What writing tips should you keep in mind when writing your recommendations?

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When you complete your dissertation, the discussion chapter calls for you to establish recommendations based on the findings of your study. This can be difficult if you are not sure what to recommend or what colleges are specifically looking for. As such, here are some helpful tips to assist you with recommendations for your discussion.

The best way to tackle your recommendations is to see what limitations were left over at the end of your study. How were you limited? Were you able to successfully accomplish all that you set out to do? Chances are that you were not; through no fault of your own, there were probably some things that did not make the cut or threw your results off. You should base your recommendations on these limitations. The purpose of rooting your recommendations in your limitations is that it allows for future researchers to continue the research that you were unable to continue. It also establishes new gaps within the literature, which allows for the research to be continued to its logical conclusion.

Finally, you want to cater your recommendations to two schools of thought: recommendations for future research and recommendations for future practice. Your recommendations for future research are the things that scholars should focus on drawing out because your research was unable to hit all of the main points of your topic. Your recommendations for future practice are key takeaways for individuals to implement within the real world, allowing you to see your ideas in action. Keeping these points in mind will help you compose a more coherent and comprehensive recommendations section for your discussion chapter.

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Published on September 15, 2022 by Tegan George. Revised on December 7, 2022.

Recommendations in research are a crucial component of your discussion section and the conclusion of your thesis, dissertation, or research paper.

As you conduct your research and analyze the data you collected, perhaps there are ideas or results that don’t quite fit the scope of your research topic. Or, maybe your results suggest that there are further implications of your results or the causal relationships between previously-studied variables than covered in extant research.

NoteRecommendations are generally included both in your conclusion section (briefly) and in your discussion section. However, if your research is more business-oriented or practical in nature, you can also present them in a separate chapter or advisory report.

What should recommendations look like?

Recommendations for future research should be:

  • Concrete and specific
  • Supported with a clear rationale
  • Directly connected to your research

Overall, strive to highlight ways other researchers can reproduce or replicate your results to draw further conclusions, and suggest different directions that future research can take, if applicable.

Relatedly, when making these recommendations, avoid:

  • Undermining your own work, but rather offer suggestions on how future studies can build upon it
  • Suggesting recommendations actually needed to complete your argument, but rather ensure that your research stands alone on its own merits
  • Using recommendations as a place for self-criticism, but rather as a natural extension point for your work

Building your research recommendation

There are many different ways to frame recommendations, but the easiest is perhaps to follow the formula of research question  conclusion  recommendation. Here’s an example.

Recommendation setup exampleResearch question
How can teachers at your local preschool ensure that social skills that contribute to maintaining peer relationships are promoted in children aged 1 to 4?

Conclusion
An important condition for controlling many social skills is mastering language. If children have a better command of language, they can express themselves better and are better able to understand their peers. Opportunities to practice social skills are thus dependent on the development of language skills.

Recommendation
The investigation revealed that mastering language is an important prerequisite for mastering social skills. On this basis, future research should examine the ability of language development programs to expand the language skills of children aged 1 to 4.

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How should your recommendations be written?

As a rule of thumb, try to limit yourself to only the most relevant future recommendations: ones that stem directly from your work. While you can have multiple recommendations for each research conclusion, it is also acceptable to have one recommendation that is connected to more than one conclusion.

These recommendations should be targeted at your audience, specifically toward peers or colleagues in your field that work on similar subjects to your paper or dissertation topic. They can flow directly from any limitations you found while conducting your work, offering concrete and actionable possibilities for how future research can build on anything that your own work was unable to address at the time of your writing.

Recommendation in research example

See below for a full research recommendation example that you can use as a template to write your own.

Recommendation section

The current study can be interpreted as a first step in the research on COPD speech characteristics. However, the results of this study should be treated with caution due to the small sample size and the lack of details regarding the participants’ characteristics.

Future research could further examine the differences in speech characteristics between exacerbated COPD patients, stable COPD patients, and healthy controls. It could also contribute to a deeper understanding of the acoustic measurements suitable for e-health measurements.

Frequently asked questions about recommendations

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George, T. (2022, December 07). How to Write Recommendations in Research | Examples & Tips. Scribbr. Retrieved January 4, 2023, from //www.scribbr.com/dissertation/recommendations-in-research/

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