A Practical Guide to Writing an IPA Discussion Chapter (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Hello everyone. I'm going to share with you what you have to write about when you reach a stage where you have to talk about or write about your discussion, especially when you are using IPA, which is Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Sometimes it's very challenging, especially when you are using IPA where you have presented your interpretation of your findings and now you have been asked to write about your discussion. What are you going to write about? If you are working on your dissertation, these are the areas that you have to think about. So discussion session, which is chapter five, where you have to present your overview, you summarize the findings, you present your interpretation of the findings, you also connect your findings to existing literature, and then you talk about your implication of your findings, and then you present your recommendation, and then you end your discussion chapter with a summary. And this is just a brief information about each of the sessions and what you have to think about. Overview, just presenting what readers should expect, right? That's all about overview. Summary, bringing only the main information about your findings. If you have been asked to write your findings in a paragraph, what are you going to present about, right? And then interpretation, how do you make sense of your findings? We're going to talk about that. Literature, how do you synthesize the findings and the existing literature? What are the lessons that you have learned, which is about implication? And the recommendation, what suggestion do you have to provide based on your limitation of the study, based on the findings, based on your interpretation? And lastly, you close with a summary, which is a recap of what you have presented. So let's start with overview. The first part is to remind your audience about the purpose of the study and also the problem that you want to address in the study, right? What was your objective of the study? The next part is to talk about what your audience should expect, what you want to talk about in your discussion, right? In the discussion, you're going to give a brief information about the findings and understanding all the interpretation of the findings, recommendations, and also the implication of the finding. Providing a preview of what your audience are going to read about is very important. So that's all about overview, right? And then we move on to summarizing the findings. The summary is all about just a brief information about your finding. If you were to talk about your findings in a paragraph or two, what exactly are you going to say? Maybe you will mention the research questions that you address in your study, the main themes, and how they are related. And this is not a time for you to present your interpretation of your findings. You are just describing the themes and how they come together to address your research question. Sometimes the themes can independently address your research question. You can present individual themes, not in detail, but just to let people know what exactly you found. And then you talk about how they are related, if it's possible for you to do that, then how they address your research question that you have. That is what you're going to do. And then the next step here is very important, which is the interpretation of your findings. And this is where it's become a little bit challenging because for interpretative phenomenological analysis, technically, your finding is your interpretation of what the participant presented to you. Now, what you're going to do is that you're going to interpret your own interpretation, which is the interpretation of the findings. So how do you do that? There are several strategies that you could use. You can choose two or three of these strategies for you to work on and present your interpretation. So at this stage, you have to see yourself as an expert. Imagine that as an expert in this field, you have been presented with the findings. What are your thoughts concerning the findings? What are your perspectives concerning the findings? What is going through your mind concerning the findings? And that's where you write about your opinion, a well-structured view about the findings and using the findings to support what you are saying. So then the second one is speculation. So the speculation is more about trying to make some kind of predictions, prediction which is supported by the data and also the literature, if you want to also include the literature at this point. Your interpretation can be also a conclusion. Looking at the element in the findings and also how they are related, this is where you synthesize the findings and then make conclusion, right? It's just inductive process. Let's say you have several themes, right? You can present how the themes are related and then based on that, you can present what you think is going on, right? A claim is making an assertion based on your data. So you can make a claim, a statement or an assertion, and then you use the findings to support your claim. And that's what it's all about. You can also explain, right? Especially if the findings are a little bit complex and you want to explain to your readers so that they will understand the findings, right? Or you have identified some pathings and you want to clarify the pathings or the complexity in your data, you can also explain as part of your interpretation. Assessment is more about critiquing your research and then your findings, right? Critiquing the outcome of your findings. Why should your readers trust your findings? What information did you provide that makes people believe your findings? Or is there any kind of flaw in your findings that you want to draw people's attention to, right? So discussion area is not as challenging as you see. You can choose from these strategies so that you'll be able to provide a very good interpretation of your findings. So you may ask, at what point do you have to use one of these strategies? So in