Wednesday, August 31, 2022

How to structure a thesis when you must develop the theory first

Theses are usually structured in five parts: Introduction, Literature review, Research method, Findings, Conclusions & recommendations. Students often question this structure when they must develop theory first before they can do the fieldwork. In such cases they present the structure as: Introduction, Research method, Literature review… When I question this, they tell me that in their case the literature review is, in fact, a method and should therefore follow on the method section instead of preceding it. Such reasoning is based on a misunderstanding of the difference between a literature survey and a document analysis. In the introduction you therefore have to point out the dualistic nature of your research.

The purpose of a literature review is to point out the current gap in our knowledge and to suggest a point of departure of research towards filling that gap. In the case in point, the literature survey would come in two parts. The first part of the literature survey will describe the intellectual puzzle – what do we already know about the situation on the ground, and what does not quite add up. The second part will describe the current gap in theory – what has already been done, why it does not work, and where we should begin looking for answers.

Now comes the research method section. First you will explain your process: developing a framework from the literature and then using that framework to solve a research problem. Thus the research section will have two parts, but the sequence is reversed. The first part describes the Systematic Literature Review (SLR), which is not a literature survey, but an actual research procedure where the texts are treated as data, rather than sources. The second part will describe the field work. Both parts of the research method section will contain the five key elements: Logic of enquiry (quantitative or qualitative), Research setting, Data collection, Data analysis, and Ethics (Kshetrimayum, 2022).

For the systematic literature review you will describe how you searched for the sources you used, key words, databases, etc. They you will explain how you filtered them down (your criteria for inclusion and exclusion). You will describe the types of analysis you did to extract the eventual themes. You may want to consider the ethical implications of sensitive texts that you may have included or excluded and the effect that it may have on the reliability and validity of your findings. The PRISMA STATEMENT of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (Moher et al., 2009) provides clear guidelines for a systematic literature review.  

For the fieldwork you will do the same. Is it a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed method study and why? What is the context where you did your research? What was your population, how did you sample and why? How did you collect the data and why. How did you clean and analyze the data? What were the ethical considerations. In experimental or field research this part is straightforward, while for desk-top studies are often misunderstood. For experimental and field research we ask: How did you set up the laboratory? What experimental design did you chose and how did you execute it. How did you analyze the data? How did you ensure safety for all. For field research: In what stetting did you do the research, how did you select your participants, what intervention did you make, how did you collect and analyze data and how did you protect your participants? Desk-top studies are, in fact, the same. The only difference is that the data sources are mostly text based.

In fields such as Policy studies, History or Literature the analyzed policies, historical documents or literary texts are often confused with literature sources. Paradoxically, in when you study the work of a great literary figure you are not doing a literature study. You are doing a document analysis. The policies, biographies, or anthologies that you are studying are your data sources. Thus, in your method section you will again take a stance regarding quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods, you will explain your setting (libraries, archives, or your own PC), how did you select your data sources (original manuscripts, published works, reprints), what did you look for in your analysis, and what ethical considerations are there. In policy, historical work, or literature, for instance, the principle of anonymity becomes problematic, since the political, historical or literary subject of your study may well still be alive.

Finally at the end of the research method section you will explain how you used the framework that you developed from the systematic literature review as a filter for the data that you collected in your experimental, field or desk-top research.

The findings will also come in two parts. Firstly, there will be a discussion of the Systematic Literature Review and the framework that emerged. Then you show what happened when you filtered your data through it, and finally you will present the answers to each of your research questions.

The conclusions take place in reverse. First you give the answers to your primary research questions – what your data told you once you filtered it through your framework. Then you express yourself on the value of your model in making sense of the data. Finally you present recommendations for further research of your problem, and further development of your model.

The thesis structure, therefore, remains the same: Introduction: I am going to solve this problem by first developing a framework from a systematic literature review, then I am going to use the framework tot analyze data. Literature review: This is what we don’t know about the research problem this is what we don’t know about the theory. Research method: This is how I developed a framework through a Systematic Literature Review. This is how I used the framework do solve the problem. Findings: This is what the framework looks like. This is what I found when I filtered my data through it. Conclusions and recommendations: This is the new knowledge and this is my contribution to theory. Now we need to solve the following problems and address the following theoretical shortcomings.

And then you graduate.

References

Kshetrimayum, M. 2022. 5 Key Elements of Methodology Section of a Research Paper. Mel Insights. https://melinsights.com/5-key-elements-of-methodology-section-of-a-research-paper-2/.

Moher, D., Liberati, A., Tetzlaff, J., Altman, D.G. & Group*, P. 2009. Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement. Annals of internal medicine, 151(4): 264–269. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000097