Thesis Format Diversity
As I work my way into the “Results & Findings” chapter, I’ve been reading over various theses and dissertations in the ABI/ProQuest database. I have also gone over several of the ALM theses in Grossman. From this informal survey, I am beginning to form an opinion on format options. There seem to be two basic choices: the traditional format (apparently typical in education and the sciences) which clearly shows where certain information is regardless of your topic. This looks like
I. Introduction
II. Background
III. Literature review
IV. Methodology
V. Results and Findings
VI. Conclusion
Chapter V, Results and Findings, can actually be broken out into separate chapters based on your hypotheses; and, it can also include the discussion of the results which is the analysis and interpretation or the discussion can be a separate chapter.
The other option which is much more common and certainly is prevalent in political science involves naming the chapters based on your subject matter. Reading through these is a real slog because it’s not obvious in the Table of Contents where the Results, Findings, or Discussion sections are. Many of these theses and dissertations do not even have separate background or literature review chapters. Making matters worse, more than a few of these were “hybrid” theses — meaning they included both quantitative and qualitative research.
My efforts to find a couple of good Results Chapter “templates” or models for my singular case study based on qualitative research and process tracing were not particularly fruitful! Frankly, some of the ALM’s were (and I know I’ve said this before) just long papers that could’ve been written for a class. For instance, no methodology chapter, just one or two pages for the introduction with a sentence or two about methodology, and no lit review. Also, quite a few of these had only one hypothesis; so the reader doesn’t see what some of the alternatives were, especially if the author did not include a discussion of “counter-arguments” or “alternate explanations” in the results/discussion chapter.
As one of my fellow ALM students said last year, “not all ALM theses are on the same playing field”.
