Tips for writing Qualitative Results when you don’t feel like writing

Presenting your research findings

Chapter 4 of a dissertation is commonly the presentation of the research findings. The first three chapters of your dissertation were based on a whole lot of research into what other scholars have already done. Chapter 4 is where you present your own research! This should be fun! You have completed data collection and analysis, so now you just need to get through this chapter and your discussion. However, for many doctoral students, Chapter 4 can be a stumbling block. While it may be easy to write about the work others have done, it can be hard to know where to start when it comes to writing about your own work. Here we will discuss some tips to get past this hurdle.

Most schools require some basic sections in Chapter 4. You will need an introduction and presentation of the findings, but you will also be expected to write about how you analyzed your data, your participants and their demographic characteristics, and the setting of your research. Before you get started, outline the chapter. Using your school’s template and preferred formatting style, create all of your section headings. This will help with your outline and overall chapter structure.

Then, start with the low-hanging fruit. If you do not feel like writing up your results just yet, there are other sections you can work on that take less mental effort. Write about the setting where you conducted your research. In this section, you can highlight any of the differences between what you proposed to do in Chapter 3 (i.e., the methodology) and what actually happened when you collected your data. You can also write about your participants. This may include a brief background, or sketch, of each of your participants. Are you good at making tables?

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