Qualitative Dissertation Methodology. Nathan Durdella
continue to do—the focus of their investigations and the approaches that they use in their research work. In turn, the research work that faculty advisors do may shape what their doctoral students do in their dissertation work. What is more, students’ personal and professional interests—particularly in applied program contexts—and curricular areas of focus may inform the empirical and conceptual literature that they review and dissertation methodology that they ultimately develop.
Qualitative dissertation methodology as an approach to inquiry.
Whatever the factors that explain the specific features of a student’s methodological framework for her or his dissertation work, he or she uses a distinct format and unique structure to articulate the steps in site selection, participant selection and recruitment, instrumentation, data collection and analysis procedures, and interpretation. What is so unique about dissertation methodology? What distinguishes dissertation methodology from approaches that appear in other scholarly works—including research articles in peer-reviewed journals—is the level of operational specificity and amount of procedural detail. Indeed, dissertations require an explicit, transparent format that lays out the steps that student researchers follow in implementing their research purposes and evaluating their research questions. This is a roadmap of sorts—a way to move from little to no information to interpreted patterns of information about a topic.
Why so many procedural details and such operational specificity? The function of dissertations in doctoral education—primarily as instructional tools and mechanisms to certify new members of the academy—and the dissertation proposal, where the methodology section appears, is in part a contract between a student and dissertation committee. Accordingly, the contract terms spell out what you will do—and the methodology section “is usually the most carefully read section of the whole proposal” (Krathwohl & Smith, 2005, p. 75). And just as many contracts are written, so is the dissertation proposal and final dissertation—documenting student efforts to design an original investigation and present new knowledge. Methodologically speaking, the contract terms must include the answers to the following questions:
1 What is important to you—what you value—in investigations of human social life (design or tradition),
2 where will you go to gather information (research setting),
3 with whom will you talk with (research sample),
4 with what and how will you talk with them (data collection instruments and procedures),
5 how will you understand and interpret what they share (data analysis procedures), and
6 how will you describe your role in the study and account for your effects on whom you talk with and how you interpret what they share (researcher roles)?
This final section on research roles is extremely important in qualitative research contexts—but it is sometimes omitted from dissertation studies and studies that appear in published research journals. You can find reflexive research practices and applications of researcher roles in dissertation methodology in Chapter 8—so more later on this issue!
Given the general structure and content of the methodology section and expectations related to what students include in the presentation of design and methods, I argue that we can discuss dissertation methodology as a methodology or an approach to inquiry. More to the point: We can talk about qualitative dissertation methodology as a specific research approach. That is, we can identify and describe a unique set of assumptions and guiding principles associated with traditional qualitative methodologies like ethnography, phenomenology, grounded theory, and so on and frame this approach as a methodology unique to dissertations—and qualitative dissertations in particular. This is not to say or imply that qualitative dissertation methodology imitates, replaces, or qualifies as traditional methodologies in dissertations. By no means! Rather, the use of these traditional methodologies in dissertation contexts allows student researchers to enhance procedural detail and further specify operational steps in their research work and extend dimensional practices of qualitative research that are generally implicit in published research studies: detailing procedural steps, protecting human subjects, articulating researcher roles, and developing reflexive strategies.
Guiding principles of qualitative dissertation methodology.
The traditional approaches to inquiry associated with qualitative research—ethnography, phenomenology, grounded theory, for example—generally direct the design and methods in dissertation methodologies. As such, the assumptions about human social life and principles that guide methodological decisions tend to circumscribe what researchers propose to do in their studies. However, even the strictest interpretation or most faithful application of traditional methodologies generally do not require researchers to elaborate on each step of the process to implement a study or articulate who they are as researchers in the study and the protections of research participants. When administered in the field, researchers generally do not propose—and then follow—specific steps or events in the context of data collection and analysis. By contrast, in qualitative dissertation research, faculty chairs and committee members frequently expect students to outline a plan to gather and make sense of information while accounting for who they are in their studies.
Table 2.2
Beyond developing a plan as part of the proposal and working under the supervision of a chair and committee—which characterize dissertation research work more generally—qualitative dissertation methodology often requires students to follow an order, informed by broader standards in qualitative research, in laying out an approach to data collection and analysis. Indeed, Allison and Race (2004) argue that faculty advisors guide the expectations for specific data collected in a specific order. Qualitatively, the order follows something like what appears in Table 2.2, where a discussion of the overall design or tradition, with guidelines for what to include, informs the rest of the ordered plan, and in Table 2.3, where variations of the methodological components are seen as section titles. Take note now: The design or tradition permeates all of the components or sections in the order of the methodological framework! From this start, the design leads to two methodological components that identify and describe where and from whom data will be collected. Transitioning from research setting and sample to the tools and activities of data collection and analysis, the next three sections detail how and with what data will be collected and analyzed. While the final component of dissertation methodology in qualitative research can appear in virtually any part of the framework, the overall function is to situate the researcher in the office, on site, and in the field with a discussion of multiple roles. In fact, an inventory of researcher roles articulates who they are as researchers in their studies, including the following:
their multiple roles within the context of the study, and
beliefs, values, assumptions about the topic, participants, and expected findings.
Even though the chapter section titles that appear here may be used more generally, the conventional terms of sections of qualitative dissertation methodology tend to vary. As seen in Table 2.3, the terms used in this book generally vary and can appear in multiple forms in dissertation studies. While the forms may appear slightly or substantively different, they tend to retain the same meaning as to what they present.
Table 2.3
Meaningfully Designing a Qualitative Methodological Framework: A Section-by-Section Approach
The ordered structure of dissertation methodology informs the section-by-section approach in this book. In fact, the organization of methodology chapters in dissertations—and