Writing a Watertight Thesis

A Guide to Successful Structure and Defence

Mike Bottery, Nigel Wright

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350046962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Writing a doctoral thesis can be an arduous and confusing process. This book provides a clear framework for developing a sound structure for your thesis, using a simple approach to make it watertight, defensible and clear. Bottery and Wright draw on their extensive experience of supervising and examining numerous doctorates from an internationally diverse and multicultural student body both in the UK and overseas, and include examples of how successful theses have been made watertight along with exercises to enable readers to do the same thing to their own thesis. The authors demonstrate how the key to making a thesis watertight lies in selecting the central research question and the sub-research questions that together collectively answer this main one. If these questions are well formulated the thesis can be defended successfully against criticism on structural grounds – a major part of the battle. Including chapters on the viva process, strength-testing your thesis and essential preparation for writing up your research, this is the resource for anyone looking to produce a well-structured, watertight piece of research.

PART ONE

Moving in

In the first section of this book, key issues of structuring at the beginning of a thesis are examined. Chapter 1 begins this process by examining the need for, and the meaning of the term ‘watertight’. Chapter 2 gives advice on developing the structure of a research proposal so that it works to your advantage in your application and if you get called for any interview. This proposal then is very likely the first structured conception of your thesis structure. Finally, Chapter 3 explores the early meetings you will have with your supervisors, and how such meetings can help in developing this doctoral structure, as your initial conceptions move into a more concerted framing of your thesis.

CHAPTER ONE

The need for a ‘watertight’ thesis

Introduction

A generation or two ago, it was fairly normal for doctoral students to arrive at a university and spend the first few months reading around a topic until at some time during the first year, they came to an understanding of what the thesis might consist. Whilst reading round a subject is an important early activity, students and supervisors alike now face new pressures. Students now have strong demands to finish on time. They may be paying for this study themselves, they may have a scholarship or funding body which expects completion within the allotted time period and they may have a family to support. Supervisors, irrespective of national location, want students to finish on time with a quality piece of work, which launches them along their chosen career path. They also tend to live with increased work pressures and external expectations of students completing on time. Both student and supervisor then have strong reasons for wanting to waste as little time as possible, to establish the focus of the thesis fairly early on in the study, how this can be framed to suit the specified length, and then developed during the period of study so that satisfactory data are gathered to provide the final answers in the concluding chapters.

Yet our joint experience of half a century of supervising and examining over 160 doctoral theses, with students from virtually every continent on the planet, and from a wide range of academic and professional backgrounds, is that lots of doctoral students still come to university with limited understanding of what to expect, what a good doctorate looks like, and how to spend their time on study most profitably. They can find it very difficult to understand what needs to be done at the beginning of their thesis, and particularly in terms of its overall structure. This book provides them with these understandings from the start, and in particular helps them establish their thesis structure in a convincing and clear way, so that they can maintain this through to the end of their programme. To do this, they need to produce a watertight thesis.

This book is written for students in the first place, but it also is likely to be useful for supervisors new to the task, and for those beginning to examine doctorates. To start, then, we want to explain how ‘watertight’ theses have major strengths that other theses may lack. We also need to reassure you that what is recommended is not just the parochial approach of a couple of UK academics but also applicable internationally.

So, what is a ‘watertight’ thesis?

A ‘watertight’ thesis is fundamentally one demonstrating such sound structural integrity that it is nearly impossible to demolish its main argument. It means that if your thesis is structured in this way, then an examiner will find it enormously difficult to fail it on structural grounds, a critical aspect of doctoral quality. The suggestion of needing to be ‘watertight’ is borrowed from shipbuilding, where the builders of river and sea-going vessels need at all costs to keep the water out, that is to ensure that the internal parts of the ship and the people on board, along with any cargo, remain dry and afloat. To do this, shipbuilders need to adhere to a number of principles. In particular, they need to ensure

• that the ship is properly designed;

• that the right materials are selected for its given purposes; and

• that there is such a synergy between design and materials in the ship’s construction that no water can seep in.

These need to be tested, and not just before the ship puts out to sea. The building of the ship needs to be tested throughout a process which includes sea trials to ensure the ship’s watertightness. If you look at Table 1.1, you’ll see that the early stages of thesis construction are very similar. They should include determining the general area of research, designing appropriately focused key questions, stipulating the range of contextual information required and deciding on the appropriate thesis structure to generate the answers. The ‘materials’ necessarily include determining the data that are needed to answer the key questions, and deciding on the modes of investigation by which the data will be accessed and collected. The actual construction of the research must be reflected by an appropriately structured thesis, which ensures the necessary synergy between questions, context, data and analysis, and thus provides defensible answers to critical questioning. When talking about testing, we avoid using the term ‘finally’, as this may suggest that this only needs doing at the end of the process: in fact, any thesis needs to be tested by initial questions and comments from your supervisors, and later on by means of formative assessments, where your work is scrutinized in critical detail. This provides the doctorate with the ability to move back and forth in its examination, and to adjust earlier stages as necessary.

