Qualitative Dissertation Methodology. Nathan Durdella
For instance, the use of the American Psychological Association’s formatting guidelines in psychology, sociology, or education; the Chicago Manual of Style in anthropology and history; and Modern Language Association’s (MLA) formatting guidelines in English programs reflects disciplinary connections. The use of documentation styles dictate more than just citation rules that give credit to others’ work, they seem to serve as a unifying norm for members of a discipline and frame efforts to socialize new members into the field of study. When instructors, faculty advisors, journal editors, and conference chairs all require the use of a discipline-based documentation style, graduate students work within a set of standard writing features that connects them to senior members of the field and rewards them for complying with expected behavior.
While programmatic and institutional differences in how dissertations present chapter titles appear across U.S. colleges and universities, the content of these chapters generally follows broader standards for research reports—so variations between programs tend to be minimized. In fact, the prevailing model in the monograph dissertation follows a formula that ensures compliance with a set of expectations of work products. Here, the first three chapters—introduction, literature review, and methodology—constitute the dissertation proposal, which serves as a plan or roadmap for gathering and making sense of information in the study. Unique on their own, these three chapters function synergistically within the dissertation proposal as follows:
Chapter 1 generally serves as an introduction to a study, establishing the importance of the study and contextualizing the major components of the study within a research framework that includes an opening “hook” that compels the reader to continue to the research problem, purpose, and questions. Chapter 1 often includes an overview of the methodological framework and parameters of the study—limitations and delimitations. Initial chapters may also include a descriptive overview of the conceptual framework and definition of terms.
Chapter 2 usually functions as a background, situating a study within broader, overlapping areas of the empirical and conceptual literature related topically to the investigation. The culmination of the work in this chapter is a statement of the research problem that identifies and describes gaps in knowledge and practice related to the areas of the literature and the study’s plan to address the gaps.
Chapter 3 presents the methodological framework of a study and outlines the steps to collect and analyze data. Guided by a study’s research problem, purpose, and questions, the methodology chapter describes the research design or tradition and methods of a study: research setting, data sources and sampling and recruitment strategies, data collection instruments and procedures, data analysis procedures, and research roles.
In general, programs and departments build more or less structure in form and content into guidelines that govern traditional dissertation proposals.
You can see this traditional dissertation proposal in program and department handbooks. In fact, on one end of the spectrum, UCLA’s Department of Education’s handbook (GSEIS, 2010) advises students to work within a broad set of expectations: “The dissertation, required by every candidate for the Ph.D. degree, must embody the results of the student’s independent investigation, must contribute to the body of theoretical knowledge in education, and must draw on interrelations of education and the cognate discipline(s)” (p. 5). By contrast, the doctoral studies program handbook in the Department of Education at Washington University in St. Louis (Department of Education, 2015) allows students and faculty advisors broad discretion in shaping the proposal, whose “format does not necessarily have any fixed structure and organization” (p. 12). But within this general framework, program requirements dictate that dissertation proposals do the following:
(1) explicitly state the questions or themes that drive the research; (2) place these themes within the context of relevant theory or prior research; (3) outline, if possible, the answers to the questions that the research might produce—these might be formal hypotheses or they may be tentative and illustrative; (4) describe the research design, methods of data collection, and types of analyses to be used in answering the questions; (5) defend and justify any of these items if their importance or merit is likely to be questioned; (6) include a bibliography of relevant literature. (p. 12)
You can see here a similar framework that would be presented in the first three chapters—from an introductory chapter (Chapter 1) that contextualizes the study and offers research questions, to a background chapter (Chapter 2) that describes literature related to the study, and a final chapter (Chapter 3) that articulates a plan to collect and analyze data. With an even more prescriptive approach, California State University, Northridge’s (2014, p. 15) doctoral program in educational leadership stipulates that the dissertation proposal “is a draft of the first three chapters (Statement of the Problem, Review of the Literature, Methodology).” But that is really just the start of the organization and content of a proposal. The program handbook goes on to enumerate in descriptive detail what appears in each of the first three chapters (e.g., Chapter 1 includes an introduction, statement of the problem, purpose and significance, etc.).
With the first three chapters, the dissertation proposal transitions to the dissertation—with the final two chapters generally presenting information in the following ways:
Chapter 4 frequently presents results of data analysis. In a qualitative dissertation, the focus is on describing patterns in segmented, coded data from interviews, observations, critical incident reporting, structured journaling, and so on. In fact, narrative storytelling of what emerges from a systematic treatment of transcribed textual, visual, or audio data forms the bulk of the chapter and connects the research plan in the dissertation proposal to what the study leaves for others: findings and recommendations. The generous but judicious incorporation of direct quotes organized around themes and subthemes support what you say in this chapter and facilitate participants’ voices in the messages that you develop and share.
In cases where the final two chapters are not combined, Chapter 5 ends the dissertation with a brief summary of the study, if needed, and a discussion of the results or findings as an interpretive story of the study. The thrust of this final chapter is on describing and in most cases, interpreting analytical patterns through a conceptual lens, where applicable, connecting results to the empirical literature, and evaluating the study’s research questions. That is, work in this final chapter integrates results or findings with the empirical and conceptual literature and contextualizes the findings in the broader framework of knowledge in the field. The end of the chapter—and dissertation—usually ends with a discussion of implications and future directions for new knowledge, offering a set of recommendations related to the results for future research and practice.
Beyond these five chapters of a traditional dissertation, references and appendices with data collection instruments, research invitations, consent forms, and so on may be included.
Key Questions to Ask Yourself
Have I or will I work within a conventional (monograph) dissertation format? Why or why not?
If I have or will work with an emerging dissertation format, how have or will I incorporate more conventional features of dissertation research into my work?
Dissertation rituals.
Within program and department environments, the traditional dissertation research process tends to be marked by a