## 2.1. What should I put in my introduction?

The introduction includes at least the following elements:

1. The research question you will answer.
2. Arguments about relevance: why it is important to know the answer to the research question.
3. Some historical and local context for your research.
4. A literature review, summarizing the key theories or hypotheses that could help answer the question, and an assessment of previous research.
5. Your contribution to the theory, research methods and body of evidence.

In some disciplines such as economics it is common to include the findings in the introduction, while this is not common in other disciplines. Also disciplines vary in the amount of attention you need to devote to the context, theory, and research design. See chapter 9: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”.

The research question. The first substantial piece of your research is the introduction in which you formulate your research question, and convince the reader that it is important to read further to get the answer. Make sure you do both as early as possible. So: start the introduction with a very brief formulation of your research question. This enables the reader to understand what the remainder of your text is about. Make it a habit to start writing by formulating a question. As you can see I’ve taken this advice to heart by formulating section titles in the form of questions.

Relevance. To convince people why they should be interested in your research, you need two types of arguments: arguments about the societal relevance and arguments about the scientific relevance. The question you should answer before you write the paragraph about the societal relevance is: who will be interested in your research outside academia, and why? The question you should answer in the paragraph about the scientific relevance is why people in academia should be interested in your research. I will talk about the scientific and societal relevance later in two separate paragraphs (2.3 and 2.4).

Context. Describe the context of your research problem for the period covered by your empirical data. The further history may be interesting in its own right, but describe it only if it has consequences for your hypotheses or findings.

Literature review. The literature review starts with a fact finding mission: what are the most important concepts and definitions and how are they connected? How have these concepts been operationalized in previous research? Which theories and hypotheses have been offered in previous research to examine the relationships between concepts? What does the evidence say about these relationships? What have we learned from these studies with respect to the validity of theoretical expectations – if any?

Next comes a critical assessment of these studies: the conceptual confusion in definitions, the lack of clear hypotheses, the inconclusive research designs, the light weight of the evidence, the selective presentation of findings to ‘support the expectations’. The modal answer in the social sciences to a question like ‘what do we know about X’ is that we know very little with certainty.

Contribution. The introduction should identify the research gaps in the literature. Position the empirical work that follows the introduction – i.e. the analyses in your thesis, the chapters in your dissertation – as an attempt to fill some of these gaps. Tie the contribution to the arguments about relevance: how does your study contribute to science and society?

Do not put an ‘empty roadmap’ in your introduction (Cochrane, 2005; Sociomama, 2018). Nobody wants to read sentences like “In the introduction, I will introduce the topic” or “In the discussion I discuss the conclusions”. There is no additional value in warning the reader that after the introduction, you will discuss theories and review literature, before you present the data and methods, the results, and the conclusion and discussion. This structure is self-evident. Even when your piece has an unusual structure, there is no value in a section, paragraph or even a sentence explaining the structure of the remaining text. Readers recognize the structure from the section titles of the paper and the table of contents.