84 7 Establishing Your Contribution
Kinds of Contribution
I continue to be amazed by the breadth of kinds of contribution that research stu-
dents can make. That is, not only do they work on a remarkable spread of questions,
but even the nature of the questions varies dramatically. To help explain what I
mean, here is a sample of research contributions that I found in my university’s PhD
thesis collection:^1
- Design of health messages for display on the packaging of fatty foods.
- Historical food advertising themes as a measure of population dietary changes.
- Food choices in literature as signifiers of masculinity.
- Historical marsupial dietary adaptations in response to climate change.
- Marsupial dietary adaptation mechanisms for coping with climate change.
- Practical tests for detection of salmonella in the home.
- Low-energy fabrication of food-storage plastics.
- Atomic models of carbohydrate-based metabolism.
- Emergency-care identification of dietary causes of rapid-onset illness.
- The effectiveness of taxation for reducing dietary causes of type II diabetes.
- Statistical minimization of food wastage in complex distribution networks.
- Energy accountancy practices for production and distribution of grains.
- Diet in Camanderra: contrasts between rural and metropolitan Australia.
- Quantification of the impact of diet in treatment of recovery from stroke.
These truly are diverse. Some are theoretical. Some are based on data collected
over time, prior to the research being done. Some are based on a new investigation
of historical materials. Some are based on data gathered for the specific purposes
of the project. Some are analyses of other people’s proposals or initiatives. Some
propose a new technology, or treatment. The kind of evidence that can be used to
validate the work varies too.
Very probably, none of these projects is close to your own area of expertise, but
you may find it interesting to work through them and try and characterize them
against a range of properties. Does the work involve inventing something new, or
observing something that already exists? (Example: new plastics are an invention,
quantification of food choices is an observation.) Is the impact limited to the re-
search question, or is it likely to have broader implications? (Example: marsupial
biology may not apply to other animals, but diet in Camanderra may be representa-
tive of regional Australia in general.) Is it primarily theoretical or practical? And so
on.
The lesson here is that each kind of contribution is likely to be suited to a par-
ticular style of narrative. Your task is to figure out the narrative that best explains
your contribution.
(^1) This is a good place to remind you that my descriptions of research are to some extent fictional-
ized. That is, except where a citation is given, I have used real students and research questions, but
have altered the research descriptions in ways that I feel preserves their ‘feel’ while making them
both anonymous and more accessible to a general reader.