Why your qualitative PhD discussion chapter feels like a 1980s game show
“The discussion chapter is where I started wondering whether I actually understood my own PhD”. These are actual words from a member of my PhD community, Momentum, recently and they nicely sum up what this stage of the journey can be like. Your discussion chapter is where you’ll suddenly start feeling as though your brain is just refusing to play ball anymore. It’s had enough.
By this stage of the doctorate, you’ve got a lot under your belt - literature review, data collection, data analysis. Go, you. In theory, this last bit should be fairly straightforward, the hardest part’s over. Isn’t it?
Then you sit down to write the discussion chapter and discover that writing up this closing section feels very different from anything you have done previously in the PhD.
You’re now trying to work out what everything means - you’re trying to put it all together in a way you haven’t done before, which can feel a bit like trying to force strangers to hold hands.
I think my childhood television habits probably best explain why the discussion feels so overwhelming. Bear with me ;-)
The 1980s game show problem
I don’t know whether this is a specifically British childhood experience, but I grew up watching anxiety-inducing 1980s game shows where contestants were expected to perform seventeen impossible tasks simultaneously while their partner - who always had unnaturally voluminous hair - yelled instructions at them from the sidelines.
Programmes like The Crystal Maze, where perfectly intelligent adults would leap around like Ribena berries inside giant domes trying to grab floating gold tickets before time ran out.
Or Fun House, where children sprinted around collecting giant plastic cubes while navigating what appeared to be a health and safety officer’s worst nightmare.
Or those obstacle-course shows where contestants had to carry buckets of slime across slippery surfaces, memorise flashing lights, solve puzzles involving foam shapes, and crawl through inflatable tunnels while an audience shouted contradictory advice.
The discussion stage of your qualitative study can feel kind of similar.
Why your discussion chapter creates so much overwhelm
You reach the discussion chapter and suddenly feel unable to think clearly because you’re trying to operate at far too many levels simultaneously.
By this point in the PhD, you’re attempting to connect findings to theory and literature, develop a coherent argument, position your contribution carefully, and somehow hold the entire thesis in your head at the same time. Urgh. That’s a lot. Your brain bandwidth gets busy.
If you’re thinking, “I don’t know how to start writing my discussion chapter”, what you likely mean is, “I don’t yet know what matters most”, or “I think I know what I’m arguing, but I’m not confident enough in it yet”.
That uncertainty feels incredibly destabilising because you might be thinking that you should be more clear at this stage, not less.
The close you get to the end, the harder the writing is
The closer you get to submission, the harder writing is going to feel. If you’re experiencing this right now, you probably weren’t expecting it, right?
Perhaps you thought that by now, you’d long have this all figured out. Writing up would just be a case of going through the motions, it would maybe even become a little bit… boring.
PhD veterans are wiping their computer and phone screens right now because they’ve just spat their coffee out all over them laughing at my previous sentences.
They will tell you that the closing stages of the PhD aren’t at all like this. They’re more caffeine-fuelled, on-the-edge-of-an-existential-crisis kind of times where folks are restructuring chapters, rewriting sections of the literature review (again), and rethinking arguments they previously believed were settled.
When this happens to you - maybe it already has - you might interpret this back-and-forth as evidence that you’ve got something wrong and it’s literally falling apart in front of your eyes. In reality, qualitative research is often supposed to unfold this way and this is completely normal.
We need to stop for a second here and remind ourselves that we’re studying the human experience. That, by it’s very nature is Chaos Central, stopping along the way at all stations including contradiction, complexity, and confusion. The human experience doesn’t lend itself all that well to order and categorisation - but that’s what we need to do to make academic sense of it as qualitative researchers.
When you’re writing the discussion chapter, you’ve got to sit with the complexity for long enough to move away from, “What did I find?”, and start asking, “What does all of this mean?”. That is a fundamentally different intellectual task.
Why you freeze at the discussion chapter
You might assume that your fellow PhDers are all writing smoothly and confidently right now, tapping away on their keyboards while you’re wondering whether your argument even makes sense. Or whether it’s even an argument at all.
In reality, far more people are struggling with this than you probably realise.
What is often happening instead is that you’re all deep in the process of intellectual integration, where your understanding is still developing whilst you are writing.
It doesn’t help that the PhD itself is probably the least structured learning experience you’ve ever been though. Well, meet the discussion chapter, which is the least structured part of the PhD.
Want more help with your discussion chapter?
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