Summary of Chapter 6: Background Chapters 81
because she felt she had to describe the work appearing in 120 different papers.
When she structured it around the central four ideas that represented significant
advances in the field it was easy to write. You should also ensure that the structure
provides a firm base for the discussion of your own work (see Chap. 9).
There needs to be an appropriate formulation of the research questions or hy-
potheses that you used to help you to design your own research program. When
students present me with a proposed work program and I ask what it is based on,
they sometimes reply that it is obvious, or that it just came to them. These responses
may be true from where they stand, but will not convince examiners. They have
to be argued out. What apparently happens is that our unconscious mind works on
various fragments of ideas from different sources that come to us from our reading
and our senses, and makes connections that our rational mind will not. These con-
nections emerge not as new rational thoughts but rather as proposals for action. We
then implement these proposals in the form of research designs without actually
making the underlying logic of them explicit as research questions or hypotheses.
If this happened for you, you now have to work backwards from your research
program to why you did it the way you did, that is, what your research questions
or hypotheses were. You then have to work back further to where these questions
or hypotheses came from, and ensure that at the very least the conclusions of your
background chapters prepared the way for them. You then have to make sure that
the appropriate material is present in the background chapters to enable these con-
clusions to be drawn.
You have to be ready to cut material out of background chapters if it is not used
elsewhere in the thesis. The background chapters are not an end in themselves, they
are merely the context for your own work. I have already mentioned some tests for
what to include and what not to include in descriptive chapters. Be ruthless! If you
are not making use of material either as background to your own work or as context
for the discussion of your results, take it out. A survey of literature on a topic unre-
lated to your own work will not please an examiner looking for evidence of critical
thinking.
Finally, there is another type of material that you should remove. Because stu-
dents know what they found out themselves they sometimes forget that the exam-
iner does not know. Remove all material from background chapters that is to do
with the design of your own work, the results of your own work, or the discussion
of these results.
Summary of Chapter 6: Background Chapters
The background chapters have the following two functions.
To provide all the background material needed for your own research:
- Historical, geographical, and other descriptions of your study area.
- Definitions and usages of words and expressions as appropriate to your thesis.
- Existing theory and practice for your research topic.