How To Write A Dissertation Introduction

Chapter:
The 7 Essential Ingredients Of A Powerful Introduction
If you’re reading this, you’re probably at the daunting early phases
of writing your dissertation or thesis. You need to get started, but
you don’t know where to begin.
Fret not! In this post, we’ll explain the 7 key ingredients used to
create a dissertation or thesis introduction chapter that will not only
tick those boxes in your rubric, but will help organise your thoughts
and set you up for writing the rest of your research paper.

Start with why.

Before we can get to those 7 essential ingredients, it is important to
understand what your intro chapter needs to achieve. What is
its purpose? Well, as the name suggests, it needs to introduce the
reader to your research – specifically, your research problem. By
the end of the chapter, you need to have addressed the following
questions in the reader’s mind:
 What are you researching?
 Why is it worthwhile?
 Who will your research benefit?
 How are you going to research it?
In other words, your intro chapter serves as a rationale for the
research, and a succinct explanation of what is to come in the rest
of the paper. In other words, this chapter has to explain the “why”
of your research.

Simple enough, right?

Well, the trick is finding the appropriate depth of information. As
the researcher, you are extremely close to your topic and this
makes it easy to get caught up in the minor details. While these
details might be interesting, your introductory chapter must be
written more on a need-to-know basis. The extra pepperings of
nice-to-know information come later. So, as you’re writing your
intro chapter, pretend your reader knows nothing and you are
tasked with explaining things to them without boring them or
overwhelming them.
Now that you understand your task, let’s get into the detail. While
the requirements for your introductory chapter may vary between
institute or research field, there are some basics that most
universities will require. We call these the 7 essential
ingredients of a winning intro chapter.

#1 – THE INTRODUCTION
Yes, it may seem silly, but you do need an introduction to your
introduction chapter. In fact, every chapter needs an
introduction to prepare the reader for what is to come. However,
being the very first chapter, the intro to this one is particularly vital.
Your intro paragraph needs to engage the reader with clear,
concise language that can be easily understood and digested. If
the reader (aka, your marker!) has to struggle through it, you’ll lose
their engagement and might not get it back. Just because you’re
writing an academic paper, it doesn’t mean you can ignore the basic
principles of engaging writing used by marketers, bloggers, and
journalists. At the end of the day, you are all trying to sell an idea.
Yours is simply a research idea.
While a good intro is by no means black and white, it is good
practice to include the following four foundational sentences in your
introduction paragraph:
 A sentence generally introducing the field of your
research.
 E.g. “It is understood in research that skills
development is a vital consideration for a growing
business.”
 A sentence introducing your specific research problem.
 E.g. “However, there are conflicting perceptions of
whether skills development should be directed by
staff themselves, or by their managers.”
 A sentence stating your research objectives.
 E.g. “This research aimed to determine how best
to direct skills development for improved company
performance”.
 A sentence detailing the chapter structure.
 E.g. “This chapter provides an introduction to the
research by explaining the background of the
 research problem, the research objectives,
significance, scope and limitations.
This intro section needn’t be lengthy – it should fit neatly into one or
two paragraphs max. Keep it short and simple…

#2 – BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

This section should explain the context of your research and set
the scene. For example, it could explain the history of the topic,
common perceptions, or recent news. It should help the reader
understand why delving into this study is important, and provide
detail to support the foundation of your research. In other words, it
should help you justify your claim that this is a legitimate field of
study.
For example, if we stick with the skills development example above,
our Background to the study may explain why skills development is
necessary and briefly cite previous research and statistics that
support this.

#3 – PROBLEM STATEMENT
Leading on from #2 above, the purpose of this section is for you to
“bring it home”, so to speak. In other words, this section should
identify the gap in the existing literature that you are trying to fill –
the problem you are trying to solve, in the precise context in
which you are studying it.
Simply put, this section is about making the problem crystal
clear so that you have the platform to present a solution.

