Your thesis may contain many chapters or relatively few. As an original piece of work that conducts new or expands existing areas of research, you as the writer should enjoy the flexibility of adapting your work to suit your style and your particular research. However, although you may name your chapters as you see fit, your thesis should have an introduction, a literature review, a methods section, a results section and a conclusion.
You may wish to precede your introduction with an abstract or even a preamble, but this is a matter of choice. The introduction proper should introduce the general area of research, become more specific as the chapter progresses and, towards the end, state the problem and/or research questions that you will address. This can be more formally done in the form of a hypothesis, which is stated in the ‘null’ manner. So it proposes a negative or non-changing outcome, which your work will either accept or reject.
This is the most important part of your thesis because it must justify your work. You demonstrate by reference that you have exhaustively considered all aspects of the broad area of research and, again you will narrow this down to a specific research idea. So don’t misunderstand what review means. It is not just saying what writers have said but what is strong or weak in the arguments and data that they have proposed. The specificity of your analysis comes down to the niche that you will explore. This must be different, either as a new angle or as a new approach to work that you have shown to be flawed.
There is often a problem with terminology for this section and the word ‘methodology’ is often used. Methodology refers to an accepted and general way of approaching a research objective, so if yours deviates from this, which will probably be the case, you should use the word ‘methods.’ In this you set out you research type, for example quantitative or qualitative, how you will develop this type, for example by collecting primary or using secondary data, and how you will achieve your results.
In this section, you will present your results. This should be done in as clear, objective and unbiased way as is possible. Do not try to use flowery prose in this chapter and do not be afraid of repetition. By repeating the same approach to each finding, you are implying objectivity and neutrality, which the examiners will like.
This is sometimes referred to as the discussion chapter. It is where you put it all together, join your arguments, and express the implications of what you have or have not found. Do not credit what you have found as anything more than that which it is, but if the results are significant, state their significance and try to place the relative importance of these findings as rationally and objectively as you can.