A Null Result Doesn't Kill Your Dissertation

Null results: the outcome every dissertation student dreads.

Visions of academic failure, of a career ended before it begins, haunt anyone whose data comes back showing nothing. The dread makes sense. Publishing favors exciting findings, popular culture celebrates the breakthrough, and somewhere along the way, you absorbed the idea that you must discover something impressive to be worth anything.

Say you are researching a promising treatment. The literature says it should work, your methods are sound, and you've done your due diligence, carrying out the experiment. And the treatment just doesn't work. A null result.

Most students would despair, believing they've failed and their dissertation is dead. But dissertation failure is not an inevitability. If your program accepts null results for graduation, you've been handed something rarer than you think: a built-in story.

Storytelling thrives on the gap between what is expected and what actually happens, and a null result is that gap at its widest. Everything pointed one way. The data went the other. Why was the treatment plausible? What could have made it fail? What does that mean for what comes next? Each question is a chapter your "failed" result just wrote for you.

There is one real limitation: how much room you get to work with a null result depends on your field. In medical and clinical research, the expectation of positive findings runs deep, and a null result faces greater skepticism. This will mean that you will need to show that your data was analyzed using the best methods possible. That your analysis and tests were ironclad. And you will need to be able to explain what you did with extreme clarity.

Advisors will tell you to start on your data as soon as you have it. This is exactly why. A null result discovered eight months before your defense is a story you have time to build: you can dig into why the result surprised you, strengthen the methods in defense of your field, even adjust your scope or collect more data if your program allows it. The same result discovered three weeks out is a crisis.

Talk to your advisor at every step of the way, not after the defense is scheduled, about how your program and committee treat null results. If they're workable, you know the story you're telling. And honesty compels us: if your committee truly won't pass a null result, there is nothing we or anyone else can do to storytell your way around that. Knowing that early is exactly why you ask early.

For everyone else, the null result isn't the end of your dissertation. It's the beginning of its plot. Data in Plain English helps you understand what your data is really saying, null or not, and build the story it hands you. Nothing happened in your results. Everything can still happen in your dissertation.