Writing Findings and Discussions
If you are writing a thesis that uses a typical AIMRaD structure, the findings and discussion sections are at the centre of your thesis, both in terms of content and argument. These sections have very distinct, but linked, purposes and approaches.
Writing Findings
The purpose of this section is to report your findings (sometimes called results). Here you describe, collate, and report on the data that you have collected, including the results of any statistical analyses; and establish logical relationships between variables and different parts of the data set. The language that you use will be mostly descriptive – this is not the place for argument.
Begin the findings section by providing a brief description of the aims that your findings address; end with a statement of how those aims have been addressed, highlighting any novel findings. The structure of the findings section will probably be determined by your research questions, and many choose to present the findings (and discussion of the findings) in the same order in which you list your research questions at the outset. To help the reader navigate the data, organise the results in subsections relating to each aspect or theme, with subheadings.
Be selective about the data you present, without introducing bias; choose data that is representative of your results. Think about how best to present your findings to highlight patterns or trends in the data. To do this you can make use of visual elements – tables, figures, graphs, etc. - to help your reader understand your data, although you will also need to describe these visuals in prose (figures do not speak for themselves). Figures, tables and graphs should be:
- labelled with a title that is a brief description of their content,
- referred to in the text before they appear on the page and
- numbered based on the order they are referred to in the text.
Tips to help you get started
- Collate and visualise your data first, putting them into some kind of tabular form (there are some really good online tools to help with this).
- For each table or figure, write a description of what it shows. This will help you to form the basic chunks for each part of the section.
- Remember to keep the focus on recount and summary only; leave interpretation of the results to the Discussion section.
Writing Discussions
The discussion is where you synthesise your results to highlight how you have contributed new knowledge to your field of research. You might find this the most daunting section of your thesis to tackle, but try to break it down and draw the threads together to weave a cohesive interpretation of your results.
The discussion section should:
- interpret your results and explain how they address the research questions and hypotheses,
- situate your research within the current body of knowledge,
- tell the reader why your findings are important,
- highlight novel findings,
- provide explanations for unexpected results,
- discuss limitations of the research, and
- point to future directions.
The discussion section is primarily interpretative in nature; it explains the significance of your findings and results to your reader – you need to explain what your findings mean in the context of your research questions and the broader knowledge of your discipline and show how your research has moved the field forward.
While you might have a brief summary of your results at the beginning, your discussion needs to be argument based, it shows what your results add up to and links back to the bigger picture. This will include linking back to, and elaborating on, previous literature. It might also involve anticipating potential criticisms of your research and how you could address them.
The discussion section also answers the question: So what? Why does your research matter? What do we know now that we didn’t know before you did your research? In other words, it draws out the significance of your contribution to your field.
According to Inger Mewburn (Mewburn, How do I start my Discussion Chapter), there are four main moves you should be making in this section:
- Re-stating (but not simply repeating) your main results
- Commenting upon your results
- Evaluating your results
- Making suggestions based upon your results
These moves will involve identifying patterns in your data, discussing whether your findings supported your hypothesis, contextualising your findings within previous research and theory, explaining unexpected results and their significance.
Hedging
It is likely that you will also need to hedge at least some of the claims you make about your data, as most research doesn’t lead to conclusive results. This means you will need to use language that is cautious about the knowledge claims that you are making. The following examples of hedging come from the Manchester Academic Phrasebank, which is an excellent source for some of the language you will need in this section.
