Developing Quality Dissertations in the Social Sciences

A Graduate Student's Guide to Achieving Excellence

Barbara E. Lovitts, Ellen L. Wert

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642672657
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This is one of three short booklets designed to be given to graduate students as they begin their studies. They explain the purposes of the dissertation and the criteria by which it will be assessed. They help students understand the context of their course work; the need to take an active role in shaping their studies; and the importance of thinking ahead about the components of the dissertation and the quality of scholarship they will need to demonstrate.These booklets are intended to support the dissertation research and writing process by providing faculty and advisors with guidelines for setting clear expectations for student performance, and with a model for helping students produce the desired quality of work. They encourage dialogue between faculty and students about the quality of the components of their dissertation project. They include rubrics that students can use to self-assess their work and that can aid faculty in providing focused feedback.Setting explicit targets and benchmarks of excellence of the sort advocated in these booklets will enable departments and universities to respond to demands for accountability with clear criteria for, and evidence of, success; and will raise the overall quality of student performance.

THE WORDS on the title page of nearly every dissertation, “Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,” underscore that the dissertation is part of a process. The requirements of your program and the many informal opportunities for learning are designed to move you from student to professional, from someone largely dependent on others for guidance in learning to an independent, expert learner and producer of knowledge.

Consider the observations of the faculty who participated in the study on which this booklet is based. The various purposes they ascribe to the dissertation, summarized in Table 1.1, point to the dissertation as a product that provides evidence that you have mastered professional skills and knowledge: your discipline’s theories and methods and a vast array of facts, principles, concepts, and paradigms. The dissertation is also evidence that you have developed informed opinions about various issues, learned how to approach problems, and how to judge others’ work. Whether you plan a career in academia, government, business, industry, or in the nonprofit sector, the successful completion of your dissertation will signify your ability to conduct high-level inquiry and to create new knowledge.

Table 1.1 The Purpose of the Dissertation: Descriptions From Faculty in the Social Sciences

The purpose of the dissertation is to prepare the student to be a professional in the discipline. Through this preparation the student learns and demonstrates the ability to conduct independent, original, and significant research. The dissertation thus shows that the student is able to

• identify/define problems,

• generate questions and hypotheses,

• review and summarize the literature,

• apply appropriate methods,

• collect data properly,

• analyze and judge evidence,

• discuss findings,

• produce publishable results,

• engage in a sustained piece of research or argument,

• think and write critically and coherently.

The dissertation shows mastery of the field, that the student is ready to be a professional in and contribute to the discipline.

The dissertation prepares the student for a career. It is the capstone of the graduate education and research experience, a rite of passage from student to professional. It is a “union card” or credential for admission to the profession.

Table 1.2 provides descriptions that emerged from the discussions with the faculty about the dissertation in their discipline. As you consider the discipline-specific examples in Table 1.2, think about your particular field and program. Ask your advisor and other faculty members what they consider the purpose of the dissertation to be. What aspects of the dissertation does your field or program emphasize? What are the expectations, for example, about the quality of writing?

As you discuss your dissertation with your advisor and committee members, ask about ways your particular project best lends itself to serving these purposes. What, specifically, must your dissertation demonstrate? What, exactly, will give evidence that you have mastered the expected knowledge and skills? What will demonstrate your capacity to independently produce professional-level work in the future? From these conversations, you might want to draw up a summary of the purposes you and your advisors agree on.

Ask your advisor, committee, and other faculty mentors to suggest recent dissertations from your department that might serve as good examples. Look at how the students assembled their dissertations. Put yourself in your committee’s shoes and consider how the students fulfilled the purposes of the dissertation that your advisors have described.

Table 1.2 The Purpose of the Dissertation: Descriptions From Faculty in Economics, Psychology, and Sociology

Economics

The purpose of the dissertation is to allow students to

• practice the habits of professional economists;

• learn to be researchers who do original, creative, significant work;

• learn how to do research—generate questions, apply the appropriate methods, and solve problems independently at a professional level.

The dissertation demonstrates the student’s ability to do original research, use tools appropriately, and produce an independent piece of work.

Its function is to launch a career and help the student get a job; to credential the individual as a professional economist.

Psychology

The purpose of the dissertation is to allow the student to learn how to be an independent researcher.

The dissertation demonstrates the student’s skills and ability to independently conceive and conduct original, significant, scholarly research: develop important researchable problems, define an experiment, generate and address hypotheses, conduct the experiment, and produce publishable results.

The dissertation is a process that encourages and fosters creativity, a test of whether the student can do research independently, the preparation for and launching of a career, on-the-job training, a capstone, a rite of passage, the culmination of graduate education and the start of a career as an investigator, and a transition from being a student to being an independent scholar.

Sociology

The dissertation trains scholars; the student learns how to do independent research, learns certain useful skills, learns to synthesize the literature, analyze unformed data, and reach conclusions and write them up; the student learns what the professional standard of scholarship is.

The dissertation demonstrates that the student can mount an original, independent research project and take it from conceptualization to completion independently, formulate problems or questions, review the literature, collect and analyze data, and discuss findings. It demonstrates that the student can do sociology, knows the area at a sufficient level of depth to teach it, and can be an independent, productive academic/scholar.

The process of the dissertation moves the students from thinking of themselves as research assistants to thinking of themselves as independent researchers/sociologists. It develops independence and the ability to do original and significant research and put together a product that has internal logic, is coherent, and makes an innovative, significant contribution to the field.

The dissertation gives the student a product that can be published; it teaches the skills necessary to get a tenure-track job. It is a rite of passage, a test for establishing a person’s claim to be a scholar, a certificate for admission into the profession.

YOU PROBABLY NOTICED the terms original and significant in the examples in chapter 1. Maybe you have heard or been told that you must make an original and significant contribution to the field through your dissertation. Graduate students across all disciplines spend a great deal of time worrying about these expectations: What, exactly, does it means to make an original or significant contribution in my field? Is my project or its results important enough to be considered original and significant? What, specifically, about my dissertation must be original or significant?

In talking with the faculty who participated in the study, it became evident that the qualities of originality and significance are elusive and difficult to define. Moreover, the terms are often shorthand for “the capacity to make an original or significant contribution.”

Originality

An original contribution offers a novel or new perspective. The faculty in the social sciences who participated in the study described an original contribution as

something that has not been done, found, proved, or seen before. It is publishable because it adds to knowledge, changes the way people think, informs policy, moves the field forward, or advances the state of the art.

To achieve this goal, you might develop an original insight or advance, or you might borrow a contribution from another discipline and apply it to your field for the first time.

It is important to understand that the original contribution is not necessarily your entire dissertation but something that is part of it. The faculty in the study explained that an original contribution may result from

• asking or identifying new questions, topics, or areas of exploration;

• applying new ideas, methods, approaches, or analyses to an old question, problem, issue, idea, or context;

• developing or applying new theories, theorems, theoretical descriptions, or theoretical frameworks, or reinterpreting old ones;

• inventing, developing, or applying new methods or techniques;

• creating, finding, or using new data or data sets;

• applying old ideas, methods, approaches, or analyses to new data;

• developing, modifying, or applying new analyses, analytic approaches, frameworks, techniques, models, or statistical procedures;

• coming up with new ideas, connections, inferences, insights, interpretations, observations, perspectives;

• producing new conclusions, answers, findings, or results;

• combining or synthesizing things (facts, knowledge, models of inquiry, problems, sources, theoretical constructs) from other fields or ...