I've long been aware of and interested in the informal way people communicate research guidance. A great many of the informal standards also begin with "You must," "Always...", "Never...", and other absolutes although there are some that incorporate dichotomous guidance ("You must always do either X or Y..." I encountered a somewhat serendipitous example this week - "serendipitous" because one of the co-authors offered one of these rules while we were writing - while a peer reviewer offered the opposing view. Specifically the co-author shared guidance provided by their graduate mentor that the discussion section of a paper could only consider/re-consider the research described in the introductory or background (AKA initial review of literature) section. In contrast, included in a list of reviewer criticisms was some of the same papers were described in both the introduction and the discussion. So, which is right? Clearly not both. My ownresponse is "neither. I believe both of these guidelines are arbitrary and do not take into account the aims of the particular sections of a research article. As I tried to show in my quickly created MindNode mind map (https://www.mindnode.com/), the aim of the background information is to provide not only information of the current state of knowledge on a subject but to also identify what people like to refer to as gaps and to provide a rationale for design, question, and method.
I did not make this up, by the way, nor does it originate in informal communications. Most good qualitative or mixed methods research texts that include information on writing a report - academic or otherwise - as well as formatting guidance such as that provided by the American Psychological Association, and many general academic publisher and specific journal guidelines include some version of this same information. The point of the discussion, on the other hand, is to interpret your findings and to compare them with the current body of knowledge. There are other elements typically included in a discussion section such as thoughts on future research, limitations of your work, immediate applications and implications to research, practice, and/or policy, and, (in some journals) your own response to the work and potentially additional creative applications. However, this may require that you do more searching and reading, because presumably your findings differ than or are broader than the information presented in the introduction - unless this is some type of replication study, in which instance all that matters is a comparison. However, most researchers I work with, and most of what I do is motivated by data and knowledge generation, versus replication. And, most qualitative inquiry is not a replication study because context influences everything. So, to return to the idea of doing more reading - after you have compiled your results, and found something novel compared to the current body of knowledge, as a diligent researcher, you will want to check again to see if there are similar or analogous findings in your area or in a related field. Most likely you will not find the identical results but you may find something comparable, or approaching your results, or something someone else thought was an outliner that turned out to be an or the essential aspect of your own work. In summary, you should make a good faith effort to compare your current results with previously published work. This is at odds with the idea of only considering the papers reviewed in the introductory section, and it makes no logical sense to limit yourself to looking at what you found that rationalized your study rather than looking at other information once you completed your work. I reject the reviewer comment that criticized reconsideration of papers in the introduction by the authors in the discussion section. If your results add insight to the current (or, actually pre-existing) body of knowledge, this is something you should spell out for your readers. Your findings may clarify, be contradictory, or reinforce aspects of prior/existing research. The idea that you cannot reconsider work used to rationalize your study makes as little sense as the idea that you can only reconsider the work used to rationalize your study. The graphic, as suggested above, was created by me, using MindNode Plus for Mac, V. 2023.2.4.(484).
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3/6/2024 03:19:31 am
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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