answer any questions you might have. Now, A number of people get to chapter five and don't know what to write and. Or don't know how long chapter five should be. Huh? I'm gonna go back to one of my standard answers. If your university has a template, there's typically going to be headings of what should be included in every chapter. But we'll talk about chapter five now. So what should be included there? So that can be a good place to start. Many people are going to go back and say, here were my research questions. This was my problem. This was the purpose. Now I found that this was significant. Or I found that this theme developed and that now I want to start answering my research questions. Was I able to answer the research question? And what is the answer I got for every research question that's going to be very helpful and very important to include in Chapter 5. In addition, excuse me, how long should it be? Chapter five typically is not, you know, 200 pages. Chapter five typically end up usually in the 15 to 18 page range. Tying things in, what else? You know, another big thing you get to say in chapter five is what future research should be done. Look, you spent all this time doing it. You get to find out what the limits of your research were. You get to then say, oh, well, if we want to expand our knowledge in this area, perhaps we should. And now you got start thinking about, wow, where were their boundaries to what I did? Maybe it needs to be a different population or sample easily. Maybe it needs to be a different methodology. Maybe it needs to be, if you're doing a quantitative study looked at from a different perspective, slash a different type of test. Because certain tests can bring out some information and other tests bring out other information. So this is a chance where you get to break a little bit out of a mold and say, really? Here's here's what I found, here's what else should be done, here's why it's important to what needs to be done and other things that can be included. I've seen chapter fives that have had, okay, what's the application to practice? How, why? And how is are the results here important? And this is where you get to say, here's why it's important. Here's why, here's where it can and should be used. And again, here are limitations, okay? And sometimes people say, well, what's the difference between a limitation and a challenge? Well, a challenge is something that you ran into that made it a little more difficult to do the study. I had a hard time finding participants or there was an external event that caused Problems with collecting my data. A limitation is I only looked at these type of people, or I only looked at this type of stock transaction, or I only looked at. And it's the boundary or sometimes think of the delimitation, the boundaries of my study so I can make conclusions based on that if I want to go further. This is when I have my recommendations for future work. Before I do any summary or anything. Are there any questions from anybody? Yes, It. Two good questions. I'm going to start with the second one. Are you allowed to make policy recommendations coming out of your study? Yes, if they are within the scope of your study. So if you studied something, let's talk about educational curriculum for high school students and you wanted to start making policy recommendations about that. Yes. Great. However, if you want to start making policy recommendations about animal husbandry or immigration, that's pretty much way beyond the scope of what you studied. And your committee's going to pretty much say, you can't do that. It's way beyond what you've done. Now, delimitations and by demerits of your study, I'm going to guess it means challenges. So a delimitation is just a boundary of your work. My study is delimited by the fact that I only interviewed middle school teachers or I only gathered data on. And I've used stocks as an example. I've only gathered data on stocks that were traded in Europe or on. Or only technology stocks or something like that. So I can only make recommendations about that. A demerit might be some. Something that was a. I'm not going to say a flaw, but an issue potentially with the way you did the study, the way it was set up. So hopefully things like that can be taken care of on the front end before you've done it and when your committee gives input there as opposed to after it's already completed. Okay, great. Thank you. And if anybody else has any questions. Yeah. So it is going to depend on your field of study. Very short chapters tend to bring up questions and committee members of things like, well, wait, you did all this work and you only have three pages to say about it. You know, there's got to be more to this and, and what's happening internally with the committee members. Well, if they've only got three pages, we didn't make them work hard enough. Maybe I should ask them to do more. So that's just kind of a subconscious thing that can come up. But by discipline it will make matter. By what your committee wants, it will matter. And you know. Yeah, it can be 20 pages. I've not seen too many chapter fives that have gone over 25 pages. But again, discipline and university and committee are all factors that go into that. It, Yeah, If you have a requirement of a certain number of pages, you can fill it. But is it actually meaningful to move the discourse forward on this discipline or is there a lot of stuff in there that people are just going to flop over and not, not even read or pay attention to? Because. Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, fine. You know, I, I'd rather see things shorter personally, where we can get to the point, because at a thousand pages, if, if I say seven people read a dissertation that's a bestseller, how many people are going to read a thousand page dissertation? Other than people who have to? So I think that's just, you know, I understand why some places might do it. They're looking for a certain level of rigor. They're saying, but is it real rigor or is it just filling in, you know, pages? And that's my opinion. So. But chapter five. Oh, great. You're welcome. Chapter five purpose is to conclude everything is to show how you understand your material, how you tell the world what it means, how it integrates with previous literature and recommendations for not only future research, but also applications of what your research has found. And if there are no further questions, I'm going to wish everyone a wonderful day and come back and see you tomorrow. Thank you. Good bye. Bye.