122 10 The Conclusion
One way that I get my students to think about an agenda for further research is
to have them picture their responses to questions at a post-doctoral job interview.
‘Now that you have completed a thesis’, an imagined professor asks, ‘what do you
expect to work on in the coming 5 years that will contribute to this department?’
With that question, or something similar, we then begin to brainstorm how the work
may be extended. Will you focus on its theoretical implications, and what future
researchers may need to think about as they begin to work on their own conceptual
frameworks? Does your work have ‘practical’ application in that it illuminates the
processes of building faster, more efficient processes and machines? How does it
relate to the development of professionals in the discipline: Should they be told, for
example, to train more on food safety in an era of increased litigation? For many
students, working on an agenda helps them to see the implications of their work in a
wider context. I have seen it be enormously validating for some students.
Note, however, that it is fine for such a discussion to be speculative, but it
shouldn’t be fanciful. It may also be appropriate to sketch future research directions
that your conclusions imply, or to suggest additional work that your investigation
left incomplete. When it is poorly done, such a discussion can appear absurd; when
it is done well, such a discussion can powerfully communicate to the examiner your
understanding of the importance and limits of your work.
You should now have a deep sense of satisfaction about the whole thesis! Any
residual doubts may indicate that something is wrong earlier in the thesis, and you
should try to find out what it is. Some diagnostics are in the following rules.
- I have already hinted at the first rule. If the discussion chapter is where you draw
together everything you have done in your whole research project (not just your
own experiments or surveys, but also your reviews and analyses of the work of
others), then you should draw your conclusions solely from the discussion chap-
ter. If you find yourself wishing to include conclusions that you have not worked
over in the discussion, you have either omitted something important from the
discussion or, more likely, you are still hankering after more than one aim. - There should be only minimal discussion in the conclusions chapter. If you find
yourself wanting to engage in further discussion, and are even still quoting from
the literature, you should have incorporated this material in your discussion
chapter. The conclusions can be a good place to tightly link together the themes
that have emerged in your thesis, but a detailed analysis should take place else-
where. - The conclusions should respond to the aim stated in the first chapter. If you take
your problem statement and then the aim from your ‘Introduction’, and follow
these with your ‘Conclusions’, the result should be a mini-document that reads
logically. When looking at the first draft of a thesis from one of my own students,
or examining a thesis from some other student I always put it to this test. It often
reveals that the writer omitted to state the aim, and it is only when one reads the
conclusions at the end that one can start to deduce what the unstated aim must
have been.