A Discussion Section: Writing Tips

The discussion chapter requires you to explain the relevance, meaning, and importance of the results of your research. This section should focus on evaluating and explaining your findings, as well as their relation to the research questions in your literature review. It should also state your argument. Experts from https://writers-house.com/ service decided to share some useful tips so that you can write a comprehensive and successful discussion section.

There are different writing approaches that you can choose. However, you can focus on the following key elements:

• Recommendations: what actions or solutions would you suggest?
• Limitations: what cannot your results illustrate?
• Implications: why are your results important?
• Interpretations: what do your results mean?

The discussion and conclusion are often interconnected, and some dissertations imply writing a single chapter for both of these sections. You may also occasionally combine the discussion and results in one chapter. We recommend that you talk to your supervisor for the necessary instructions.

Summarize Your Findings

First, reiterate your research problem and summarize your main findings. Don’t just repeat information that you have already provided. Instead, write a clear statement that will answer your research question. This statement should be no longer than one paragraph.

Discuss the Implications

You should provide your own interpretation while also making sure that your results are related to the scholarly work that you considered in the literature review. You should explain how your findings are related to previous research and what is your contribution, as well as its impact on the theory or practice. Try to answer the following questions:

• Do your results challenge or prove the existing theories?
• Do your results support the conclusions of previous research? What do they add?
• Can you offer any practical implications?
• Do your findings differ from other studies?

Your main goal is to explain why your readers should care about your research.

Identify the Limitations

Any research has certain limitations, and you need to acknowledge these limitations to demonstrate your credibility. Don’t just list your mistakes but explain what conclusions cannot be drawn from your study.

Limitations may be caused by certain methodological choices, unexpected obstacles or the research design, in general. We recommend that you only list the limitations that are directly related to the objectives of your research. For example, if your research has been limited to a specific group of people, address this issue in this section. You should also mention the problems that you’ve experienced while collecting or analyzing the data.

After listing the limitations of your research, explain why its results are nevertheless valid and valuable in the context of your research questions.

Provide Your Recommendations

Provide recommendations based on the discussion of your results and suggest what implementations your results may have. You may also save your recommendations for the conclusion.

You may move to the implementations right from the section devoted to the limitations of your research. Don’t just write the ideas for future studies but provide specific recommendations. Explain how other researchers can contribute to the areas you didn’t manage to address.

What You Shouldn’t Include

There are some common mistakes we recommend you to avoid:

• Don’t make exaggerated claims. Don’t overinterpret your results and don’t make claims that you cannot support with data.
• Don’t introduce new information. You should only consider the data that you’ve already included in the results section.
• Don’t undermine your own research. The section devoted to the limitations should prove your credibility instead of emphasizing failures or weaknesses.