82 6 Background Chapters
- In some cases, preliminary reviews, surveys, correlations, and experiments fol-
lowing what other workers have done.
To provide the stepping-off point for your own research:
- The conclusions to these chapters should lead clearly to the research hypotheses
or research questions that you pursue in your work (see Chap. 7).
Writing your background material:
- Write first drafts in the first year of your project. Use the style, referencing, and
so on that you intend to use in the final thesis (see Chap. 3). - Many researchers, particularly in the experimental sciences, put this writing off
until they have finished their research. Don’t delay. Writing early drafts helps to
sharpen up your research design. - These first drafts will probably not be well structured, as you are not yet on top
of your topic. Be prepared to restructure them later, after you have done most of
your own work. This double handling is not a waste of time, as it will make a
fruitful contribution to your own research. - As you revise, make sure that the background does lead into your research ques-
tions or hypotheses.
What you should include:
- All necessary definitions and ways that you use words or ideas in your own
work. Don’t assume that the examiner will know this. This is particularly impor-
tant in cross-disciplinary research. - All the necessary geography, context, and history.
- All the arguments that are in the literature, and some tentative judgments on
where you stand (but don’t enter the argument yet; wait until you have described
your own work). - Everything necessary to justify the conclusions or summaries to the chapters,
which in turn have to lead to your research hypotheses or questions.
What you should not include:
- Descriptive material that will never be used later in the thesis. Your first draft
may contain a lot of this. Be ruthless: take it out! - Your own contribution to thinking on the theory. By the time you come to revise
these chapters you should be in a position to make such contributions. Resist the
temptation, and save these contributions for your discussion chapter. - Any foreshadowing of what you will be doing in your own research. You can’t
do this until you have designed your own research, which can’t be done until you
have finished all these chapters. Don’t get ahead of yourself.