113Chapter 9
The Discussion or Interpretation
Phil had reached the discussion chapter of his thesis, and we were talking about how
he might shape it. The aim of his PhD project was to determine whether agricultural
forestry could make a worthwhile contribution to the rehabilitation of degraded
tropical uplands. He had spent a year on field research in Sri Lanka and, in the end,
carried out two major research programs: a comparative study of existing land uses,
and an economic analysis of a particular agroforestry system sponsored by a Ger-
man aid agency. He had written chapters of his thesis describing the results of these
studies, as well as the appropriate background chapters, but now found himself in
trouble trying to pull it all together. Luckily, he had followed some earlier advice
to keep his introduction and conclusion in alignment. I asked him whether he knew
what the overall conclusions of his research project were. ‘More or less’, he replied.
‘Enough to write them all down?’ He hesitated, but ‘yes’ was the eventual answer.
When you have analyzed your results, you are much more proficient than when
you started your project, but you now have to establish what can be concluded from
these results. This is where you can advance from information to knowledge, where
you might be able to establish new theories or new ways of looking at things. This
is the task of the discussion chapter. Once Phil realized that he knew what he had
concluded (more or less!), the task of writing the discussion that enabled him to get
to these conclusions suddenly seemed less formidable.
Here I suggest a method for tackling the discussion chapter that makes it rela-
tively easy to write. In many theses, there isn’t an explicit discussion chapter, but
instead, for example, the experimental chapters may have a discussion section. For
convenience here I treat the discussion as a discrete chapter, while noting that it is
often a component that might be included into the thesis in any of several ways.
The Task of the Chapter
Why does the discussion chapter worry students so much? The reason appears to
be a variation on the problem I tackled in Chap. 4, that of the tension between the
creative and the rational parts of our brains. In the discussion chapter the creative
D. Evans et al., How to Write a Better Thesis, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-04286-2_9,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014