The Purpose of Chapter 4
Topic 1: Chapter 4
What is the purpose of Chapter 4 or the Findings or Results Chapter?
This chapter should provide the product of your analytic process. Think of it as a “stand alone” chapter that you could hand to a friend and just by reading it, they would know exactly what you discovered through your study. The chapter should reveal the “answers” to your research questions and reflect the design you put forward in Chapter 2. It should also align to the purpose of the study you offered in Chapter 1 as well as demonstrate why the study was important to conduct in the first place. Your findings or results should connect to your literature review and especially your conceptual framework. In some quantitative dissertations the results section presents only the products of statistical analyses that have been conducted. In other quantitative dissertation, the results section also provides a discussion that connects the results to the relevant literature and conceptual framework.
The chapter represents the best thinking of the student and the advising committee about how to answer the research questions being posed. So you can see that an incomplete understanding of the role of Chapter 3 can lead to a methodology full of gaps, creating the potential for the study to go off track, and not answer the research questions.
This chapter should provide the product of your analytic process. Think of it as a “stand alone” chapter that you could hand to a friend and just by reading it, they would know exactly what you discovered through your study. The chapter should reveal the “answers” to your research questions and reflect the design you put forward in Chapter 2. It should also align to the purpose of the study you offered in Chapter 1 as well as demonstrate why the study was important to conduct in the first place. Your findings or results should connect to your literature review and especially your conceptual framework. In some quantitative dissertations the results section presents only the products of statistical analyses that have been conducted. In other quantitative dissertation, the results section also provides a discussion that connects the results to the relevant literature and conceptual framework.
The chapter represents the best thinking of the student and the advising committee about how to answer the research questions being posed. So you can see that an incomplete understanding of the role of Chapter 3 can lead to a methodology full of gaps, creating the potential for the study to go off track, and not answer the research questions.
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