TABLE 1.1 Stages for constructing the watertight ship and thesis

Does ‘watertightness’ work for different kinds of doctoral studies?

The traditional way of gaining a doctorate has been to study for a PhD or a D Phil., the key output being a thesis of up to 100,000 words, examined by a number of examiners, some internal and some external to the university at which it is written. Many universities also conduct an oral examination of the candidate (a viva voce). Over recent years, however, doctorates have changed considerably and are now characterized by a paradoxical mixture of standardization and variety: the standardization of an increasing internationalization of similar regulations, accompanied by a greater marketized diversity of programmes. Universities have then broadened the choice of ways in which candidates can pursue doctoral research. In the process, a range of ‘professional’ doctorates has been developed, which can include taught and/or performance elements, aimed at meeting the needs of mid-career professionals, who may study on a part-time basis. These include the DBA (Doctor of Business Administration), DPsych (Doctor of Psychology), the EdD (Doctor of Education), and the D Prof (Professional Doctorate). All, however, still require a research-based thesis, though these tend to be shorter than those for a traditional PhD/DPhil.

In addition to PhDs and professional doctorates, there are also ‘doctorates by publication’. For these, candidates are required, as part of their submission, to present a number of already published academic articles on a central topic in peer-refereed journals. Chapter 12 of this book deals with the writing of such articles. A crucial element here is the requirement to write a ‘connective piece’, normally of between 10,000 and 20,000 words, which shows how the published papers link together to generate a new and original contribution to disciplinary knowledge.

Whatever the format adopted, coherence and structure are universally required, and therefore the watertightness of the thesis is essential for them all. This is not to say that the demands on a student in these different formats do not vary. For example, any temptation to think that the shorter ‘professional’ thesis is in some way ‘easier’ than a PhD is in our view seriously misleading: it may be even more demanding in a shorter form to focus a main question down to a precise and researchable issue when there are less words to play with. Similarly, the articles chosen for a doctorate by publication are not necessarily written with a systematic doctorate in mind, and therefore the writing of the argument of any connecting piece will be at least as demanding as in a ‘normal’ doctorate. So, whatever the format undertaken, whether traditional, professional, or by published work, the concept of watertightness remains central to its achievement.

Does the watertight approach work for doctorates in different countries?

Over the last two to three decades, there has been a move towards the development and adoption of ‘qualifications frameworks’ worldwide. A report in 2013 for the ASEM Ministers’ Conference indicated that 142 countries and territories were now involved in developing qualifications frameworks (Bjornavold, 2013). Initially many of these have been nationally based (National Qualifications Frameworks, or NQFs), but these have also been drawn together into regional qualifications frameworks (RQFs). The most prominent of these regional frameworks is probably the European Qualifications Framework (EQF, 2005), but there are others such as that of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN, 2007). These qualifications frameworks provide a series of descriptors for different levels of learning outcomes for school and post school education. Now there is a growing consensus about the nature of key aspects of the outcomes of doctoral level study. So the UK descriptors indicate the need for the following:

• The creation and interpretation of new knowledge, through original research or other advanced scholarship, of a quality to satisfy peer review, extend the forefront of the discipline, and merit publication.

• A systematic acquisition and understanding of a substantial body of knowledge which is at the forefront of an academic discipline or area of professional practice.

• The general ability to conceptualise, design and implement a project for the generation of new knowledge, applications or understanding at the forefront of the discipline, and to adjust the project design in the light of unforeseen problems.

• A detailed understanding of applicable techniques for research and advanced academic enquiry. (QAA, 2014)

The Hong Kong qualifications framework similarly asks the student to do the following:

• Demonstrate and work with a critical overview of a subject or discipline, including an evaluative understanding of principal theories and concepts, and of its broad relationships with other disciplines.

• Identify, conceptualize and offer original and creative insights into new, complex and abstract ideas and information.

• Deal with very complex and/or new issues and make informed judgements in the absence of complete or consistent data/information.

• Make a significant and original contribution to a specialized field of inquiry, or to broader interdisciplinary relationships. (hkqf. 2017)

And finally, the Canadian qualifications framework requires that:

• holders of the doctoral degree must have demonstrated a high degree of intellectual autonomy, an ability to conceptualize, design and implement projects for the generation of significant new knowledge and/or understanding, and an ability to create and interpret knowledge that extends the forefront of a discipline, usually through original research or creative activity. (Council of Ministers of Education, Canada, 2007)

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