Qualitative Dissertation Methodology. Nathan Durdella
offer students curricular structures and research requirements directly connected to their work in practice.
Even when students remain in research or university settings as career fields, they may face increasing expectations to immediately apply their research skills and publish products of their research work as doctoral students. For example, in U.K. universities, Jump (2015) recorded a move toward a cluster or bundle of journal-length articles in place of traditional dissertations. What is behind this pattern? Jump cites the “growing pressure on students, particularly in the sciences, to publish their findings prior to graduation—not the least so that they can compete for postdoctoral positions in an increasingly international job market.” So rather than spending an inordinate amount of time and resources on writing a monograph on current literature related to their studies and documenting every painstaking step in the research process from methodology to results, students may be better served by building a series of shorter, journal-length papers that can be disseminated quickly and shared efficiently. While potential issues of co-authorship and absence of detailed steps in the research process in articles may arise with journal articles, faculty advisors argue that requiring students to articulate their roles in studies and maintain descriptive documentation of their methods offers greater support to students in the academic job market.
Resistance to changes in conventional dissertation research structure.
While newer formats and processes of dissertation research have emerged as alternatives to traditional dissertation writing and research production, the academy has been generally resistant to change. The evidence: conventional dissertations in the book-length form still serve as the prevailing model of the culminating project of degree programs. Indeed, the centerpiece of doctoral student research remains the monograph dissertation—even if scaled in applied programs and adapted to comply with disciplinary norms for entry-level research and writing. Need more evidence? Just check on any website of a program or department that offers a Ph.D., Ed.D., or other doctoral degree, and you will likely find multiple references to parameters for a five-or-so-chapter dissertation, requirements for committee membership, and procedures for holding hearings. Look further, and you will see that these requirements often appear in program handbooks or manuals, codifying outlines and steps in the dissertation research process. Inquire within—talk with a department chair, program director, or prospective dissertation chair—and you will almost certainly find faculty who favor the conventional dissertation.
While many faculty continue to work within the monograph dissertation and tend to resist changes to the approach to guiding and supervising students through the research process, some faculty are open to change. For example, the MLA, through a task force of alternatives to the traditional dissertation, sponsored a survey of doctoral-granting departments, finding that many department leaders would consider changes to the traditional dissertation (Jaschik, 2012). Still, these same department leaders shared that they would likely be constrained by the graduate schools within which they operate. Further, the survey found that very few departments have formally changed their dissertation research practices (Jaschik).
Why have so few departments or graduate schools been open to change—even if some faculty members are? What is behind individual and institutional resistance to change in dissertation formats? To be sure, the pattern can likely be explained by several factors that range from student behaviors to faculty attitudes to institutional norms. For example, doctoral students who hang around and write a research opus in the hopes of getting hired tend to extend their time to degree and work within the traditional dissertation structure—some serving as teaching or research assistants or segueing into postdoctoral positions. For their part, some faculty with outmoded technology skills and a disinterest in using new digital resources may operate as advisors along similar lines as their advisors did—working within a more traditional structure to research and writing. More broadly, weak institutional commitment and few technical and financial resources mitigate a move toward more technologically mediated approaches. Perhaps stronger than any force related to faculty technology skills or student career interest is faculty and administrator beliefs that the traditional dissertation ensures quality in the degree program.
Ensures quality in rigorous academic programs.
You’ve heard this one, right? The argument goes something like this: The dissertation requires students to engage in original research on a topic related to theory and practice and use systematic approach to gathering and making sense of information. This is rigor; this is quality—so goes the belief that traditional dissertation research supports graduate student development and preparation. What appears to stand behind the conventional dissertation is the notion that understanding and applying broader research standards in the field offer opportunities to investigate and share knowledge that is meaningful and useful—and lead to career promotion and advancement in tenure-line faculty positions. Beyond implementation of curriculum and qualifying exams to assess student knowledge and skills, the reasoning is as follows: traditional dissertation research formats generally offer program faculty familiar standards and procedures for gauging student development.
Facilitates students’ engagement with scholars and practitioners.
The traditional dissertation has served as an indispensable mechanism to assess graduate student preparation for research work and readiness for an academic career for centuries. Integral to this experience is student–faculty interaction, particularly in dissertation advising relationships. Indeed, the assignment and role of faculty advisors generally manifests as students move through their curricular sequence in graduate education degree programs. In fact, a central argument to traditional dissertation research and writing focuses on a groupof faculty members as a committee—not just a single faculty advisor—offering students feedback and critical comments to enhance student research work product in the dissertation proposal and final dissertation study. We know that graduate student contact with faculty means something—doctoral student development and program completion can be traced to student interactions with faculty advisors (Blackwell, 1983; de Valero, 2001; Luna & Cullen, 1998; Lyons, 1990; Waldeck, Orrego, Plax, & Kearney, 1997), and the persistence of the traditional dissertation model tends to be based on the belief that these advisor–advisee experiences are essential to student learning and career preparation.
Prepares students for academic or research careers.
Not surprisingly, the primary training program for academic jobs has been the academy. Like an apprenticeship model of training—from doctoral student status to postdoctoral research posts—faculty have historically coordinated and overseen the development of the standards and practices of developing and certifying new members in the field. The requisite skill set for research production—primarily in research and writing—dominates the approach and offers legitimizing experiences in empirical research in the dissertation as the focus of faculty work with students. Here, faculty who work directly with students who plan to go on to careers in the academy or closely aligned research fields tend to rely on the monograph dissertation as the training tool to support career development. But since the academic job market has not yet caught up (Patel, 2016) with academics largely trained in traditional disciplinary frameworks that value research, scholarly activity, and knowledge production, book-length dissertations may not work for up to half of all doctoral students.
Emerging approaches to dissertation research in doctoral programs.
As early career faculty emerge, new disciplinary leaders assume gatekeeping posts in the field, established scholars reshape their research agendas, and late career faculty vacate their positions, the theory and practice of research evolve. In response to changing epistemologies in the discipline, pedagogical and technological innovations on campus and in the field of research practice, and broader social and political patterns, researchers update methodological approaches and procedural steps to gather and interpret information. These evolutionary changes extend to dissertation research, too. In fact, what we see as dissertation research now would not have been considered such research in the past—and may still be eschewed in some quarters of the academy.
When