Revising 79
You may then even undertake some preliminary investigation of this baseline, to
establish its strengths and limitations, as I now discuss.
Preliminary Investigations
Peter came to me in some puzzlement, announcing that his experiments had failed.
He was investigating a problem in the utilization of brown coal, and had designed
some preliminary experiments based on hypotheses drawn from earlier work in the
same field. What he expected to happen had not happened, and what had happened
was quite unexpected. His ‘experiments had failed’. I assured him that they had in
fact succeeded. He had been lucky enough to have the unexpected happen, under
conditions where he was sure it had happened, because he was making careful ob-
servations. If he could work out why it might have happened, he would have far
better hypotheses than when he was depending solely on the earlier literature.
Most research workers when tackling a new project will use a variety of meth-
ods. As you can see from the example of Peter’s work, it can be difficult to establish
from the literature alone what experimental work you should do, because you are
an outsider listening to a debate. If you are to become a participant in the commu-
nity of practice then you will need to have some practical experience of your own.
In the physical or biological sciences this might consist of designing some simple
experiments to enable you to test the results or theories of earlier workers, as Peter
had done. In the social sciences, gathering data through preliminary surveys or in-
terviews could be useful. A further method is to revisit old questions or experiments
in the light of new methods and materials.
Where should an account of this preliminary work appear in your thesis? If you
have used it to help you to formulate hypotheses that you have called on when de-
signing your principal research program, you could report the preliminary work as
one of the background chapters. If it appears to form a major element of the princi-
pal work itself, you should set it aside for reporting later as part of the ‘Design’ and
‘Results’ chapters. If you report preliminary investigations in a background chapter,
it will have to contain sections on the hypothesis used, the design of the work, the
results, and the conclusions drawn from them. In either case, be sure that you make
clear the need for its inclusion—you don’t want to appear as if you are trying to pad
out your work by including irrelevant material.
Revising
As I recommended earlier, there is much to be gained in writing the background
chapters before or during the time when you are carrying out your own research
program. However, when you have finished your own research it is time to rewrite
the background chapters. You are now much clearer about several things than you
were when you first wrote them: