Unit 4: Communicating significance and acknowledging limitations
00:00: As a qualitative researcher, one word that I have learned to use in trying to modulate and present my findings is the word “significant.” You could say “significant” is a significant word in academic writing. It is somewhat different to the situation in the quantitative social sciences where the reference is often made to statistically significant or insignificant relationships between two variables.
00:46: In a qualitative research situation where, say, you found a rather high level of awareness around a topic you were researching in a particular community or context, you would want to represent that in a way that is more factual than emotive, so it would be acceptable in scientific terms to say that the level of awareness you found was significant.
01:18: That description in that context helps you to avoid the trap of potentially over-claiming because, to begin with, your sample size was probably small. Even if you were to have had a relatively large sample, it would still not be a universal sample, so you would want to still refrain from overstating the magnitude or impact of this phenomenon that you observed.
01:53: At the same time, you wouldn’t want to downplay what you have found, so you want to be skillful in communicating your findings as authoritatively as you can without exaggerating them. To hone this skill, I always recommend reading articles in journals in your field that have a good reputation for rigorous peer review. This will help you to identify how others have navigated potential pitfalls and adjust your writing accordingly.
02:34: In my experience, this practice of reading well-researched and rigorously embedded articles or papers is one of the best ways to learn how to critically communicate the impact of your research to global audiences. The more you read articles where authors have learned to hedge effectively while still presenting remarkable findings and communicating their impact, the more you become versed in that sort of language, because it is a kind of language.
03:17: You can have the most interesting set of findings or results, but if you are not able to communicate them effectively, your writing could get rejected on that basis. It is therefore critical to learn the ropes by reading extensively to identify the sorts of phrasing that are admissible in academic writing, and little details of that sort. Conversely, it is important in scientific writing to be clear about the limitations of your work.
03:59: Every piece of research has limitations, and it is another mark of critical thinking to be explicit about them. As a regular reviewer for scientific journals, I take the absence of any discussion of limitations in a submitted manuscript as a red flag. Such a discussion might involve hedging, but it usually extends beyond that to the broader presentation of your conclusions.
04:31: It involves acknowledging that there are limitations to your methods as well as the interpretation of your findings. You state explicitly, for instance, that while your conclusions may be valid under certain conditions in Accra, Ghana, they do not necessarily extend to Lagos, Nigeria. And what would be useful would be for further studies to be conducted in other contexts to further test your thesis in those contexts and potentially improve on it.
05:10: This way, you are acknowledging that your study has not answered every question there is about your area of research, and you are acknowledging by extension that you are a part of this broader human enterprise in which knowledge is built up one block at a time.
05:33: I would like to sound a friendly note to early and mid-stage PhD students here. We all start out on our PhD journeys believing, quite nobly, that our research will save the world. It’s a very interesting phenomenon. It often takes a while to realise that maybe, you know, you should just focus on saving your thesis first, and then you can go on and try to save the world subsequently. The point is, you do start to realise at some point that nobody can achieve a feat as expansive as saving the world through a single piece of research.
06:20: And so, you start to limit yourself to whatever small but significant contribution you are able to convincingly and persuasively make with your work. This is the essence of your PhD defense. You are tested on a set of conclusions that you are able to defend with the evidence that you have gathered using appropriate and rigorous scientific methods.