This article describes to how bring your dissertation “full circle” so that all of the chapters are linked to one another. The chapters discussed here align with the five chapter dissertation format in which the introduction is chapter one, the literature review is chapter two, the methods are in chapter three, the results/findings are in chapter four, and the discussion/conclusion are in chapter five.

Your dissertation introduction should set up the story you are about to tell. It should give us an idea of what the problem is that you are addressing, how we came to this problem, why we need to address the problem, what we broadly already know about this problem, and then introduce your approach to solving this problem in your dissertation research. Your literature review should then go into greater detail on what is known about the problem by reviewing the current and seminal literature. It highlights what we do not know and then tells the reader what the gap in knowledge is that is addressed in this study.

The methods chapter then tells the reader how you will address this gap. It covers what data you are collecting and gives the details and justifications of your methods. The next chapter provides your results (quantitative research) and/or findings (qualitative research). Finally, the conclusion chapter “brings your research full circle.”  There is a lot packed into this term of bringing your research full circle. In this blog, I will describe what this means for connecting your conclusion chapter to all of the chapters that come before it in your dissertation research writing journey.

The introduction, chapter one, and chapter five should be bookends — anything you proposed in chapter one should be revisited in chapter five. Chapter two, the literature review, should be referenced in multiple ways. You want to show how your results/findings fit into the extant literature. This can include how you align or how you contradict the literature, as well as what you add that is not already known. Chapter three, the methods chapter, should align with what you ended up doing in your dissertation research.

Someone should be able to read your methods and know how you collected the data you are discussing in chapter five, but you will also want to summarize what you did to collect and analyze data in chapter five. Chapter four, the results/findings, are elaborated on and discussed in the conclusion chapter.  Because chapter four only presents the results of your analysis, chapter five will have to discuss what these results mean.  This includes how they connect to and advance the literature, the limitations of your study, the implications for practice and for future research, and the significance (the “so what”).

Overall in your dissertation research, your conclusion chapter should be written in a way that someone who did not read your first four chapters could read this chapter and still know what you studied, why you studied it, what we already know about your topic, how you conducted your study, what you found, how what you found fits into what we already know, the limitations of your study, the implications of your study, and more.

That puts a lot of pressure on the conclusion chapter in your dissertation research. The good news is that you have already done so much of this in chapters one through four. It is important that you know how to connect back to these chapters without replicating them.

For instance, chapter five should not repeat the findings from chapter four in the same level of detail.  You will bring your findings into chapter five to support your discussion, but they won’t be presented in the same level of detail as chapter four where you present all the numbers and quotes.  Your five chapters need to be well aligned, so when we are working with a student on chapter five, we advise them to:

1. Re-read their results/findings chapter so that all of the data and what became of the analysis are fresh on their mind;

2. Read it again and start making notes of everything it made them think of – limitations of their study, implications of their study, future studies that come from their study, literature that aligns with their study, anything at all that seems worth mentioning in a discussion of what they have done and the significance of what they have done;

3. Re-read chapter one and highlight any questions you posed, promises you made, or deliverables you suggested, that need to be included in chapter five — you will bring it full circle here when you show the reader you have addressed the problem (or advanced knowledge regarding the problem) in some way and met the purpose of your dissertation research;

4. Re-read chapter two and use one color to highlight the literature that aligns with your findings and another color to highlight the literature that contradicts your findings — these references will be the basis of your discussion when you are explaining what you found in regards to your guiding research questions and what this means for advancing knowledge;

5. Re-read chapter three to make sure you have done what you proposed to do and write one to three paragraphs that recap what you did to collect the data — chapter five doesn’t need to go through all the details or the justifications, but it should have enough information that the reader understands how you collected the data, from whom you collected the data, and how you analyzed the data.

By now, you should see that your chapter five is completely dependent on everything that has come before it. If you go to write the conclusion and it is void of everything you have promised in chapter one and found in chapter four and the literature on which it is built in chapter two, then your conclusion is not full circle.  For most, chapter five is your chance to really interpret what you have been doing all along.

This is the first time in the study where your opinion matters.  However, your opinion has to be supported by your research and by everything that has been introduced in previous chapters.  In chapter five, you get to critique yourself in the limitations, you get to finally give recommendations for how this study can be used and be applied in real life settings, and you get to highlight your contribution as an independent scholar. Here’s the best part: this is the final chapter in your dissertation research to becoming Dr. You!