Lessons Learnt About Structuring the Thesis and Implications for Practice

This chapter draws out some of the lessons which have been learnt about structuring the thesis by analysing and synthesising across all the example chapters in the book. As social science research normally adopts an inductive approach to deal with a complex ill-defined issue, the conventional thesis structure has been shown to be generally inappropriate. Many of the research students reported that their inductive research took the form of a journey of discovery, which was often accompanied by a personal transformation of research perspective. It seemed important to include accounts of these voyages in the thesis; and the chronological timeline often helped to frame the structure. Plans of the structure often germinated at the time strategies were developed for tackling the analysis. Organisation around main emerging themes was a common strategy. The traditional comprehensive literature review as Chapter 2 was regarded as inappropriate for inductive research, which explored an ill-defined topic. There was a need for a relatively short initial literature review to frame the study. The bulk of the literature was then dispersed through the thesis, as findings were presented in an organised framework and compared to the literature. As the alternative structures were adopted, it was considered important to detail the structure of the thesis and provide an explanation for its form.