121Chapter 10
The Conclusion
You stated the aim of the research project in your first chapter. These conclusions
must indicate how you fulfilled that aim, and must arise inescapably from the
argument in the discussion chapter. Researchers often state conclusions that they
have failed to argue for. They had become convinced of them in the course of their
research but, because they did not follow a process such as the one I described in
the previous chapter for structuring the discussion, they had omitted to back them
up in their writing.
It is essential to forge the links between the ‘Introduction’ and the ‘Conclusions’,
and between the ‘Discussion’ and the ‘Conclusions’. As these are the conclusions to
the ‘Discussion’, it follows that the discussion chapter does not need its own sepa-
rate conclusions. (For this kind of reason, I find it clearer to have end-of-chapter
summaries rather than conclusions; or it may be that you have structured each chap-
ter so that it ends with a section headed ‘Discussion’, rather than ‘Conclusions’ or
‘Summary’, and have omitted the ‘Discussion’ chapter entirely. For convenience
here, I’ve assumed that you have a separate chapter devoted to discussion, but I
don’t think it is necessarily superior to having a discussion in each chapter, espe-
cially if your thesis is a series of linked contributions.) You could roll the discussion
and conclusions into one final chapter, giving it the title ‘Discussion and Conclu-
sions’, as is sometimes done in papers for learned journals, but I think a separate
chapter of conclusions is much preferable.
If you followed the suggestion I made in the last chapter, you will have a set of
conclusions that emerged out of each section of your discussion, rather than the
ones that you dredged out of your unconscious mind when you started the proce-
dure. You can now write these down as the conclusions to your research, knowing
that you have argued rigorously for all of them, and that you have got them in per-
spective through your argument. Also, if you put them down in the order in which
they emerged in the discussion, they will be in a logical order, because you arranged
the discussion in a logical order.
In some disciplines it is customary to use the conclusions chapter to briefly ex-
amine the implications of your findings, such as their likely impact on future work,
on other research areas, or on practice of a profession. In some fields, examiners
expect that your thesis conclude with an agenda for further research.
D. Evans et al., How to Write a Better Thesis, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-04286-2_10,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014