Discussion chapter to go and I’m bottling it!

[TheWildRumpyPumpus]

I’m at the final hurdle, just got the discussion chapter on my MSc dissertation to write and I am sat at my desk with absolutely no idea where to start.

I just haven’t got a clue what I’m doing. I’ve finished my findings chapter (and still don’t know if I’ve done that correctly - diss supervisor on holiday understandably) and I really want to get this done in the next week.

Any tips? It’s a thematic analysis - I know they prefer a combine results and discussion chapter but my supervisor wanted them separate 😭

Don’t think I can help but hope someone else can.

My generic advice for structuring a discussion:

• summarise key results


• explain how you met your aims and objectives stated at the beginning of the dissertation


• Situate your findings within the literature (think about any key references in the introduction)


• discuss limitations, including how the affect interpretation of your results
  


• make a few policy/future research/whatever most appropriate for your field recommendations

I find it useful to skim read what I have already written , gather then observations you made and thoughts tend to
Pop out at you (( that's odd, that's good , that's a question )

Does your university have guidance on academic English? Worth contacting the library to see if they have anything to help. Mine runs short training sessions on each section of a thesis. If they don't have any scheduled the woman who runs them will organise a one to one session. It goes through how best to structure each section and what the aim of it is. Annoyingly it isn't well advertised but you can see the difference in marks between the students who use it and those who don't.

Thank you everyone! I thought this thread had died a miserable death so hadn’t checked it. We do have academic librarians but they’re too on summer holidays understandably. It’s a weird deadline to have dissertations due in straight after the summer break as everyone you need to ask for help at the sticky end is unavailable.

If I have 3 objectives, does it make sense to structure the discussion by how my research has addressed them? With links to literature throughout?

My suggestion would be to do it separately: have a brief(ish) summary of how you met your objectives at the beginning or near the end, and another more detailed section where you contextualise key findings (which may not map directly to answering your objectives e.g. you may have several interesting findings within one) within the literature

Can you check your online library for guides? This one is available for free on ours www.amazon.co.uk/Dissertations-Project-Reports-Palgrave-Skills/dp/1137364262

Also Google dissertation guidance and your uni name. When I do it there's are lots of links to in depth guides on structuring and writing a dissertation but only accessible with log in details for our university. We appear to have borrowed extensive guides from other universities too. A lot of them are credited to Leeds and Cambridge.