Thesis Statement
In writing a master’s thesis, you will need a topic and a thesis statement. The thesis statement is the crucial roadmap to form the rest of the paper that tells the reader the core “so what of the paper.” For example, “While there is a general consensus about differences in emotional intelligence among the sexes, those differences tend to be less as individuals get older.”
This thesis statement has several characteristics. This statement tells the reader what we are studying: emotional intelligence, sex differences, and age differences. The thesis statement tells the reader that the rest of the thesis will discuss and examine these constructs. The statement is arguable, where not everyone may agree with the statement, thus making it interesting. Additionally, the reader may ask themselves at what ages the difference change or why age influences the changes in emotional intelligence.
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To create a thesis statement, identify the precise constructs you want to examine, then clearly state the relationship among them.
Where to go for help. The online writing lab at Purdue University have some great resources for writing at https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/545/01/ as well as some great examples. If you don’t find what you need there, please call us for a complementary consultation.
Thesis Topic
In writing a master’s thesis, you will need a thesis topic and a thesis statement. The thesis topic, in addition to the thesis statement, answers the overarching question of what you’re doing in the paper. The thesis topic must state the constructs and variables of interest. For example, if my topic includes the constructs of emotional intelligence, sexes, and age, I need to delineate these for the reader. If I study emotional intelligence, I might be referring to EI as perceiving emotions, using emotions, understanding emotions, and managing emotions, or I might be operationalizing emotional intelligence as self-awareness, self-regulation, social skills, empathy, and motivation. When your studying sexes, specify if you’re referring to biological sexes, or do you mean self-identified gender, and so forth.
The point is that your thesis topic needs to clearly tell the reader what you will be studying, and how you will operationalize or measure the constructs.
Thesis Consulting
Conducting the research to write a thesis is a novel task for graduate students. The good news is that the rigor to write a thesis has a much lower bar than writing a dissertation. So what is the task at hand? Essentially, look at previous research and add a twist to it. In my thesis for example, I wondered if the type and intensity of an emotional experience was a function of the outcome’s valence (positive or negative) and the pattern of causal attributions about the cause of that outcome. While I was not the first to identify the attributions of internal/external locus of control, stability, personal control—this was the work of Dr. Weiner at UCLA—I was able to ask a slightly different question.
Even with a body of work in front of you, the literature review, methodology and research design, analysis of the results and discussion chapter can be challenging.
Descriptive statistics
Conducting descriptive statistics—means, standard deviations, min and max, frequencies and percentages—is a crucial step in preparing to do quantitative analyses. Descriptives are important both as a preliminary step to the analyses and as providing the extent to which the results can be generalized. Data is messy, but your results don’t have to be, and conducting descriptive statistics will facilitate clean results. Very often data is either missing, inaccurately recorded, or there are outliers, all of which make it messy. When the statistics researcher goes to analyze the data with that messy data the picture gets worse because that one variable that ranges from 1-7 has a 117 as a score, throwing off your analysis. Having examined the max and seen the value of 117 would have had you correct it and had more accurate results.
Descriptive statistics also help the researcher speak to the limits of who the results can be generalized to. For example, knowing that 100% of the participants were male would imply that they can not necessarily generalize to females.