Writing Strategy: State Contribution(s)

This book is running in a long beta. Revisions are currently underway. Check back in January 2025 for updated content.

When you State Contributions, you illustrate the noteworthiness of the study by demonstrating valuable findings or implications. This Strategy enables researchers to advocate for the importance of the results and/or of the study. There are three Sub-strategies for stating contributions:

• Generalize Results, or infer from results and to develop general claims and/or conclusions
• Note Implications, or present theoretical, empirical, practical, or methodological applications or recommendations
• State General Value, or situate the novelty of the study within general claims of importance or significance.

Generalizing Results means to infer from results and to develop general claims and/or conclusions, often by summarizing/synthesizing the results and/or making deductions. This Strategy further allows us to broaden the scope of specific results, to expand the meaning of the principal findings outside the framework of the study and to deliberate on the generalizability, transferability, reliability, or validity of the results. Of course, not all research is generalizable. This will be based on your research design and the strength of your overall findings. In general, you can describe how the outcomes of your research are connected to broader concepts or knowledge on a particular subject. Here is an example: 

• “The study thus indicates that there is a considerable heterogeneity among graduate student populations.”

The example takes the study as a whole and generalizes to other graduate student “populations” outside the study.

Noting Implications is another Sub-strategy of State Contribution that is used to inform the reader of potential implications of results. Thus, we can explain how the results could be applied more broadly to research, practice, theory, or methodology; show the larger impact of the results and/or of the study; and notify readers of possible consequences. Here’s an example:

• “Therefore, these findings might be of particular importance for interventions aimed at reducing self-conscious emotions when completing a high stakes research article.”

Notice that this sentence expresses some tentative language, “might be of particular importance,” which is an example of hedging. When uncertainty may exist, researchers should acknowledge that others may disagree with your claims and choose tentative language accordingly. Other examples would include modal verbs, such as may, could, should, might.

Stating General Value is used to situate the novelty of the study within general claims of importance or significance. Statements of contribution should be explicit; do not leave your reader guessing what the value and/or implications are. Besides, there would be a risk that readers may come to their own conclusion that no value or no implication exists at all. Let us look at an example of a value statement:

• “Our study provides the first ever empirical evidence of genre awareness using the Dissemity platform.”

While this sentence may hold true, if you choose “the first ever,” your understanding of the topic must be crystal clear. You will need to ascertain that your study is actually the first one that provides the mentioned empirical evidence. When there is a possibility that someone might disagree with you, you need to be careful of claiming something with a high degree of certainty.

In the following, you can see some language use patterns for the aforementioned Sub-strategies for State Contribution.