Conclusion and Recommendations

Your Conclusion and Recommendations chapter is what will make you cross the finishing line. By the time you reach there, you might have a sense of fulfilment or be very exhausted. It is not always simple to write this final chapter of your dissertation, as you might have the feeling that everything is mixed up in your mind.

Most Conclusion and Recommendations chapters would contain:

• Conclusion, in terms of findings related to each research objective
• Recommendations (which may be broken down, once again, in relation to each objective)
• Scope for further research

You may find it useful to include the limitations of your research as part of the scope for further research sub-section.

Conclusion

Here, you will write down the conclusions you have come to, as a result your research findings. Your conclusions should also take into consideration the literature review that you conducted and the empirical research that you completed. If stated with respect to each of your research objectives, the write-up may be easier for you. Also, it would be totally unnecessary to probe again into your analysis, as you are only informing your readers of the summary of your findings.

Recommendations

A recommendation is an advice or a suggestion about what should ensue as a result of a finding. Avoid making recommendations that are not practical in the context of your research. You might wish to make recommendations in relation to each of your research objectives, based on their corresponding findings. However, do not give a detailed explanation of your analysis and discussion that led you to a recommendation.

In this section stick to recommendations that are specific to the evidence of your study, by linking them to previous conclusions.

Scope for Further Research

In this section, you should give other researchers leads to what is to be done if they are going to conduct similar or further investigation in the same research topic as yours. You might wish to mention the limitations of your study in this section to inform other researchers about the improvements that can be made to yield better results. For example, you may suggest improvement in questionnaire design, readjustment of target population, increase in sample size, etc.