To create a rock-solid problem statement, you should try to include

three elements:
 1. Context: This is a “backdrop” to your topic. It should give
your reader a simple frame of reference so that they can
grasp the significance of your study.
2. Implication: This should hint at the gap in knowledge
relating to the topic and clarify the importance of your
research in filling that gap. By doing this, you are helping
your reader understand the connection of the study to the
real world.
3. Objective: This should communicate the tangible outcome
that your research aims to achieve. At this point, you are
focusing on what you want to achieve, not yet how. That
comes later.
Using our previous example, the problem statement could read
something like:
“Skills development is important for employee satisfaction and
company performance. It has been argued that a company’s skills
development programme has a direct influence on company
success, but it is unclear how these programmes should be
directed. Looking at the South African financial services sector, this
research aims to determine how best to direct skills development
programmes to maximise company performance.”
A side note – scope is important here, and you should have
established this clearly when choosing your research topic. If your
problem statement is too broad, you risk losing focus or stating a
problem which is too big to solve within the limitations of your
dissertation. So, you should consider clear boundaries in your
research, for example, limiting it to a specific industry, geography
or time period.

#4 – RESEARCH QUESTIONS
As you probably discovered when choosing your topic, meeting your
research objective(s) may require answering several more specific
questions – your research questions. So, in this section, you will
present your research questions, which will “unpack” your objective
into digestible parts. These will help address the elements or
variables involved in achieving your research objective.
While this section is commonly presented in numbered lists or
bullets, it is good practice to include an introductory sentence or
two, explaining how you came to these questions (for example,
having been informed by literature, by observing the research
problem first-hand, or by looking at internal company reports).
Using our fictional example, the research questions could read
something like:
“Through observation of the research problem at Financial Services
Company X, the below research questions will be investigated:
 RQ1 – What are the benefits of staff-led skills development
initiatives?
 RQ2 – What are the benefits of management-led skills
development initiatives?
 RQ3 – Which development initiatives have delivered the
most valuable outcomes?”

#5 – SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

By this point, you would have already briefly hinted at the
importance of your study in your background and problem
statement sections, but you haven’t explicitly stated how your
research findings would benefit the world.
So, now is your chance to clearly state how your study will benefit
either the industry, academia, or – ideally – both. How will your
research make a difference? What implications could it have?
For example:
“This study will contribute to the body of knowledge on skills
development by clarifying the benefits of skills development
initiatives when driven by a) staff and b) management. It will fill an
existing gap in this area, and open doors for further research into
the field. Additionally, by understanding these benefits, it can be
determined which method is best suited for the financial services
industry in South Africa.”
This section does not need to be too detailed as you will likely
address this again later in the paper, but it should pointedly present
the value of your research and where it can be applied.

#6 – LIMITATIONS
No piece of research is perfect (especially not a dissertation, which
usually has no budget). So, your research will invariably have
limitations. This is completely acceptable, as long as the limitations
don’t yield your findings useless. The key is to recognise the
limitations upfront and be completely transparent about them, so
that future researchers are aware of them and can improve the
study.
Therefore, your limitations section should show that you have
thought about the ways in which your study is limited. For example,
you might consider how the findings are limited in terms of:
 The research method (for example, the subjective nature of
qualitative research).
 The resources of the researcher (for example, time, money,
equipment).
 The generalisability of findings (for example, studies on a
specific industry can’t be generalised to other industries).
Don’t be shy here – the markers want to see that you are aware of
the limitations (this demonstrates your sound understanding of
research design), so be brutal.

#7 – STRUCTURE
In the final section, you need to provide a brief summary of each
chapter in the paper (including chapter one). Done correctly, it will
help your reader understand what to expect and reassure them that
you will address the multiple facets of the study. If you’re unsure of
how to structure your dissertation or thesis, check out this post.
In terms of style, bulleted paragraphs are commonly accepted (one
bullet per chapter) but, as with section 4, it is good practice to start
with a sentence or two. As this is your concluding paragraph, it’s a
good idea to use these sentences to briefly reinforce your research
field, problem statement and objective(s).
Here’s an example of what this section might look like:

Keep calm and carry on.

Hopefully, after reading this article, you feel a bit more prepared
for this challenge. Take a deep breath and remember that Rome
wasn’t built in a day – conquer one ingredient at a time and you’ll
succeed.
To recap on the 7 essential ingredients:
1. Introduction – give a very brief, high-level overview of
what your research will be about
2. Background – sets the context for the study by laying
down foundations
3. Problem statement – explains what the problem is that
you’re going to try fix (your research objective)
4. Research questions – breaks your research objective
down into clear questions
 5. Significance – explains what value your research will
provide to the world
6. Limitations – explains what the shortcomings of your
research are/will be
7. Structure – provides an overview of the structure of the
entire document
Bake these ingredients into your intro chapter and you should be
well on your way to building an engaging introduction chapter that
lays a rock-solid foundation for the rest of your research. If you
need to, feel free to reach out for some support from the Grad
Coach team.