Dissertation Writing in Practice: Turning Ideas into Text

1. Identifying the Research Gap

When you come to write your dissertation, you need to convey three types of information to your readers: you have to explain the background which led to your study; you must describe how the study was carried out and finally you discuss your findings and present the conclusions that you have reached. This first chapter considers how a writer presents the background information, that is, the introductory part of a dissertation. (As we explained in the Introduction, throughout this book we are using the term ‘dissertation’ to apply to what is variously called a dissertation or a thesis.) Before we do this, however, we should take a look at what research itself is. Research is defined by Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (third edition, 1991) in the following way: Research is a detailed study of a subject or an aspect of a subject. When you do research, you collect and analyse facts and information and try to gain new knowledge or new understanding. As we can see from this definition, a researcher is trying to find new knowledge or new understanding. For any research to have a purpose then, there must be some gap in the current knowledge. The gap may be in the form of a newly discovered problem or an incomplete answer to a previously researched problem. It may be that a phenomenon has not been investigated in a particular place before or with a particular group of people or from a particular perspective. Whatever the situation, the first task a writer faces is how to make this gap clear to readers. This is done by explaining what stimulated the Identifying the Research Gap 8 DISSERTATION WRITING IN PRACTICE study and by reviewing the relevant literature to show what was known and what was not known at the outset of the research. There are several ways of organising this introductory material in a dissertation. The first chapter may consist of a short introductory section of just two or three paragraphs, followed by a detailed analysis of the literature in the field. (We will call this a Type 1 dissertation.) Alternatively, the introductory section can be extended to form a chapter on its own, before the literature is reviewed in detail in a second chapter (Type 2 dissertation). These two types of organisation are perhaps the most common ways of presenting the introductory material. However, in some dissertations, particularly in the humanities, there is no separate section or chapter called the Literature Review or Literature Survey, just as there are no Method and Discussion chapters. These are topicbased or text analysis dissertations (Type 3). After an introductory chapter, which explains the overall theme of the research, each individual chapter of the dissertation consists of its own introduction and an analysis of text or discussion of the topic of that chapter, with reference throughout to the literature. Yet one more type of dissertation, though a less common type, is a dissertation which consists of a compilation of published research articles (Type 4). The introductory chapter here is similar to that of a Type 3 dissertation in that its function is to explain what links together all the separate studies reported in the articles which form the chapters. (You can see a detailed breakdown of different types of dissertation organisation in Chapter 5.) In the following sections, for ease of reference, we will use the term Introduction to refer to both the introductory section of a Type 1 dissertation and the introductory chapter of Types 2, 3 and 4 dissertations. WRITING AN INTRODUCTION: MAIN STEPS The overall purpose of an Introduction to a dissertation is to make the reason for the research clear to the reader. You could see the Introduction as starting the reader off on a journey through the dissertation. It has to give the reader some idea of the starting point of 9 IDENTIFYING THE RESEARCH GAP the journey, i.e. the situation which has led the writer to conduct his/ her research in the first place, and then explain how the writer will travel to reach the chosen destination, that is, what the research will do to arrive at a new situation. Alternatively, you could see the Introduction as an explanation of how you will make changes to a building that is in need of renovation or extension: first of all you must describe the present building and point out its drawbacks before you explain...