# Some Questions

Here are some questions that you may encounter when you are writing your thesis, paper, or research proposal:

- “What should I put in my introduction section?”
- “How do I find a good research question?”
- “How can I demonstrate that my research is innovative?”
- “What’s the best way to find previous research?”
- “Can I just invent a hypothesis myself?”
- “How much detail should I give when describing the data I used?”
- “How many observations do I need for my data analysis?”
- “Should I write “I” or “we”, or write passive sentences?”
- “Isn’t my research a complete failure now my hypothesis was not supported?”
- “How should I organize my text?”
- “How should I respond to strong criticism?”
- “What should I put in my discussion section?”
- “How can I write a text from an outline?”
- “I’m stuck. Now what?”

You are not the only one to ask such questions. They come up every time I work with researchers and students. I encounter them as a supervisor of students in a variety of disciplines writing their Bachelor and Master Theses. Similar questions come up when new PhD candidates are writing up plans for their dissertation research, and when experienced researchers write grant applications. Below I will refer to ‘research’ in a generic sense. Depending on your objective, you can think of ‘my thesis’, ‘my paper’ or ‘my research proposal’.

Writing a thesis, a research proposal or a paper is a complex effort involving numerous decisions. I am writing this guide because you are not the only one with questions about these decisions. Despite the differences between social science disciplines and the specific traditions in these disciplines, I have found that students tend to come up with similar problems during their research projects. Moreover, the questions that emerge in writing an empirical journal article or a dissertation plan are similar. Another experience is that the solutions to these problems also tend to be similar. With this guide I hope to help you avoid these problems.

By describing the typical problems that students run into when writing their thesis and outlining their common solutions I hope you can save time, and end up with a better thesis. And I might save time in supervision. Please let me know whether it worked out at r.bekkers@vu.nl.

The examples I give here are mostly from research relying on survey data and experiments, because I have worked with these types of data in my own research. If you work with other types of data you may not find answers to your questions here. If you work on research questions outside the field of philanthropic studies, it will help you to replace the variables in the examples I give by the variables in your own research.

I thank successive cohorts of students I supervised since 2002, in writing their bachelor theses and master theses at Utrecht University and Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. They provided many of the questions I discuss here.

Also this text would not have been possible without Twitter. I’ve learned so much from questions that students raised with tags like #phdlife and the responses by countless scholars.

I found additional inspiration in writing guides from economics, psychology, and the humanities. “How to write a thesis”, the classic advice to students in the humanities by Umberto Eco (2015), originally from 1977, is hilariously outdated in some respects because of the advance of technology, but it is still helpful in many other ways.

Teaching courses such as Proposal Writing, Research Designs in the Social Sciences, and Research Integrity and Responsible Scholarship in the Graduate School for the Social Sciences at VU Amsterdam forced and allowed me to think further about the questions. Supervising Arjen de Wit, Claire van Teunenbroek, and Tjeerd Piersma as PhD students provided further opportunities to develop the text. Finally, I thank Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, Marieke Slootman, Boris Slijper and Rense Corten for helpful suggestions for the text to follow. The usual disclaimer applies: all errors are mine. If you find one, please let me know.