terms of opinion, if you want to take a scholarly position based on what your understanding of the findings are, then you can choose the strategy of opinions, right? You can say that, in my view or from my opinion, I think that when it comes to primary healthcare physician, it's a gradual process. It started from this interest in the tasks that they are doing and then it leads to something else. So that is your opinion and then you provide information. So you always have to ask yourself, what is the purpose of my discussion? Is it to take a scholarly point of view or a position and then defend that position? Then opinion strategy will be the best. In terms of speculation, if your goal of the discussion is opening a direction for future research, you want people to know about some areas that need to be explored based on what you found, you can use the strategy of speculation. So in terms of conclusion, if you want to really emphasize on how your findings address the research question, you really want to convince your audience how your findings truly address the research question, you can use the strategy of conclusion, right? And then claims. A claim is most of the time used when you want to rebuild your theoretical or conceptual framework. So when you are starting a study or writing your proposal, you have your theoretical or conceptual framework, right? So when you reach discussion, you could use the findings to help reconstruct the theoretical or your conceptual framework. If that's your goal, then you can use a claim strategy. So the claim strategy is that you make an argument or you make a statement that required you to use the findings to defend your claim. Explanation. You can use your findings to help mystify a complex issue in your field. Let me give an example. Maybe there's different explanation of how people experience burnout at a workplace, right? And there's competing explanation. So what you can do is that you can use your findings to try to explain what is really happening in terms of the process of burnout, right? Or in terms of experience of burnout. If that's the case, then you can use explanation as a strategy to help explain a specific complex issue or competing argument. Last one is assessment. Most of the time you use this one to demonstrate the rigor of your study, right? So to demonstrate how rigorous your study is and then connect it to the findings or the outcome. If that's the case, then you can use assessment. So the question that you always have to ask yourself is that before you write your findings, what is your goal of writing the findings? Do you want to emphasize on a specific opinion? Do you want to speculate? Do you want to make a conclusion? And as I said, you can use more than one strategy. At the end of the day, you want to help your audience to understand or make meaning of the findings that you have arrived at. Now that you have interpreted your findings, this next one is to connect your findings to existing literature. This one is so important. The reason why you do a literature review is to know what has been done, right? So that you also see how you can connect or situate your study. Now that you have your findings, how does your findings contribute to the body of knowledge, right? How do you position your findings? So this is where you compare your findings to existing literature. Sometimes you compare your interpretation of the findings to existing literature, or you compare and contrast your findings with the conceptual or theoretical framework, right? So it's more about what are the relationship between what you found and existing literature. Is there a similarity? Are there differences between them? If there are differences, why are they different? Help people understand why your findings were different from other studies, right? And I think that's what people want to learn in terms of comparing and contrasting with their literature. This one is very important. Now that you have compared and contrasted your findings with existing literature, what are the implications of your findings? What can we learn from what you've found? What is the basis of what you have learned, right? What is the essence of the lesson that we have learned, right? The lesson should be based on the finding. You can't just say that this is what I've learned, or this is the implication, but it doesn't have any base. The foundation of the implication should be based on the findings, right? You can also compare the lessons in the existing study with your lessons, right? What's the relationship between them? You can also provide that information. The next one is the recommendation. Recommendation is more about providing suggestions based on your findings. Not only about that, it can be based on the limitation of the study, based on your interpretation of the findings, right? What actions should policymakers take? What actions should future researchers take? What actions should practitioners and stakeholders take? So you mentioned the people who are connected, who can be directly or indirectly affected by your study, and also provide what they should do based on what you found. And lastly, you summarize. So the summary is just as simple as look at all the sections that you have written, right? Can you write a sentence or two for each of them? And then you are done. So look at all the sections, right? These sessions, these first six sections, can you write a sentence or two? And then that will be your summary. So this is brief information about what you have to do in terms of writing your discussion. If you want one-on-one consultation about how to write your discussion, I'll be happy to meet you and address any question that you have so that you'll be able to finish writing your discussion. There's a link in my description that I've provided my email address. And also, if you want to book for an appointment, there's a link there for you to book an appointment. So if you have any questions, you can put in the comments section and I'll be happy to address them for you. And don't forget to subscribe to my channel. Thank you so much for your time.